What's so great about Alice Munro?

this story from the Runaway collection might need a second look:

"Silence" – Juliet hopes for news from her adult estranged daughter Penelope.

yep, I mentioned it Sunday. Chilling.

is there a *least likely cancellation* thread? not saying that people are saying don't read her anymore but its so easy for people to just...not read someone anymore if they read someone negative about them. for some reason this is reminding me of the buffy sainte-marie thing. there were also old letters in that story. there have to be old letters if its an alice munro scandal.
that Cut thing is good at explaining why these things are so hard to grapple with. there is so much people don't know about families. and people will defend horrible people forever. you think you can't understand why but its really easy for people to do. even if it means losing a daughter. it happens more than you would think!

I was trying to articulate my feelings on this to my husband last night: I generally don’t really believe in the separation of the art and artist anyway, but when the “wrong” they’ve committed is so entwined with the type/subject of work they’ve done, it’s impossible for me to separate the two.

AM’s stories are these really insightful glimpses into the lives of ordinary women, and I cannot reconcile a woman who writes like that with a woman who would speak to and treat her female child in the way she did. So now I don’t trust her writing or how her writing made me feel, or what I interpreted from it. I can’t imagine rereading any of her stories without this knowledge just constantly on the edge of my thoughts.

Not sure I’ve explained this very well.

It makes sense that one's reactions to revelations about an author's life might be more "finely tuned", just because readers receive much more specific thoughts, ideas and impressions from words than if the writer were, for instance, an abstract painter.

I think one thing that's really difficult to reconcile is how sometimes artists can be very good particularly on the topics their crimes relate to...so the art ends up feeling like a confession?

or maybe like a world they've created in dialogue with a dark path they're on. in any case my feelings about rereading any munro echo just1n3's.

it's really a bit creepy. i don't doubt she was some kind of victim too, this stepfather sounds like a manipulative, narcissistic, sociopathic nightmare out of a horror movie. but at a certain point, you cross over from being manipulated and over into being a manipulator yourself. and in this case arguably an unreliable narrator not just of your own life, but your own child's.

I can't get over this guy writing all these literary-sounding letters about how a 9 year old seduced him.

and comparing himself to humbert humbert. i hadn't realized how widespread the misreading of that book is. it is obvious that humbert is a fucking delusional psychopath who is incapable of understanding other people outside of the role they play in the narcissistic drama in his head.

that is like the source of the book's humor. it's the same thing with pale fire.

people who have no excuse always look pitiful when they flail around trying to find one. its pathetic. (talking about the stepfather...)

And we can stay rooted in the world of Nabokov's novels and trust the author because we don't have creepy true stories about him to apply to the text.

Not sure I’ve explained this very well.

― just1n3, Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Excellent post.

Unlike, say, Woody Allen, whose work shriveled as he kept going, Munro's got richer, vaster, stranger; she didn't need to write novels when she was writing stories with the complexity of Faulkner (and Ontario is her Yoknapatawpha). Now that we know what she allowed to happen to her daughter and her reluctance to stand up for her, it seems to me like she drew on some dark, demonic power to write so well about damaged lives and the people doing the damaging. .

I can't imagine not rereading Munro without having her sins foregrounded, but I can't imagine myself not reading her either. Beyond the sentimental reason that she's brought me much pleasure she's also meant too much to me as an influence and model (Munro being an absolute blank as a public figure helps).

I begrudge no one who thinks, "eh, fuck her." And I can imagine a point as I get older when those sins smother my pleasure too.

i haven't read much of her. what is your favorite of her stories?

Hard to say. "Miles City, Montana." "Floating Bridge." "Runaway." "Save the Reaper!" "Meneseteung."

yeah, i'm with alfred. i have loved her writing so much and she has inspired me so much. all positive things. she has put joy and craft and a love for writing - and people! - out into the world for millions of people and that has to mean something. i do feel terrible for her daughter and her family. i certainly know the devastation and trauma that that kind of thing can inflict upon people. i have dealt with it in my own life as many here probably have as well.
its a personal choice when these things happen. i don't want to listen to buffy sainte-marie. i don't watch woody allen movies anymore. but i still love hitchcock. i can still sing along to michael jackson on the radio. i dunno. we all have lines.

Herman Melville was terrible to his family

well, that's the thing. a hundred years from now and this family stuff will not be remembered by many but the stories might endure. you never can tell. she might not be the kind of thing people want to read 100 years from now. she didn't write enough about living underground and hiding from the sun.

I absolutely love Munro, and part of me is thinking "thank God I can take her off my list now, there was so much left to read on it, and now I don't have to bother." Oddly enough I just read the "Hateship..." collection this month and I'm selfishly glad I got to finish and enjoy it before this awful story broke.

I guess my "personal choices", as Scott puts it, about what artists I want to keep in my life, are more about my laziness than my morality. I don't watch Woody Allen or Louis CK anymore, because a lot of their work feels like a fucking chore, whereas I feel like nothing could be easier or more pleasurable than slipping into "Rear Window" or "I Just Can't Help It" for the twentieth time. That said - I still don't want to listen to "Ignition" again.

As for me, I had yet to read Munro and ordered "Hateship..." two days before this story broke out. I will read it and some connections will be mortifying, but that's how it is. It's not in my control what people do and when I will hear about it. I also believe great works can outlast the rest - there are many examples, and we typically do not wait 100 years, we often do not wait at all. Now that she died, there is no one to confront, banish, or hold accountable. In the end, I can reconcile feeling sympathy for the daughter, incomprehension at AM's personal choices, and reading her works... at least with the knowledge. Art is rarely pure, artists are not paragons of virtue, art is often an expiation... and that is also why we read.

I'm sure there's a lot more to come out of this story but it confuses me that the impulse on hearing about it is to prevaricate or distance oneself as a reader/consumer. Like that's the important thing to get straight.

I am sympathetic to this but we are only connected to these individuals as readers and what is there to get straight aside from feeling horrified for the victim?

I'm conscious of sounding hectoring which I don't mean to and people are just spitballing on a web forum. I'm in a different position since the art doesn't mean much to me in this instance but either way 'my relationship to the art' feels like an ugly framing device. For me, when it's this raw, I have a sense of wanting to wait - to give the emotional response a chance to settle.

But, as you say, sympathy aside, perhaps that's all we really have to offer.

yeah man idk, the more i grow as an individual the less i care about Art as some kind of daddy and the more i care about people who overcome trauma. obviously not everyone has to feel that way but in these kinds of conversations with these kinds of artists it always feels like there are a handful of (mostly men tbqf) who are on the side of the metrics and the universal standard of Art and while the other pov is represented it's kind of relegated to something minor. i want to advocate for it as the major thing. art is always with us, we will always have art we feel is great and ineffable and all that, but abuse and such, that's worth fighting for or worth drawing a line in the sand for, because abuse is bad for people, canceling alice munro is not. not sure how that sounds and it's not directed at anyone specifically itt, it's just how i feel.

i do think this comes down to personal exerience, essentially - either you can read her now or you can't, and i think that depends on your own background, your own trauma or lack of it. but i also feel like every time this happens it's really important for people to understand how this kind of thing affects people, to go a little further with the empathy.

for me there are artists who are or were obviously big ol jerks and I can still listen to them, but once they cross the line into something truly darker, it's really hard for me to ever want to see their books on my shelf, or their music in my collection ever again. I'm not sure where the line is exactly, it kind of differs depending on the situation. I know it when I see it.

it's okay not to know the line too! Nor do you have to defend yourself when you see that line comes imo.

For me for example, can I still listen to Grimes? Yes, and pretty frequently. Can I listen to Roisin Murphy? I don't know that I've done so since she revealed herself for what she was. And I listened to Roisin Machine as much as any album in that year or so after it came out.

roisin murphy has been an interesting example for me. being a terf is a kind of abuse i think. at first it was like, oh well this opinion is common, i don't want to stop listening to her. but the more i thought about it, where someone has to be to be like that in public, the more it illuminated about where she's coming from and how shallow she is. and being here, on this message board, with trans people i know and care about, helped bring me around to that too.

there are a lot of women writers writing about young women and girls with a darker or less foreclosed perspective, some of them "high-quality" literary fiction and some of them not. i'd rather read a cute ya author who i know isn't out there tossing their child into a pit, you know?

xp lol

🤜🏻💥🤛🏻

Yeah I know by that same rationale why would I want to listen to some narcissistic user, someone who decided she would enjoy the attention and adoration of the scene that she secretly bore some measure of disgust for, why would I listen to her when I got to listen to Kylie Minogue? Or Fever Ray?

*when I could listen to

haha absolutely

For me, it comes down to if I can enjoy the artwork without the Bad Things the artist has done intruding into my brain.

I know Marvin Gaye was a shit, but I can listen to him without thinking about it for whatever reason.

I can't listen to any Michael Jackson, because I start thinking about abused kids. I can't listen to the Jackson 5, because I think about the little kid singing who would grow up and abuse kids.

If the person is an active, living artist, I don't want my money going to them if they are an abuser.

I had never heard of Alice Munro before this. I love a good short story so I'm tempted based on what was said about her earlier in this thread. And she's dead, so it's not like she's benefiting off of me reading her works. But it sounds like the abuse echoes in the content of her stories, so I probably won't bother.

i always wonder how much i should even know about someone. before the internet i didn't really read much about artists and their lives. i mean, i did, but i don't think i ever learned too much that was scandalous. i read hollywood babylon. but for the most part i didn't seek out juicy tidbits. didn't read a lot of biographies. i liked the mystery of artists. i was always very uncomfortable meeting my heroes.

I know Marvin Gaye was a shit, but I can listen to him without thinking about it for whatever reason.

when i listen to marvin gaye i *do* think about how his entire life was fucked and doomed and how much he inflicted that on others... doesn't interfere with how much i love the music for whatever reason

i tried relistening to early red house painters a few months ago because it was my birthday and that stuff is the core, the heart music to me, but the experience was mostly miserable (how many of those songs are about abusive relationships???). i put on the golden age by american music club after and it was like breathing air again

Idk for me it’s like, art isn’t something that springs out of nowhere, with the person producing a mere conduit. The art is the person. If you don’t know anything about that person, the art will give you some kind of story about them. But once you know some truths about that person, well then it’s not just the art giving you their story, but now their story is influencing how you see their art.

I’m not good at talking about this stuff, sorry. Props to map for being so articulate.

so many great artists seem to be psycopaths lmao, better imho to have other heroes xp

i think your posts about this have really clarified how this stuff affects me, just1n3, as i really suck at talking about it

haha thx justine! hi ivy!

i think i get most depressed when i realize the art only exists so the artist could have access to more people to abuse. (obv we are talking way beyond alice munro now)

There's part of me that wants to spend more time with their work, seeing what made their life not completely wasted or toxic. It's a more magnified version of, say, knowing a pastry chef who's an asshole (I've known a few!) but appreciating what they make because it's their most generous, least fucked-up part.

People who take their own lives...that's where I land closer to what a lot of you are describing here with Munro. It takes a lot for me not be distracted by that, or to see the work as a reflection of that dark impulse.

that's an interesting pov.

Idk for me it’s like, art isn’t something that springs out of nowhere, with the person producing a mere conduit. The art is the person.

You're not having any trouble explaining yourself pithily.

For me I guess when that happens, I see the art as an honest journal of their own life, and it's one that I have to look at with some measure of respect for what they went through. When you have musicians for example who tell stories full of empathy or longing, and meanwhile they're sliding into the DMS of underage fans or something, it just feels like sensitive guy bait meant to lure people in.

So much male '70s soft rock codes in that fashion.

i learned something about an artist whose most famous work was not only profoundly influential for me aesthetically, thematically, etc. but which was likely instrumental in me figuring out i was a trans lesbian, a work that if i ever actually start writing my n*vel it will inevitably be compared to, and what i learned about him suggested that he had not actually internalized the themes of his own work, which is just..... *siiiiiigh*. but it also makes me think about how i expect to hear something unsettling about ***** ***** one day, despite the fact that his best work prioritizes female subjectivity even as its being undermined and abused and destroyed by men, and i think about how artists are often working through nigh-unconscious guilts and regrets in their work, and the art does not, cannot make up for the harm they caused others, but that it doesn't exactly nullify the usefulness of the art and the degree to which it helped me realize things about myself. idk, i think i can read alice munro in the future under these conditions but it's always fraught, unknowable until i get there

Or I don't know things start to come off as justifications for the harm done to other people. And yeah they code as the sort of wistful explanations of the complexities of being a man, and yet why do such complexities lead to them wanting to have a specific, simpleminded pattern of abuse they return to over and over again. Obviously that's just the most common one, there are other forms of abuse or abhorrent views from all genders. Xxp

Xps thanks, I really appreciate that bc ilxors are generally highly articulate and I get self conscious about being much less able to say what I want to say.

I’m a notorious grudge-holder so it’s pvmic for me to renounce my admiration of an artist once I find out they’ve really hurt someone/s. But it’s not the kind of standard I think everyone should have. And if you’ve benefited from the influence of an artist’s work, the way ivy describes, then i especially understand that and respect it.

I was a total die-hard for the Pumpkins until I found out about Billy corgan’s association with alex jones. I happily ignored all the goofy-ass pretentious shit he said before that. Now I just can’t take him seriously. But I still regularly listen to those pre-2000 albums because that music was a gateway for me, and got me through my awful teenage years.