Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me

For Jonny Diamond the Separation of the Art From the Artist Isn’t the Question Shortly after she died, I wrote about Alice Munro and the way her life seemed to parallel that of my late mother’s (aside from the literary canonization). For me, Munro’s stories offered an uncanny window into the lives of my parents: their frustrations, their longings, their regrets. As I wrote at the time: We are all characters in an Alice Munro story, at the mercy of the relentless tidal pulls of yearning and regret only she seemed able to chart. I will grow old and die, and my memories of my mother will wink out and be gone. But her life will be there still, somewhere, in the stories of Alice Munro. Forever. This past Sunday, Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner wrote about her mother’s failure to protect her from serial sexual abuse by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin. Skinner’s essay is brave and important. It is hard enough to tell your own story of abuse, to talk publicly about how the one person in your life who should have protected you failed to do so. It is harder still when that person is a literary icon, as close to a secular saint in Canada as it gets. Because of Skinner’s bravery—and because of what I wrote two months ago, about the improbable contiguities between Munro and my own mother—I feel compelled here to tell my own story of sexual abuse. When I was 7, I was sexually abused by a neighbor’s teen son, who would have been 15 or 16 at the time. When I went to my mother, knowing something wrong had taken place but not sure exactly what, she dismissed the situation and seemed to blame me for the clear physical injuries that had resulted from the abuse. She did nothing. That moment with her is a clear and visceral scene in my reel of childhood memories, matched only in vividness by the summer afternoon I learned to ride a bike in the driveway. That moment now feels like the […]

Click here to view original page at Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.