Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour: Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

Release Date: January 3, 2025
Hosted by David Remnick
Guest: Rachel Aviv, Staff Writer for The New Yorker

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Introduction to Alice Munro and Her Legacy

In the episode titled "Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets," host David Remnick delves into the complex legacy of Alice Munro, celebrated as a master of the short story and the "Chekhov of her era." Munro's illustrious career includes publishing over 50 stories in The New Yorker and receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. However, Munro's reputation faced scrutiny following revelations by her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, about childhood sexual abuse by Munro's longtime partner, Jerry Fremlin, beginning when Andrea was nine years old. This revelation presents a profound moral dilemma, juxtaposing Munro's empathetic literary prowess against her familial betrayals.

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Rachel Aviv's Investigation

Rachel Aviv, renowned for her incisive reporting, conducted an in-depth exploration of Alice Munro’s life, unearthing the dark family secrets that shadowed her celebrated career. Aviv's piece, titled "Alice Munro's Passive Voice," is highlighted as one of the most remarkable pieces of reporting recently published by The New Yorker. The investigation not only uncovers the abuse Andrea endured but also examines the intricate dynamics within the Munro family that enabled such trauma to persist in silence.

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Alice Munro's Writing and Qualities

David Remnick opens the discussion by asking Rachel Aviv about Alice Munro’s distinctive qualities as a writer. Aviv emphasizes Munro’s unparalleled ability to evoke shifting understandings with each reading, stating:

"There's something beyond the sort of incredibly astute descriptions of people's inner lives. There's something formally that she's sort of turned the short story into sort of stretch the limits of it." (01:42)

Munro's narratives often focus on the "silent and the silenced," exploring characters who grapple with life's revelations long after pivotal events have occurred. Her stories frequently portray poor rural upbringings, familial neglect, and sudden, horrific events, capturing the essence of human crises through a lens of profound empathy and formal innovation.

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The Family Secret: Andrea's Abuse

The conversation shifts to the heart of the episode—the sexual abuse suffered by Andrea Skinner at the hands of Jerry Fremlin, Alice Munro's longtime partner. Rachel Aviv reveals that Andrea disclosed the abuse to family members when she was nine, but Alice Munro chose to protect Fremlin despite his written confessions.

Andrea's revelations came to light in a memoir published by the Toronto Star, where she detailed the prolonged abuse:

"I had been sexually assaulted by Alice's husband when I was very young, nine years old." (05:19)

Fremlin's obsession with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and his portrayal of the abuse in his letters further complicated the family's ability to address the trauma, leading to a long-standing silence.

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Alice Munro's Response and Choices

When Andrea disclosed the abuse to Alice in 1992, Munro initially responded by leaving Fremlin and relocating to the west coast of Canada. However, within a month, she reconciled with Fremlin, a decision that profoundly impacted her relationship with Andrea. Aviv explores the psychological complexities behind Munro's choice to stay, suggesting a pattern of dependency and replication of childhood trauma:

"She was a participant in, like, a pretty psychologically abusive relationship... some sort of artistic distance that had become her mode of living." (09:33)

Munro's letters reveal her internal conflict, prioritizing her literary career and personal struggles over her daughter's well-being.

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Impact on Literary Legacy

The revelation of Munro’s familial betrayals has ignited a debate about the separation of art and artist. Rachel Aviv discusses how this complicates Munro’s literary legacy, prompting readers and critics to reassess her work through the lens of her personal failings. The episode references Munro's own reflections on abandonment and artistic obsession, highlighting a pattern of self-sacrifice that seemingly extends to her familial relationships.

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Interviews and Personal Reflections

Throughout the episode, excerpts from Andrea Skinner’s interviews and reflections provide a poignant glimpse into the long-term effects of the abuse and the family's collective silence. Andrea discusses her estrangement from her family and the emotional toll of watching her mother win the Nobel Prize while maintaining a fractured relationship:

"I felt like, oh, you know, the family really is happier that I'm not in it now." (28: F)

Rachel Aviv also critiques Munro’s biographer, Robert Thacker, for his decision to omit the abuse from his biography, underscoring the broader issue of accountability in preserving a public figure’s legacy.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes by contemplating the lasting implications of Alice Munro’s actions on her literary contributions. Rachel Aviv raises critical questions about the ethical responsibilities of artists and the enduring impact of their personal lives on their work. The conversation ultimately challenges listeners to navigate the complex intersection of artistic genius and personal morality, leaving a lasting reflection on how Munro’s stories will be viewed in the shadow of her family’s hidden truths.

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Notable Quotes:

• "I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like you're understanding has shifted." — Rachel Aviv (01:42)

• "Passivity is not something that modern woman is supposed to be content with... it's probably the overriding passion of my life just to see." — Alice Munro (11:00)

• "The most essential thing... to see what will happen." — David Remnick discussing Munro's philosophy (11:50)

• "My daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me." — Alice Munro to biographer Robert Thacker (31:13)

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Final Thoughts:

Rachel Aviv’s investigative reporting sheds light on the hidden fractures within Alice Munro’s personal life, offering a nuanced perspective that challenges the reverence traditionally afforded to literary giants. This episode serves as a critical examination of how personal ethics and actions can profoundly influence the reception and interpretation of an artist’s work.

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For a comprehensive understanding of Rachel Aviv’s reporting on Alice Munro’s family secrets, listen to the full episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour or read the piece "Alice Munro's Passive Voice" on newyorker.com.

Transcript

[Rachel Aviv]

Listener support WNYC Studios.

[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alice Munro was a master of the short story in our time, the Chekhov of her era. She published more than 50 stories in the New Yorker, and then in 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But shortly before her death, her legacy darkened when her youngest daughter, Andrea, revealed that she'd been sexually abused by Monroe's longtime partner. This began when Andrea was just nine years old, and it was kept secret in the family even after the man confessed to it in letters. And Sonelle, Monroe's ardent readers, and there are a great many of us are left with this terrible conundrum that a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child. In one of the most astonishing pieces of reporting that the magazine has had the honor of publishing in recent years, Rachel Aviv explores the story of Alice Munro and her art and the terrible secret of her life and the lives of her family. I thought we should begin by talking about Alice Munro as a writer. She published 50 short stories at the New Yorker at least, and there were people around the office for years who considered her, in many ways, you know, the Chekhov of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer.

[Rachel Aviv]

I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like you're understanding has shifted. To me, there's something beyond the sort of incredibly astute descriptions of people's inner lives. There's something formally that she's sort of turned the short story into sort of stretch the limits of it.

[David Remnick]

What's the work about, really?

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, it's interesting. Looking at the Nobel Prize presentation, the secretary is pretty on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who only understand sort of aspects of their life years later, when it's been revealed. Many of her early books are about this kind of poor rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful, and there are a lot of horrific sort of freak events that happen quickly. She kind of writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it. Not necessarily about herself, but about people going through sort of crises of middle age and then the crises of late age. And I think her stories are unique in the way that they kind of skip forward, like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time, and someone is sort of only grasping what happened in their past belatedly. The thing that feels sort of most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that, like, she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something and then those words would feel like, alive to her and. And she would sort of write a story around those words and that this constantly happened to her where sort of it almost felt like she was moving through the world in a different way. Like things had a kind of secret intensity that she could pick up on and that she wanted to capture somehow.

[David Remnick]

You know, I've been working at the New Yorker for a long time, over 30 years. And Alice died last year, right?

[Rachel Aviv]

Mm, last spring.

[David Remnick]

I think. I met her once or twice maybe. She very rarely seemed to come to New York, and when she did, it was like a stealth mission. She kept far apart from that so called literary world, didn't she?

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. There was a really interesting letter that she wrote to her agent and she's saying, like, I cannot go on another book tour in order to sort of be a social self, I have to take so many uppers that I can't sleep for 72 hours. And then in order to sleep, I need to take so many downers that I'm sort of endangering my life and I'm in this sort of dysregulated state. And she was saying, I don't know if I can publish another book if it requires a book tour, because it sort of does damage to myself.

[David Remnick]

Now I have the confession to make. So this past summer, like a lot of people, I read the piece in the Toronto Star by Alice's grown daughter, Andrea. And it was a short memoir in which she said that she had been sexually assaulted by Alice's husband when she was very young, nine years old, I think.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. And she essentially said, you know, my stepfather sexually abused me when I was nine, and my mother protected him for our entire lives. And his name, Jerry Fremlin. And then Jenny, who is Andrea's older sister, and Andrew, who is her stepbrother, both wrote essays as well, sort of talking about the way that the silence had shaped their lives and their families.

[David Remnick]

I read this piece. My first reaction was one of. I was just startled. I mean, Alice Munro holds a great place in my mind as a reader and frankly, as a citizen of the New Yorker. She's an important figure. And my second thought, not long thereafter was that Rachel Leviev should write about this. And before I even had a chance to call you and discuss this. I had heard that you were also thinking the same thing. How did this news affect you? And then why did you decide to get on it as a piece of writing and investigations so quickly?

[Rachel Aviv]

Well, it's funny because the morning that the Toronto Star article came out, my friend who's from Toronto just emailed it to me and was like, rachel, you should write about this. And then over the next few days, a few other people, friends were like, you're writing about this.

[David Remnick]

What did that tell you?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think because it's about so many things that I, you know, memory, sort of family trauma, the sort of generational dynamics.

[David Remnick]

The abuse against Andrea by Fremlin, the stepfather, began when she was nine years old. What exactly happened?

[Rachel Aviv]

So Alice was away, her father was dying, and Andrea asked if she could sleep in the master bedroom. And Jerry Fremlin said, okay, don't tell your mother. And from there he got into her bed and sexually abused her. She said it didn't even occur to her to tell her mother because she felt so unsafe in that house. And then it continued until she was through puberty. This sort of him exposing himself to her and sort of trying to go.

[David Remnick]

On and on for years. And Gerald Fremlin had a very strange relationship way of talking about this. When he eventually did, he seemed to be obsessed with Nabokov's novel Lolita and much else. So tell me about Framlin.

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, so after Andrea told her mother about the abuse in 1992, which is 16 years after it happened, Alice left Jerry Fremlin and he then sort of unleashed this like torrent of letters in which he was ostensibly defending himself, except what the letters actually were were like incredibly detailed confessions in which he explained that he was sort of responding to this nine year old seductress and that he knows that there are Lolitos in the world and he was simply being a Humbert Humpert.

[David Remnick]

And how did Alice Munro initially react to this letter that she got from her, her daughter Andrea saying to her, sit down, go to a quiet place before you read this. And she gives her the news. How did Alice Munro react?

[Rachel Aviv]

Well, she did immediately leave her partner and go to their second home on the west coast of Canada. And Andrea came there to be with her and felt the experience was not about her, it was about her mother as this sort of betrayed lover. Alice Monroe took Jerry Fremland back within a month. Within a month, Within a month. And you know, the way she explained it to Andrea was, you know, I loved him too. Much. I'm too dependent. I'm too old.

[David Remnick]

How do you make sense of why she stayed? It can't just be, I loved him and I was dependent on him.

[Rachel Aviv]

She was a participant in, like, a pretty psychologically abusive relationship and had many of the dynamics of sort of women who try to leave men and don't feel like they can exist without that man. There was a sort of confused idea about misogyny. Like this sort of idea that she often would tell Andrea that it was misogynistic to expect a mother to sacrifice her own happiness because her husband has done a bad thing. And Andrea really internalized that and would tell her mother, like, yes, of course, no one would ever ask a father to do this, only a mother. Therefore, I cannot ask my mother to do this. And then I think there was, like, this sense for Alice that the writing was the most important thing and that she was sort of on a kind of existential level, like, living in this in a way that's hard to describe, where she was sort of watching and not totally present and maybe, you know, not able to really feel her daughter's experience, whether it was, you know, dissociation or some sort of sort of artistic distance that had become her mode of living.

[David Remnick]

Let's listen to Alice Munro talking to Joyce Davidson for the CBC. This is in 1979.

[Alice Munro]

Passivity is not something that modern woman is supposed to be content with, let alone striving for. And yet, well, if you're passive, you sit back and watch things and you let things happen. Have you been guilty of that? Oh, yes. I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them, just to see what will happen, to see what people will say, to see what people will do. It's probably the overriding passion of my life just to see.

[Joyce Davidson]

Now, is that because you don't want to hurt them?

[Alice Munro]

Oh, no, that's only part of it. That's the surface part. That's the social behavior. That one doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. But it's also that everything fascinates me that happens between people.

[David Remnick]

The resonant phrase, for me, there is to see what happens, as if the most essential thing. It's to see what will happen. And by extension, I think, to see how it becomes the material of her art.

[Rachel Aviv]

You know, there's this. That line really resonates because there's this story she wrote years before where a girl is sort of being abused sexually, like sort of being groped on a train.

[David Remnick]

Which one is this?

[Rachel Aviv]

This is Wild Swans. And she Says, you know, she just wanted to see what will happen. It's almost the same language, the sense of, like, I'm just gonna kind of keep going here because I'm so curious.

[David Remnick]

To see what the human behavior will be, positive, negative, or otherwise.

[Rachel Aviv]

And she describes herself as victim and accomplice. And there's this sense of feeling like an accomplice because of that curiosity, of that wanting it to happen or wanting to not interfere with the action that will come to her.

[David Remnick]

It's almost as if she. She never left her husband and reconciled with her daughters because the conflict was fruitful for her work. Is that unfair?

[Rachel Aviv]

Probably. I mean, I feel like it was more helpless than that because, like, of course, she had, like, deep wounds from her own life. Like, she.

[David Remnick]

Right. She had been beaten bad by her father when she was growing up in.

[Rachel Aviv]

Sort of complex dynamics. It was a power game sort of. She would be beaten, and then her mother would sort of come to her like a supplicant with all these treats, and she would sort of resist, and then she would fall back into it. And I think, you know, like, there's this language of, like, art monsters, which, like, sure applies, but I also feel like it's maybe less interesting or true to the experience of, you know, just being very wounded and sort of finding a man who kind of speaks to those wounds and then.

[David Remnick]

What do you mean, speaks to those wounds?

[Rachel Aviv]

Who.

[David Remnick]

To heal them?

[Rachel Aviv]

No, no, not to heal them. To allow her to sort of unknowingly replicate patterns from her childhood.

[David Remnick]

You know, I went back and reread this piece in the New York times magazine from 20 years ago by Daphne Merkin. It describes the relationship of Monroe and Jerry Fremlin. And it's not Merkin's fault. This was performed for her, in a sense, but she described that relationship in very sporty, genial terms.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah, I mean, it's just like an incredible level of sort of living, of performing. And I think, you know, she's spoken about that a lot in interviews, of feeling like she is two women. You know, one is the woman who sort of being what other people want her to be, and the other is the woman who's sort of living a solitary, kind of watchful, removed existence. And so. Well, the interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea, where she.

[David Remnick]

Felt like, what year is it?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think it was 2004. And she felt like she was just being erased. And that was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse.

[David Remnick]

How did the police react to that report?

[Rachel Aviv]

I talked to the detective and he was, you know, praising her for being this, like, incredibly straightforward witness who looks him in the eye. And, you know, and she had these incredible letters to back it up, like she was handing him the perpetrator's confession.

[David Remnick]

And what came out of that investigation.

[Rachel Aviv]

It was sort of patched up really quickly. He pled guilty to indecent assault. There was no jury.

[David Remnick]

It was a one sentence admission of guilt in which the first person pronoun was dropped.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. And then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer, basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press. And at the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her. And then abruptly she canceled the plan.

[David Remnick]

Because, in a sense, in publicity terms, they got away with it. It didn't blow. And we should say also that Alice Munro, in Canada, her reputation was immense. People referred to her as the queen of the literary scene there. It was, you know, people here probably at that time knew other writers, Toni Morrison or John Updike, much more than Alice Munro, somehow. But in Canada was a different story. No.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. I was surprised talking to the Toronto Star reporter who ultimately broke the story. But she said when she was first proposed the story, after Andrea had sent an email, she said no, she didn't want to do it. She didn't want to take down an idol. She didn't want to jeopardize her relationships in publishing. She'd seen Alice Munro as this emblem of feminism and she'd sort of been inspired by the idea, like you could tell your own story and take control over your own story. And ultimately she did change her mind. But even that thought that in 2024, there was like a day long pause before she was ready to do it. And even before then, Andrea had reached out to a number of journalists and she got no response.

[David Remnick]

I'm speaking with Rachel Aviv, who's reported for the New Yorker on Alice Munro and her daughter, Andrea Skinner. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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[David Green]

The 2024 election was a lot, and now that we're past it, you might be avoiding political news altogether. You might want to understand the other side of the aisle, but without poisoning your algorithm or treading into online territory that feels like an alien planet. You need Left, Right and Center. It's your weekly political news check in with representatives from both parties so you can hear from the other guys in a way that helps you actually make sense of it. I'm David Green. Join me on Left, Right and Center from kcrw. New episodes drop every Friday wherever you listen to podcasts.

[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with staff writer Rachel Levieve. In a piece that you can find on newyorker.com called Alice Munro's passive voice, Rachel Leviev probes with depth and sensitivity what happened in Alice Monroe's family after Monroe's partner sexually abused her youngest daughter, Andrea. The daughter told members of her family about it when it happened, including her father, Jim Monroe, but nobody wanted to tell Alice Monroe. Nobody wanted to upset her. And years later, when Jerry Fremlin admitted to the abuse, Alice stood by him. She gradually lost contact with her daughter, Andrea Rachel, we spoke before the break about how the media ignored this story for many years, and it kind of mirrors the way Alice Munro's family dealt with it. You spoke with Andrea Skinner repeatedly and at great length. Here's a recording she made for a survivors group in Canada called the Gatehouse.

[Joyce Davidson]

I was estranged from most of my family for many years, though I had told most of my family about the abuse when I was 10 years old. No action was taken to protect me, and I was sent back to my stepfather's house. Unfortunately, nobody did anything to stop it or help me heal at that time, and the effects of that were that I felt really devalued and even dehumanized by not just my abuser but all of the significant people of my life.

[David Remnick]

So her siblings as well as her mother shut her up there was this.

[Rachel Aviv]

Sense of, like, we all need to protect our mother. And this feeling that she was very horribly fragile. And that, like this refrain in the family, like, she'll die if she knows. And the sisters kind of took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother, and actually Sheila almost told her mother, but they both. There was this kind of mythology of like, we must not impinge on this great, great career and on this fragile woman.

[David Remnick]

Now, you spoke with Robert Thacker, who's a biographer of Alice Munro. He knew about the abuse. What was his rationale as a scholar, as a biographer, to ignore this incredibly pivotal on the criminal record piece of news?

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, he just basically said, it's not the book I'm writing. I think what he said to me at one point was, every family has a thing like this.

[David Remnick]

I'm sorry, but how did you react to that when you heard that?

[Rachel Aviv]

You know, I try not to respond with judgment. I think I just listened. But.

[David Remnick]

But we're sitting here, it's just us too.

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, why write a biography if you're not gonna sort of do. Yeah, I think, you know, Andrea said in a letter to him, like he had responded, you know, I'll make sure I didn't, like, say anything too flattering, essentially, about Jerry. And she said, I didn't mean cross out flatter. I meant, you know, scrap the whole.

[David Remnick]

Book or write an honest biography.

[Rachel Aviv]

Right. And she said, you know, to ignore this is to ignore sort of the context in which these stories are being created. I think there was this. He was trying to hold onto this idea, and the family members were too, that something that this was between Jerry and Andrea, like the sort of delusional idea that it was a two person interaction.

[David Remnick]

What's amazing is how many stories in mid and late career are haunted by, shadowed by, or even you could say about this situation. Which is the story that in your mind is the most directly infested with this?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think It's Vandals from 1993.

[David Remnick]

Talk about that story.

[Rachel Aviv]

I read the letters that Alice wrote to her agent, and she said first she wrote that she had started a story and she called it about. It was about the subject, and she said she approached it from different angles. And then she felt like she was gonna throw up and she burned it. And then two months later, she had written a draft of Vandals. It's about a young girl named Liza and her younger brother. And in the summers, they go every day to play with this man and his wife who's Sort of become a mother figure, and the man is sexually abusing the children. It sort of emerges. The story is sort of structured as an investigation into whether the mother knows and chooses to look away or doesn't know, but should know. And in that story, there are lines or images that are almost lifted from the letter that Andrea wrote to her mother disclosing her abuse and from a letter that Jerry wrote about their relationship. So it feels. You can sort of see pieces of sort of language, sentences that must have, like, lit her up in some way or, like, made her feel like she had to build a story around it.

[David Remnick]

Did Andrea go on reading her mother's stories as they came out in the magazine and in books?

[Rachel Aviv]

She did for a while, and must have been horrific. You know, she said that for a while, she almost tried to convince herself to be hopeful, and she felt like, okay, here she is. She's getting it out. She's working through it. You know, there was one story, rich as stink, that has this image of a daughter wearing a wedding dress that burns. And it's this, like. And Andrea said, here. You know, here's this image of innocence destroyed. Like, there's this feeling that her mother must understand. And then eventually, Andrea realized that, like, the insights were going to her characters and not to her daughters and not to herself. And then Andrea felt increasingly enraged by sort of the. The passivity of the characters, the sense of them sort of existing in this, like, bleak survival mode.

[David Remnick]

One of the striking things about this extraordinary piece is that Andrea doesn't go to pieces. She continues living her life, and she has a life. What is it?

[Rachel Aviv]

You know, I think this sort of is a defining problem in her life, in a way that she appears to.

[David Remnick]

Be thriving even to her siblings, who are deceived by that in some way.

[Rachel Aviv]

Right. And that, you know, in a way, as a child, it was a coping mechanism. There's a sense that, like, she held the key to either destroying her family or keeping their family together. And so they all felt like she was kind of the star of the family, the one who was the most like her mother. And she. And I had conversations about that where I would say, like, I'm worried. I'm slipping into that state that the siblings are in where you seem to be thriving. Your daughter just said, you have this incredible joy for life. You do seem to have this incredible joy. And I mean, something she said to me that I found really profound was one of the letters from the 70s that Alice wrote was about being raped by a colleague. First, she says, she was so numb that she just walked aimlessly around the city and missed the class she was supposed to teach that day. And then later on, she says, well, we'll make a good story.

[David Remnick]

The sense of dissociation is incredible.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. But Andrea said, you know, when I read that letter, at first I kind of felt pain for my mother because I know that feeling of, you know, aimlessly walking around the city. And then she said the next feeling I had was rage. That, like, she did a day of that and sort of moved on to have this incredibly productive life. And I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city.

[David Remnick]

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. How did Andrea react to that news?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think what was hardest for her was watching Jenny receive the prize from the King of Sweden because Alice was too weak at that point to go to Sweden. And she felt like, oh, you know, the family really is happier that I'm not in it now. They can live this one reality.

[David Remnick]

How do you think this affects Alice Munro's literary legacy and how we'll read her in the future? I know lots of people that at first they said, I'm never gonna read her again. Your colleague Jiang Fan, who was teaching Alice Moore was. I just had lunch with her. She just. It just rocked her in a most elemental way. How do you think that will affect Alice Munro's being read in the future?

[Rachel Aviv]

Like, a question that feels almost more like, alive to me is the way that her writing makes you think about, like, art. At what expense? Not to sort of deny that it's art and that it has value as art, but to think about what existed in its wake, sort of who was harmed, what was sacrificed. And, you know, that's probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro kind of makes it visible on the page. Like, it felt so literal, like, you know, trading your daughter for art.

[David Remnick]

It felt like, do you see it that way?

[Rachel Aviv]

Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision. But I think, you know, Alice did speak very with a lot of self awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying, because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter and that person was a writer.

[David Remnick]

Alice ignored her own mother.

[Rachel Aviv]

Her own mother who was dying, who had Parkinson's.

[David Remnick]

So there's a certain ruthlessness to it.

[Rachel Aviv]

No, but the repetition. I think that she could speak very honestly and with a lot of self awareness about how she had to abandon her own mother to become a writer. That I'm sort of Feeling that there was a certain awareness probably about how she also abandoned her daughter to be the writer she became.

[David Remnick]

And you earlier in our conversation talked about trying not to be judgmental, but in fact, writing in no small part is a collection of many judgments along the way, whether about sentences or how a story moves or the judgments you make. And in this story, the real crime is committed by the man, Gerald Fremlin. We shouldn't forget that. And I wonder in the end how you do judge Ellis Munro generously or.

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, I feel horrified. I feel horrified that it's hard because, like, you know, what would she say? Did she think the work is more important? Is that just sort of what the decision she made?

[David Remnick]

Do you think she thought of it in those stark terms?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think maybe because in that, you know, one of the most like, chilling moments for me was when the biographer Bob Thacker, when I read the conversation between Alice and him about, she was sort of asking him, like, what do my daughters want you to do? And he was telling her, and she stated really clearly, you know, my daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me. And I worked a long time to become who I am. And she sort of, I mean, couldn't be more stark than that.

[David Remnick]

Rachel Leviev, thank you so much.

[Rachel Aviv]

Thank you.

[David Remnick]

Alice Munro's Passive Voice is the title of Rachel Aviv's piece and you can read it at our website, newyorker.com and you can subscribe to the New Yorker for reporting like this every week. And that's [e-mail] I'm David Remnick and that's our program for today. I want to close the program and begin the New Year by thanking everyone at the Radio Hour and at the New Yorker. And thank you for listening and a happy new year.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommers, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barsch, Victor Guan and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

[H]

My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for the New Yorker. I focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public. You know, for us at InTheDark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling and we felt a real kinship with the New Yorker. Like the combination of the deeply reported stories that the New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to the New Yorker, it would be, maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue. As a New Yorker, you know, like, you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read, even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great. But I haven't even mentioned like the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we were so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden, Keefe. And so to me, it's like, I can't imagine not reading these writers.

[Madeline Barron]

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[David Remnick]

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[Madeline Barron]

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[David Remnick]

That's newyorker.com dark and thanks.