So, Alice Munro.
Recently-deceased Canadian literary icon, one of thirteen women to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and one of my personal literary inspirations. Also, since her youngest daughter published an essay, a controversial figure.
Scan a headline or whatever they call a Tweet these days and read no further—a practice which has helped destroy politics in democratic societies—and you'll get something like, "Alice Munro's daughter was sexually abused by her husband and she did nothing about it." It evokes the posthumous scandal surrounding Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bradley's husband, Walter Breen, sexually abused children, including their own, and ultimately died in prison. Fifteen years after Bradley's death, her children said that she knew about Breen's activities, accepted them, and also abused children. The damage to Bradley's reputation was disastrous. My wife had grown up reading her novels. She took the news hard. Although Bradley's actions repelled me, the fact of them affected me less directly. I certainly knew Bradley's work, but I was not particularly a reader, and, as I'm no coin-collector, I'd had no interest in Breen's foundational work on numismatics. I was appalled to learn how many people knew or suspected: there were efforts to ban him from Worldcon dating to 1961. Of course, we routinely sidestepped such things in the past, when the accused were respectable white men.
I approach the the Munro revelations differently, and with far less objectivity. Nevertheless, the situations do differ dramatically.
Munro divorced her first husband and remarried sometime later to Gerald Fremlin. Her daughters lived with their father and stepmother. Fremlin sexually abused one of her youngest daughter when she was nine, during a visit in 1976. Her father and stepmother learned of it as did her siblings. They chose to say nothing publicly.
The daughter continued to visit her mother, more cautiously, over the years. While the original specific abuse was not repeated, Fremlin, over the next few years, would expose himself to the girl and make inappropriate sexual comments and propositions. He lost interest as she entered her teens.
Alice Munro remained unaware of these things until her daughter became an adult and informed her. At that point, Munro left her husband for a time.
Her reactions otherwise were not helpful. She told her daughter that she had informed her "too late" to do anything about it and treated the situation, in her daughter’s words, "as if she had learned of an infidelity." Munro later moved back with Fremlin and she and her daughters remained estranged for many years. A retired detective involved with a belated 2004 investigation claims, twenty years after the fact, that Munro told him her daughter was lying.
She nevertheless changed her plans to be buried beside Fremlin.
In a case that managed to avoid publicity, Fremlin plead guilty and received a suspended sentence and probation, weak justice nearly thirty years after the initial incident. Fremlin's own recorded comments on the case are incredibly disturbing. He claims that the nine-year-old entered his bed seeking "sexual adventure." He said that photos existed that do not speak well of her, including one of her in his underwear, and he would be willing to go public with them. The glimpse into his mind is chilling. Claiming, in effect, that a nine-year-old was a slut who wanted it and that he can prove it because he has been holding on to inappropriate images of her would not convince many people of anything but his guilt. But that's Fremlin, whose vile actions I have no intention of defending or exploring further.
Alice Munro is not blameless, but—for what it's worth-- a gulf separates her culpability and Fremlin's. As she has died, she can no longer offer any further perspective on her actions (though what even a wordsmith such as Munro would be able to say I cannot guess).
Munro's actions strike people as particularly baffling if they've read her. She seemed to have real insight into the dingy corners of the human psyche. Writers, of course, depict; sometimes they do not truly understand. Many readers prized her for the way some of her stories championed female characters and the everyday reality of women. These facts make her betrayal unsettling in a particular way that differs from the reaction we might have when learning of the far worse crimes committed by many male filmmakers, authors, artists, classic rock stars, and entertainer/businessmen-turned-politicians. She wasn't worse, not by a long shot, but readers expected more of her.
In the end Munro won the Nobel Prize for her literary virtuosity, not for being Mother of the Year. Whether you still want to read her remains a personal choice. Her stories sometime explore complex and difficult and occasionally abusive circumstances. They trended darker in the latter part of her career. I will reread those pieces rather differently, I suspect.
She remains a great writer: one of the greatest.
Whether she was a good person is another matter entirely.
Update: predictably, another woman has come forward and reported that, some years before the incident with his stepdaughter, Fremlin exposed himself and propositioned her. She was a daughter of one of Fremlin's friends, and nine at the time.