alice_munro no reason first canadian to win the nobel prize for literature! this morning is exploding with canlit pride. 131010 ... epitome of incomprehensibility What_woke_you_up_this_morning - well, last morning: (mumbling of the kitchen radio) D: Have you heard of Alice Munro? E: No, I don't think so. D: Canadian story writer? She just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. K (jumps out of bed and rushes to kitchen): "Oh that's cool because she writes short stories and mostly novelists win that sort of thing" (etc., etc; I do not talk with punctuation) I read "How I Met My Husband" in a first-year class. It's good teaching material, since it's not too long, has what you call real-world issues (class, sex in both senses) ...and also, now that I think back on it, a structure more like a joke than your standard narrative triangle. The twist at the end is sort of a punch line, cute but not too cute. All well and good, but it wasn't until I picked up her collection, what is it called - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - that I started to like her stories for themselves and not "just something I read in class." The film of the last story of that bunch, Away from Her, is also good, though it takes away some of the original's ambiguity. Think Chekhov for characters, but with more space-time detail, perhaps. She also reminds me of an American author called T.M. McNally, though he mixes around chronology a lot and uses more repetition. In my opinion, Margaret Atwood's stories are often, well, more fun - but hey, she's already got lots of recognition and it takes skill to be real. Munro's writing has a great sense of pacing that makes mundane details interesting, and she doesn't plop unnecessary blobs of symbolism on the reader. Keep it real, A.M.! You deserve this! 131011 ... nr i feel like i finally learned why the term "like a gut punch" was invented, because the news about her and her daughter is literally making it hard for me to breathe. 240708 ... raze is it weird that i'm kind of glad i never got around to picking up one of her books, though i always meant to? i'll never understand how a mother could side with the monster who destroyed her daughter's childhood, knowing exactly who and what he was, while showing more empathy for a fictional character than her own flesh and blood. 240708 ... e_o_i I haven't read the article by Andrea Robin Skinner yet, but I heard a radio interview with someone who was working with her. Yeah, it makes me sad and angry that she seemed so dismissive of her own daughter, acting like "this is a problem to ME" and not to the one who was hurt in the first place. What the hell, A.M.?? Speaking for myself only, that doesn't mean I'd be opposed to reading her writing again. I'd still recommend, say, Open Secrets for its spookiness and mystery (different mysteries). But I get if someone else doesn't want to read her stuff. And I will see if I can hear/read what the daughter has to say, because her voice deserves to be heard - it should never have been ignored in the first place. (This reminds me a little of how I felt about watching stuff by Leni_Riefenstahl - I'll put that in another blathe.) 240710 ... raze i'm probably more sensitive to this stuff than most, since the woman who gave birth to me did essentially the same thing to me (though the circumstances and the nature of the abuse were different). i don't hold it against anyone if they're able to separate the art from the artist. i just don't think i can in this case. you'll probably find a paywall hides the article in most places, but i was able to find a readable version over here: https://archive.is/bYm7R it's since come out that several other people knew about the abuse but refused to say or do anything about it. one of them was a biographer who claimed he didn't feel it was relevant information. it wasn't just her mother who failed her. everyone did. 240710 ... e_o_i Thank you for this!! I was just thinking, "But if it's not accessible through the Montreal Gazette, how will I see it?" It gives more context, too - for instance, the person I heard in the CBC interview was from the Gatehouse, which she mentions near the end. But yes. Context. What made me the most angry about Munro's reaction - and this was only partly quoted in the Gazette - was this: "I visited her [Alice Munro] there [at her condo in B.C.] and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children Fremlin had 'friendships' with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed. Did she realize she was speaking to a victim, and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it. When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous. 'But you were such a happy child,' she said." (Skinner) It's so selfish. I can get why Munro would feel devastated herself, but that's no excuse to blame her daughter or suggest, "Hey, it couldn't have been that bad, you were usually happy." Like, what the hell?? The worst person here is the man who abused Skinner and other kids, but Munro was responsible for the way she reacted and treated her Andrea. Plus, here's some more context about the biographer from the Montreal Gazette: "[Robert] Thacker, whose book 'Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives' came out in 2005 - the same year Fremlin was convicted - said he had long known of Fremlin's abuse but omitted it from his book because it was a 'scholarly analysis of her career.' 'I expected there to be repercussions one day,' said Thacker who added that he even spoke to the author about it. 'I don't want to get into details but it wrecked the family.'" (Tyler Dawson) Okay, but if it was a scholarly analysis of her *career*, why NOT mention it? It's not like it was only a rumour. It was true and he knew it. And it wasn't as if Thacker was only writing about Munro's stories and not about her life. It seems more like he didn't want to get on Munro's bad side. Which is kind of understandable, not wanting to endanger your own career, but it doesn't seem fair to Skinner. Like you (raze) said...taken together, a lot of people let her down and failed to listen. Going back to Munro, I don't think the right approach is necessarily to separate the art from the artist. I prefer Jiayung Fan's approach to Thacker's, at least from what I read in the Gazette article: "Jiayung Fan, a writer at The New Yorker - where many of Munro's stories were first published - wrote on X that she's teaching a course on Munro in a week and needs to rethink how to approach it. 'A story I chose was Vandals, a meditation on complicity, implication & what it means to rob the most defenceless among us the ability to construct a self,' she wrote." (same author as above) Okay, so, I'm not quite sure what "construct a self" means, but yes to the rest: you can compare a writer's real_life with their works, and then go, "Nope, the author didn't live up to the ideals their writing suggested." Like how I don't think the novel Ender's Game sends the message, "It's OK to be a homophobic warmonger" - rather the opposite - yet the author himself is like that. So it's not that the author can be separated fully from the text but sometimes the text knows better, so to speak. ... Pah, this was super long. But last thing, I also wanted to say was awful what happened to you, and it's awful how an abuser can get people on their side and how people can make excuses for abusive parents. 240710 ... e_o_i edits *it was awful (in the last paragraph) 240710 ... e_o_i edits again also, her *daughter Andrea 240710 what's it to you? who go blather from