A COVER-UP IN CANADA
The Misguided Hero Worship of Alice Munro
A scandal involving a Nobel laureate shows why we should admire our favorite authors, not worship them
Alice Munro was never my hero.
I’ve admired her writing for decades. I’ve praised her work in a large newspaper. I thought the Swedish Academy made a defensible choice in giving her the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature.
But I never saw Munro as a literary saint as countless others did. That’s made it easier to accept a startling revelation that’s clouded her legacy.
Her daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, wrote in the Toronto Star on Sunday that she was sexually abused by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin, from the time she was 9 years old until she was a teenager. Skinner took letters from her stepfather to the police, and Fremlin pled guilty and received probation and a suspended sentence. Munro stayed with him, her daughter says, because she “loved him too much” to leave.
The news has rocked the literary world, especially in Canada, which had showered Munro with literary awards. After the scandal broke, a former communications officer for the City of Toronto tweeted:
“Alice Munro’s reputation was gilded, just shy of…
