We devoted Episode 45 of One Bright Book to Alive Munro’s Open Secrets. I wrote these remarks to introduce our conversation.
Hello and welcome to One Bright Book, the podcast where three friends real ALL the books, taking it one book at a time. My name is Dorian Stuber and I’m here as always with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, this time to discuss Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets, first published in 1994.
Before we go any further, I want to give an important content warning. Today’s episode will contain discussions of sexual violence, abuse, and rape, specially the sexual abuse of children.
Our podcast has always been focused closely on whatever book we’ve chosen to talk about. We bring biography and critical reception and historical context into the conversation, but usually only as secondary approaches to our encounter with the text.
Today, I suspect, will be different.
The outlines of Munro’s career are well-known. Born in 1931 in southwestern Ontario, near Lake Huron, the setting of so many of her stories, Munro went to university on a scholarship but left after two years to move to British Columbia with her husband, James Munro. The couple started a bookstore which is still in business. The couple had three children, but the marriage was difficult and they divorced in 1972. Four years later, Munro married a man named Gerald Fremlin, a retired geographer who had served in the Air Force in WWII and with whom she lived on a farm in rural Ontario. Munro had started writing already in university; as a young mother on the west coast she focused on short stories, claiming it was the only form she had time for. That may be true, but it’s also the case that from the start she was preoccupied by the possibilities of the form. How much time can be contained in something “short”? How many points of view can it offer? How many different ways can it be constructed? Beginning with Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, Munro published 14 short story collections. As the years passed and the books accumulated, so too did her literary fame. The stories were published in places like The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, but above all in The New Yorker, where more than 60 first appeared.
She won many prizes, both in Canada and internationally, capped off by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. In her last years, she suffered from dementia, a fate prefigured by her mother’s experience with Parkinson’s and the subject of one of her most famous stories, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” At her death in 2024 she had settled into a position as a writer both lauded and loved: a grandmotherly figure whose stories were psychologically sharp and brilliantly structured.
That status was shattered a few months after her death when Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Gerald Fremlin, her stepfather, had sexually abused her starting in 1976, the year he married Munro: Skinner was 9 years old at the time. The abuse continued for several years. Skinner told Munro about it in 1992: after briefly separating from Fremlin, Munro returned to him, effectively choosing her husband over her child. In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence. The rest of the family, as well as others in Munro’s close personal and professional circle, including her Canadian publisher, knew what had happened to Skinner but kept quiet. Nobody knew, but a lot of people knew. It was an open secret.
I wanted to discuss Munro on the podcast because, as a Canadian and a reader, she has been in my life for a long time. The revelations of her failure as a parent adds so much complexity to what was, for me, already a complicated relationship. I first encountered her in junior high when we read her famous story “Boys and Girls,” from her debut collection. It’s about a girl whose father raises foxes for their pelts and whose ability to help with that work is curtailed by expectations of what a girl should be or do once she reaches puberty. I remember a note in our textbook, something about how the girl is like the foxes, how their pens symbolize the narrator’s own imprisonment. That interpretation, though in retrospect pretty obvious, made a big impression on me. It was one of the first times I thought of a story as something made, the first inkling I had of the truth that each text teaches its readers how to read it.
Later I would veer away from Munro. The more famous she got, the more she became a Canadian writer loved around the world, the more I looked at her askance. That’s just my own pigheaded personality, but I did find her, on the occasions when I read one of her stories, such a chilly writer, a bit heartless really. She seemed to me to epitomize the emotional detachment, even stuntedness of the white Anglo Protestant settler Canadian class. (Even though, in stories like “The Wilderness Station” in the collection we’ll be talking about, she is also a critic of that mindset, the more powerful for being of that world.) In her Nobel address she talks about growing up among Scots-Irish immigrants and their descendants, a world in which it was considered poor form to have an emotional life and even worse to admit to any accomplishments. The title of her collection Who Do You Think You Are summarized that world.
In more recent years I would often teach some of Munro’s stories and came increasingly to admire their richness and strangeness. They are made to be re-read, in my opinion. Then Andrea Skinner told her story. For me, there is no way to separate this part of Munro’s life from her work. After all, the stories are so often about bad things—moral wrong, pain, hurt, betrayal—lurking in plain sight. I chose Open Secrets as the collection for us to talk about because that phrase seems to be the motto of her whole work. And I was genuinely shocked when I read the last story in the book. It’s called “Vandals,” and it’s about a man who abuses two young children and his partner, the woman who failed to care for them. It’s probably useless to speculate on a writer’s motivations, but I really wonder what Munro was thinking when she wrote it. Was she processing? Gloating? Apologizing? Was she not thinking at all? It’s past time for me to finish this introduction, so I’ll only say that despite what we know now and without excusing her in any way, I find myself captivated by the stories. I don’t know what that says about me or how I feel about that. I do think it’s important that we talk about them and about her, even at the risk of causing further hurt to Andrea Skinner and the legions of other child victims. For if we don’t—if we stop reading Alice Munro or if we separate art from artist—then we are back in the world of half-told truths. We are back in that dangerous world of open secrets.
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 