Alice Munro – More to Discover – Carl Vonderau

I’m blogging a second time about Alice Murno. I just finished a long and fascinating article in the New Yorker of Jan. 6, 2025 about her. Rachel Aviv does a deep dive into how the sexual abuse of her daughter, Andrea, affected her life and writings. It was fascinating to read this while reading her story, “Vandals,” which drew on her daughter’s actual experience. Evidently, after Alzheimers set in, Munro grew disinterested in Gerry Fremlin, the life partner who had assaulted her daughter. She said it was beastly of her not to get rid of him. Her daughter, Andrea, said that Alzheimers was a convenient way for her mother to forget what she’d let Gerry do to her when she was nine.

One thing the article brought out was that, rather than trying to stop evil, Munro seemed to have a curiosity to see what would happen. She would let situations proceed to learn what people would say and do. It’s very much a writer’s curiosity. But for Munro it seemed as if the material for the resulting story was more important than actual person. She called it “intelligent passivity.” How cruel to apply it to her own daughter.

It’s not clear when Munro first learned about the abuse. Was it twenty years after it occurred, or did she know it was happening when her daughter, Andrea, was a child? In her stories Munro finds a way to portray how someone’s mind can be completely closed to the truth, except for a few small things. What small things did she know that Fremlin was doing to her nine-year-old child? Andrea said that she was used to overriding the obvious and pretending that things weren’t what they were.

The story has a sophisticated structure with varying points of view and time periods. It has three main characters. Bea cared for Liza and her brother when they were children. Ladner, Bea’s partner is a dominating man who sexually abused Liza as a child. We see Liza’s point of view as a child and many years later when the event still haunts her. In Bea’s point of view, she can only subconsciously conceive of it in a dream she doesn’t fully understand. Is this how Munro disassociated herself from what happened to her own daughter?

I found Munro’s use of objects in the story to reveal how characters hid what they unconsciously knew. There is something secret and powerful beneath the surface. The abuser taught the two kids all about the outdoors and stuffed birds and animals. At the same time, he apparently abused the young girl, Liza. When he dies, Liza is an adult and goes back to his shack. She tears apart his birds and his books and dumps out his drawers. She won’t tell her husband why. When he asks what they did to make her so mad she won’t admit that she’s mad. But she writes on the wall, Beware! This is your blood! She is killing what he loves but not saying why.

Liza retrieves a bag full of items from her childhood, things that could only be important to her. One of them is a rhinestone earring she found on the road, which she treasures. She pretends that it belonged to her mother and gives it to Bea. You can feel her yearning for a protective mother when she does this, but it is never specified.

Liza muses on all the things about nature that Lardner taught them. But she also sees a bruise on the ground and shame in the grass. Even the trees have secrets. Ladner had taught her and her brother all about them. As an adult, Liza asks if her husband can tell what trees are by their bark—their outward appearance. But he isn’t interested.

Munro explained to an interviewer that the reason she didn’t visit her own mother was it felt like her mother’s manipulation and always felt the family was the enemy of the self. She had to resist the family’s coercion Monro didn’t even go to her mother’s funeral. It is ironic that she produced a similar alienation with her own daughter, a daughter who the other two siblings say was clearly their mother’s favorite. Was she trying to heal herself through fiction when she wrote a letter to a former editor and described the harmony she had with Andrea and Andrea’s children? It never happened.

Munro deeply loved and forgave Fremlin. She is buried in a cemetery plot next to his. In “Vandals,” Bea, the willfully blind partner of the abuser, says that living with a man required living inside his insanity. Or perhaps living inside her own insanity.