WHEN FIERCE FANS HAVE TO COPE WITH FAVOURITES' FALLIBILITY

WHEN the Canadian Alice Munro, one of the world's leading short-story writers and the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, died in June 2024, no one expected her illustrious life to be damned by a posthumous scandal.

- KAJAL BASU

Her daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, claiming that Munro had poohpoohed her revelations of sexual abuse by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, standing by him even as he was convicted.

Skinner wrote in an essay titled, 'My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him', "She said that she had been 'told too late,' ... she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men, She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her."

Munro's stories, set mostly in smalltown Ontario, are full of what the British Council called "the stirring of the creative impulse, the bohemian rejection of provincial anonymity and conservatism, the refusal to be bound by narrow definitions of womanhood, and the complexity of female sexuality". That her real life was antagonistic to her celebrated oeuvre "focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires", as the NYT wrote in her obituary, is what has sent the literary world reeling.