This is baked into us: Regardless of our feminist beliefs, we expect women to be good mothers. So when we learn that Alice Munro... played a part in a story of childhood abuse, it shakes the foundations of our belief in what? Her writing? Her role as a model? The maternal archetype? Whatever it shakes, it does so profoundly.
For it had seemed that Munro understood everything about us, the way we thought and felt, in public and private. How is it possible that she did not understand this fundamental female thing about what a mother is?
Those passages were both discomfiting and electrifying. Yes, we thought, these are real, these awful encounters; here is the anti-romantic aspect of sex. We stared at them in horrid fascination, safe with the author, at a distance.
But now we see these stories in a different light. Now we can't help but wonder how they relate to the fact that Munro's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, was covertly abusing Munro's young daughter Andrea, and that a horrifying story of sexual predation was unfolding around Munro herself. Was she somehow aware of it? Did she keep herself from knowing? Did she stay silent and complicit as it happened, protecting her husband at the expense of
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