The unsurprising failures of Alice Munro, the mom

When estrangement is the only safe place

In the summer of 2024, news broke that the Nobel Prize-winning writer Alice Munro continued her marriage to a man she knew sexually abused her daughter. Last week The New Yorker published a deep dive on the entire saga, penned by Rachel Aviv.

While I strongly recommend reading the full piece, here’s the story in a nutshell: Alice Munro had three daughters. Her second husband, Gerry, exposed himself and abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, when she was nine years old. Andrea told her father and step-mother, but they did practically nothing about it (her father even questioned whether it was true, and diminished it; her step-mother offered for Alice to not return to her mother and Gerry’s, but Andrea was afraid of upsetting her mother). Nobody told Alice Munro until Andrea herself revealed it in a letter about fifteen years after the fact.

There were signs that Alice was suspicious of Gerry, and Aviv does amazing work in the New Yorker piece analyzing Munro’s published short stories alongside these real-life revelations. The news of the abuse only entered the mainstream following Alice’s death in May 2024.

I haven’t read much of Alice Munro’s work, but this scandal fascinated me. She put her own interests before her daughter (something I think we too harshly judge mothers for doing in some cases but not this one) by choosing to remain with Gerry rather than reject him for gravely harming her daughter. But did Alice actually want to be with him? Or did she just believe Andrea to be stronger than herself or Gerry, and so allowed her daughter to bear the burden of the abuse? The piece points to two possible reasons Alice stayed with Gerry: she did not want to be known as the woman who married a pedophile, and she feared Gerry would take his own life if she left him. (Ironically, if she had left Gerry when she learned of the abuse in the 90s, it would likely not be her lasting legacy, as it now seems to be). Neither possibility, of course, excuses her actions. But it does show that in the face of this abuse, Alice chose to adopt the role of the victim: she saw herself as the woman stuck married to a pedophile out of guilt and/or shame. It seems she did not consider herself the mother of a girl who was victimized by said pedophile. In fact, in the aftermath of learning of the abuse, Alice reportedly told Andrea that “blaming a mother for her husband’s abuse was a symptom of the culture’s misogyny.”

Of course, it was not Alice’s fault that Gerry abused Andrea. It is, however, her fault that she kept Gerry in their lives after she learned he was an abusive pedophile, and it is Andrea’s father’s fault that he ignored her abuse. But the parentified child is conditioned to do whatever is necessary to care for and soothe the parent; for Andrea this included keeping this secret from her mother for all of her childhood, and consoling her after sharing the news. In the end, though, Alice’s choice to stay with Gerry was too much, and Andrea soon cut off contact with her mother.