WEBVTT - Sebastian Smee on the legacy of Alice Munro 0:00:01.600 --> 0:00:04.400 Hello, Ruby Jones here, and welcome back to our week 0:00:04.480 --> 0:00:07.880 of Longreads. Every day we have a feature story for you, 0:00:08.240 --> 0:00:12.039 read by the author who created it. This year, the 0:00:12.160 --> 0:00:15.240 daughter of the late Nobel Prize winning Canadian author Alice 0:00:15.280 --> 0:00:18.919 Munroe revealed something about her mother that had stayed hidden 0:00:18.960 --> 0:00:22.520 throughout Monro's life. In an essay in The Toronto Star, 0:00:23.040 --> 0:00:26.400 Monroe's daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, said that when she was 0:00:26.520 --> 0:00:31.000 nine years old, Monroe's husband, Andrea's stepfather, had assaulted her. 0:00:32.159 --> 0:00:34.559 Andrew said she told her mother the truth when she 0:00:34.640 --> 0:00:38.320 was an adult, and Alice Munroe sided with him and 0:00:38.520 --> 0:00:42.000 kept it secret, saying she loved him too much to 0:00:42.120 --> 0:00:47.080 leave him. Today, art critic and author Sebastian Smee reads 0:00:47.080 --> 0:00:50.400 his piece on the author Alice Monroe. It's a reflection 0:00:50.560 --> 0:00:53.360 on the artists who act in ways unacceptable to us, 0:00:54.000 --> 0:00:57.400 but whose works are perhaps enriched by their moral ambiguity. 0:00:58.320 --> 0:01:01.040 It's an insightful and sharp piece of writing by one 0:01:01.080 --> 0:01:03.720 of the best observers of the art and literary worlds. 0:01:04.720 --> 0:01:08.319 After The Monthly published this piece by Sebastian Smee, another 0:01:08.360 --> 0:01:11.360 of Monroe's daughters got in touch, saying she felt the 0:01:11.360 --> 0:01:14.400 piece reminds us of the value of literature in general 0:01:14.640 --> 0:01:18.040 and how it stands apart from its creator. I hope 0:01:18.040 --> 0:01:21.160 you enjoy Into the Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:32.960 read by Sebastian Smee as much as I did. It's Tuesday, 0:01:33.360 --> 0:01:51.800 January seventh, Into. 0:01:51.560 --> 0:01:57.480 The Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe. Having read and 0:01:57.560 --> 0:02:01.440 re read Alice Munroe's stories for almost three years, I've 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:04.080 often laughed at the laurel most frequently bestowed on her 0:02:04.240 --> 0:02:07.400 the near obligatory clam that the late Canadian short story 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:12.560 writer was ah Chekhov if Tchehov, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, 0:02:12.760 --> 0:02:16.680 wrote sad books for humorous people. If he achieved beauty 0:02:16.720 --> 0:02:19.520 by keeping all his words in the same dim light 0:02:19.600 --> 0:02:22.040 and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint 0:02:22.040 --> 0:02:24.040 between the color of an old fence and that of 0:02:24.080 --> 0:02:28.520 a low cloud. Munroe wrote shocking, vividly colored books for 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:32.600 grown ups. Her favored landscapes may have been Canadian and 0:02:32.680 --> 0:02:37.120 small town rural, Her brushstrokes calm and evenly applied, but 0:02:37.200 --> 0:02:40.920 her palette verged on lurid. What makes her stories so 0:02:41.040 --> 0:02:44.280 riveting is not, of course, limited to one quality. She's 0:02:44.280 --> 0:02:47.320 too good for that, but it's often her feeling for 0:02:47.360 --> 0:02:53.560 what is vulgar, macabre, and disturbingly sexual. As Monroe aged, 0:02:53.680 --> 0:02:57.919 the stories became wilder. She disguised her taste for disturbance 0:02:57.960 --> 0:03:01.280 with a plain spoken, why not see what happened style 0:03:01.320 --> 0:03:06.120 of narration. Her voice remained cool, her insight into human 0:03:06.160 --> 0:03:10.679 bafflement and peculiarity deep. Her stories were never as willfully 0:03:10.720 --> 0:03:14.720 shocking as, for instance, Ian McEwan's early short stories, but 0:03:14.800 --> 0:03:18.240 they could call to mind Christopher Rix's description of McEwen's 0:03:18.240 --> 0:03:22.040 novella The Comfort of Strangers, a tale, wrote Rix, that 0:03:22.200 --> 0:03:26.600 is as economical as a shudder. It never itself shudders, 0:03:26.880 --> 0:03:28.960 which is one reason why it makes you do so. 0:03:30.280 --> 0:03:32.919 That was Monroe. She never shuddered. 0:03:34.000 --> 0:03:36.920 You wished at times she would, but then you probably 0:03:36.960 --> 0:03:40.040 wouldn't have that secret sensation when reading her best stories, 0:03:40.240 --> 0:03:43.680 like the cool damp feeling of sand on fingertips digging 0:03:43.680 --> 0:03:47.480 tunnels beneath sand castles, the sand must be damp for 0:03:47.520 --> 0:03:48.920 the structure to hold. 0:03:49.560 --> 0:03:50.360 Monroe's stories. 0:03:50.440 --> 0:03:54.680 Likewise, whisper that sensations must be kept secret. They may 0:03:54.680 --> 0:03:58.680 disintegrate if exposed to the light. When a character in 0:03:58.720 --> 0:04:01.040 one of her most shocking stories is asked by another 0:04:01.080 --> 0:04:04.400 woman if everything is okay in her marriage. She's right 0:04:04.480 --> 0:04:09.160 to be concerned. The wife becomes more circumspect she saw 0:04:09.320 --> 0:04:12.400 Munro writes that there were things that she was used 0:04:12.440 --> 0:04:17.000 to that another person might not understand. It's normal to 0:04:17.040 --> 0:04:19.840 think that a writer so in control of her art form, 0:04:19.960 --> 0:04:22.960 and Monroe's command of structure, suspense, and nuance was a 0:04:22.960 --> 0:04:25.279 big part of what won her the twenty thirteen Nobel 0:04:25.320 --> 0:04:28.560 Prize for Literature must be in control of her own self. 0:04:29.600 --> 0:04:32.000 But artists move in the world like you and me. 0:04:32.320 --> 0:04:35.919 The only significant difference, perhaps is that their inner lives 0:04:36.040 --> 0:04:40.320 occupied constructing other worlds, so that alternative versions of the 0:04:40.360 --> 0:04:45.000 life they're in continually found out in their wake. Even 0:04:45.040 --> 0:04:48.560 just a modicum of biographical knowledge about Munroe can make 0:04:48.600 --> 0:04:53.240 this disorienting in her stories. As American author Leah Hager 0:04:53.400 --> 0:04:56.599 Cohen has noted, the very shape of things, along with 0:04:56.640 --> 0:04:59.039 our sense of what is important and why, seems to 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:00.240 shift as we proceed. 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:02.040 The real story keeps. 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:05.080 Turning out to be larger than and at canted angles 0:05:05.120 --> 0:05:07.719 to what we thought it would be. The effect is 0:05:07.720 --> 0:05:15.280 initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming. Affirming maybe, but the instability 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:18.840 tends to return, I find after Monroe's stories are put down. 0:05:19.920 --> 0:05:23.800 She wrote fearlessly about the confusions of sexuality and had 0:05:23.800 --> 0:05:26.240 a sharpened sense of the ways in which sex can 0:05:26.279 --> 0:05:29.719 prove a lifelong bafflement for men and women alike, from 0:05:29.760 --> 0:05:33.800 childhood to the deathbed. Sex she saw was a banal 0:05:34.080 --> 0:05:38.760 biological compulsion and at the same time a driving force 0:05:38.800 --> 0:05:42.960 behind almost all of life's most complicated and recondite stories, 0:05:43.440 --> 0:05:50.120 from sibling rivalry to extramarital affairs and psychological perversion. Shame, 0:05:50.560 --> 0:05:54.800 often connected to sex and bodily functions, plays an outsized 0:05:54.880 --> 0:05:58.120 role in Monroe's stories. It's the water in which her 0:05:58.200 --> 0:06:03.719 characters swim. A stepmother flow in Privilege from nineteen seventy eight, 0:06:04.480 --> 0:06:09.040 likes to see people brought down to earth, nature asserting itself. 0:06:09.400 --> 0:06:11.240 She was the sort of woman who will make public 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:15.360 what she finds in the laundry bag. In the nineteen 0:06:15.440 --> 0:06:18.480 ninety sixth story The Love of a Good Woman, Enid, 0:06:18.720 --> 0:06:21.679 the good woman of the title, is assailed by dreams 0:06:21.720 --> 0:06:25.200 in which, writes Monrow, she would be copulating or trying 0:06:25.240 --> 0:06:28.720 to copulate. Sometimes she was prevented by intruders, or shifts 0:06:28.720 --> 0:06:34.239 in circumstances with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners, with fat, 0:06:34.279 --> 0:06:38.520 squirmy babies, or patience in bandages, or her own mother. 0:06:39.279 --> 0:06:42.520 She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:45.120 and she would set to work with a roughness and 0:06:45.160 --> 0:06:49.640 an attitude of evil pragmatism. She woke from these dreams 0:06:49.760 --> 0:06:53.960 quote unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass 0:06:54.040 --> 0:06:57.760 until her own self, her shame and disbelief came pouring 0:06:57.800 --> 0:07:03.080 back into her. In one of Munroe's most controversial early stories, 0:07:03.200 --> 0:07:07.960 Wild Swans, from nineteen seventy seven, her recurrent young protagonist 0:07:08.040 --> 0:07:12.040 Rose is caught between lurid warnings from her stepmother as 0:07:12.080 --> 0:07:16.440 to the dark agendas of men, her own erotic curiosity, 0:07:16.680 --> 0:07:21.040 and her disgust at the animal mechanics of sex. It 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:25.600 was pitiful, infantile, this itching and shoving and squeezing spongy 0:07:25.640 --> 0:07:31.840 tissues inflamed membranes, tormented nerve endings, shameful smells, humiliation. 0:07:33.080 --> 0:07:34.000 On a long train. 0:07:33.880 --> 0:07:36.679 Trip, Rose is seated next to a man who declares 0:07:36.720 --> 0:07:40.920 himself to be an off duty uniting church minister. After 0:07:40.960 --> 0:07:44.960 some time, Rose feels something touch her. She wonders if 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:49.280 it might be the man's hand. The possibilities alarming, but 0:07:49.400 --> 0:07:52.720 the thought also and Hubert Munroe would even go here, 0:07:53.360 --> 0:07:56.760 sends her into a meandering, erotic reverie about men's hands 0:07:56.800 --> 0:08:00.160 and caught everything they could do, and so so it 0:08:00.200 --> 0:08:03.080 is that moments later, Rose is imagining her French teacher 0:08:03.400 --> 0:08:07.120 quote lapping and coiling his way through slow pleasures. A 0:08:07.160 --> 0:08:11.200 perfect autocrat of indulgences, she had a considerable longing to 0:08:11.240 --> 0:08:17.240 be someone's object, pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted. I don't remember 0:08:17.240 --> 0:08:21.080 passages like this in Chekhov. There are times, in fact, 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:23.120 when you don't know what to do with what Munroe 0:08:23.160 --> 0:08:26.320 has just described. If you're on a bus or train, 0:08:26.960 --> 0:08:29.360 you can only hope that someone isn't reading over your shoulder. 0:08:30.680 --> 0:08:35.640 Munroe's sophisticated sense of structure and viewpoint will likely sustain 0:08:35.720 --> 0:08:39.480 college tutorials well into the twenty second century. But her 0:08:39.600 --> 0:08:43.120 raw power is this frank, unshockable approach to what is 0:08:43.160 --> 0:08:47.960 most furtive and disgusting in human relations. Her shamelessness, to 0:08:47.960 --> 0:08:53.760 put it plainly, about shame itself. In Monroe's stories, shame 0:08:53.880 --> 0:08:57.839 leaks from one generation to the next. Sometimes its source 0:08:57.920 --> 0:09:01.920 is impossible to pinpoint. It's just an ambient condition, a 0:09:01.960 --> 0:09:05.600 disturbing spillage that moves like ink through water, or an 0:09:05.640 --> 0:09:10.480 almost theological state like original sin. I always had a 0:09:10.480 --> 0:09:14.040 feeling with my mother's talk and stories of something swelling 0:09:14.040 --> 0:09:17.080 out behind, she writes in the Progress of Love, her 0:09:17.200 --> 0:09:20.680 nineteen eighty six short story, looped around three generations of women, 0:09:21.960 --> 0:09:24.080 like a cloud you couldn't see through or get to 0:09:24.080 --> 0:09:26.760 the end of. There was a cloud, a poison that 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:29.520 had touched my mother's life. It seemed as if she 0:09:29.559 --> 0:09:32.960 knew something about me that was worse, far worse than 0:09:33.120 --> 0:09:36.520 ordinary lies and tricks and meanness. It was a really 0:09:36.760 --> 0:09:40.200 sickening shame. I beat against my mother's front to make 0:09:40.240 --> 0:09:44.439 her forget that. It's not always possible to discern the 0:09:44.559 --> 0:09:47.760 sources of shame in Monroe's stories, but it is an 0:09:47.800 --> 0:09:51.840 emotional state so ubiquitous among her characters that its absence 0:09:51.880 --> 0:09:56.800 triggers act of suspicion. In nineteen seventy four's story Material, 0:09:57.520 --> 0:10:01.280 Monroe's female narrator is in bad gist by her lover's 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:05.160 straightforward enjoyment of life. He has forgotten the language of 0:10:05.200 --> 0:10:08.800 his childhood. She reflects privately. His love making was strange 0:10:08.840 --> 0:10:11.880 to me at first because it was lacking in desperation. 0:10:12.520 --> 0:10:15.800 He made love without emphasis, so to speak, with no 0:10:16.000 --> 0:10:21.400 memory of sin or hope of depravity. In Monroe's fictional universe, 0:10:21.600 --> 0:10:24.840 sex that is free from memory of sin or hope 0:10:24.840 --> 0:10:27.840 of depravity is not the rule. It's the exception. 0:10:29.600 --> 0:10:30.160 For children. 0:10:30.280 --> 0:10:32.840 In many of Monroe's stories, the adult world is a 0:10:32.880 --> 0:10:39.160 mysterious and tropically tangled domain, reeking with threat and allure Vandals. 0:10:39.320 --> 0:10:42.800 Written in nineteen ninety three and probably the Monroe story 0:10:42.920 --> 0:10:46.240 most widely re read in light of recent revelations about 0:10:46.240 --> 0:10:51.440 the writer's own life. Opens with two children, Eliza and Kenny. 0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:56.200 Their mother is dead, their father neglectful. Their home has 0:10:56.440 --> 0:11:00.000 quote no secret places. Everything is bare and simple ones. 0:11:01.400 --> 0:11:04.319 They stray frequently into the property of the neighboring middle 0:11:04.320 --> 0:11:09.800 aged couple Ladner and b Ladner, a taxidermist and gruff 0:11:09.880 --> 0:11:14.960 World War II veteran, has built a dense empire of bridges, forests, 0:11:15.000 --> 0:11:18.720 and shaded ponds, a deep and jungly place full of 0:11:18.920 --> 0:11:20.760 tropical threats and complications. 0:11:21.800 --> 0:11:22.240 Quote. 0:11:22.640 --> 0:11:25.240 In some places, the air is thick and private, and 0:11:25.320 --> 0:11:29.600 in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are 0:11:29.640 --> 0:11:34.280 harsh or enticing. Certain walks imposed decorum, and certain stones 0:11:34.800 --> 0:11:37.280 are set to jump apart so that they call out 0:11:37.280 --> 0:11:41.439 for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction, where 0:11:41.480 --> 0:11:44.240 Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from 0:11:44.240 --> 0:11:47.959 a butternut, and a star from a planet. And places 0:11:48.040 --> 0:11:50.680 also where they have run and hollered, and hung from 0:11:50.720 --> 0:11:55.720 branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places 0:11:55.720 --> 0:11:58.600 where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, 0:11:59.160 --> 0:12:04.280 a tickling, and sh in the grass unquote. 0:12:04.400 --> 0:12:06.520 When later the reader realizes. 0:12:06.040 --> 0:12:09.760 That Ladner has been molesting Liza, the significance of these 0:12:09.800 --> 0:12:14.600 descriptions lands like a second epiphany or a shiver its peak. 0:12:14.679 --> 0:12:19.439 Monroe Great fiction is often concerned with the ways in 0:12:19.480 --> 0:12:23.840 which relationships, even loving relationships, can turn into a struggle 0:12:23.840 --> 0:12:28.520 for control. Monroe's understanding of the tactical battles that take 0:12:28.559 --> 0:12:32.440 place inside long term partnerships made her a connoisseur of 0:12:32.480 --> 0:12:37.160 the origins and varieties of misogyny. In Labor Day Dinner 0:12:37.280 --> 0:12:41.520 from nineteen eighty one, Roberta, a middle aged woman is 0:12:41.600 --> 0:12:46.800 told by George, her lover that her armpitza flabby. Roberta 0:12:46.840 --> 0:12:51.520 notes quote a harsh satisfaction in her lover's voice, the 0:12:51.600 --> 0:12:56.960 satisfaction of erring disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body. 0:12:57.840 --> 0:13:00.880 In the wake of his comment, Roberta feels love free 0:13:01.520 --> 0:13:04.840 because she has the quote great tactical advantage of being 0:13:04.840 --> 0:13:07.520 the one to whom the wrong has been done, the 0:13:07.640 --> 0:13:12.120 unforgivable thing said. This is sharply observed. But the way 0:13:12.200 --> 0:13:14.800 Munroe turns her partner's comment on her appearance from an 0:13:14.840 --> 0:13:20.400 insult into a tactical lever provokes an uncomfortable question. Do 0:13:20.520 --> 0:13:25.079 the Machiavelian power politics within marriage open up the possibility 0:13:25.120 --> 0:13:28.760 that one partner will absorb the great wrong in order 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:33.400 that she or he can demand something else. In this case, 0:13:33.520 --> 0:13:37.400 Roberta's impulse to stay inside this emotional dynamic is short lived. 0:13:38.360 --> 0:13:42.080 After letting his comments sit with her, she entertains an 0:13:42.120 --> 0:13:44.880 alternative way of seeing the same thing, which is a 0:13:44.880 --> 0:13:49.920 recurring preoccupation in Monroe's fiction. Suppose he doesn't think it's unforgivable, 0:13:50.160 --> 0:13:54.479 she writes. Suppose in his eyes, she's the one who's unforgivable. 0:13:55.920 --> 0:13:59.320 Monroe then registers the silent displacement of shame from where 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:03.400 morally it belongs with George to where it doesn't belong 0:14:03.559 --> 0:14:07.920 with Roberta. By describing the pathos of Roberta's beauty regime, 0:14:08.840 --> 0:14:14.280 nothing she tries arrests the inevitable decline quote flabby armpits. 0:14:14.600 --> 0:14:18.360 What is to be done now the payment is due? 0:14:18.520 --> 0:14:22.760 And what for for vanity? Hardly even for that, just 0:14:23.080 --> 0:14:26.720 for having those pleasing services once and letting them speak 0:14:26.760 --> 0:14:27.960 for you, just. 0:14:27.920 --> 0:14:29.360 For allowing an arrangement of. 0:14:29.320 --> 0:14:33.240 Hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You 0:14:33.320 --> 0:14:35.960 don't stop in time, don't know what to do. Instead, 0:14:36.400 --> 0:14:41.280 you lay yourself open to humiliation, so thinks Roberta, with 0:14:41.360 --> 0:14:45.080 self pity what she knows to be self pity rising 0:14:45.120 --> 0:14:49.240 and sloshing around in her like bile. She must get away, 0:14:49.800 --> 0:14:57.479 live alone, wear sleeves. In describing power struggles within relationships, 0:14:58.160 --> 0:15:01.720 Monroe had an inclination and an mobility not only to 0:15:01.840 --> 0:15:05.920 go deeper, but to start earlier, with the uniquely tortured, 0:15:06.080 --> 0:15:11.240 anguished struggles for control between parents and their children in 0:15:11.320 --> 0:15:15.520 Royal Beatings from nineteen seventy seven. Her recurrent character Rose, 0:15:15.800 --> 0:15:20.280 a girl, is beaten by her father. As he approaches 0:15:20.280 --> 0:15:24.840 with his belt, Rose finds herself wondering about murders and 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:28.600 murderers quote does the thing have to be carried through 0:15:28.720 --> 0:15:32.360 in the end, partly for the effect to prove to 0:15:32.400 --> 0:15:35.480 the audience of one that such a thing can happen, 0:15:35.880 --> 0:15:39.640 that the most dreadful antic is justified feelings can be 0:15:39.720 --> 0:15:44.920 found to match it. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated thought 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:47.840 for a young girl to have. But Rose is very 0:15:47.880 --> 0:15:51.680 bright and evidently a stand in for Munroe, who, as 0:15:51.760 --> 0:15:54.320 an author, is an expert in finding feelings to match 0:15:54.360 --> 0:15:58.560 all kinds of actions. The father approaching with the belt 0:15:59.440 --> 0:16:02.720 is quote like a bad actor who turns apart grotesque, 0:16:03.400 --> 0:16:05.520 as if he must save it and insist on just 0:16:05.560 --> 0:16:08.880 what is shameful and terrible about this. That's not to 0:16:08.880 --> 0:16:11.800 say that he's pretending that he's acting and does not 0:16:11.920 --> 0:16:15.920 mean it. He is acting, and he means it. Rose 0:16:15.960 --> 0:16:18.240 knows that she knows everything about him. 0:16:18.720 --> 0:16:19.880 Monroe writes. 0:16:21.320 --> 0:16:24.800 Royal Beatings traces the course of Rose's righteous indignation in 0:16:24.840 --> 0:16:28.680 the aftermath of the beating, as her noisy sobbing wears 0:16:28.720 --> 0:16:33.080 off It's replaced by a calm, decisive state in which 0:16:33.120 --> 0:16:38.080 things quote take on a lovely simplicity, choices a mercifully 0:16:38.080 --> 0:16:42.280 clear unquote. Rose resolves never to speak to her father 0:16:42.360 --> 0:16:45.280 and stepmother again. She will never look at them with 0:16:45.400 --> 0:16:50.560 anything but loathing, writes Monro, never forgive them. This produces 0:16:50.560 --> 0:16:54.680 in her a sensation of superiority, like floating beyond herself, 0:16:54.720 --> 0:17:00.480 beyond responsibility. But then this resolution, too, cracks rose nose. 0:17:00.800 --> 0:17:03.400 She will relent and return to her status as a 0:17:03.520 --> 0:17:10.360 child subject to adult power. The struggle for control persists 0:17:10.359 --> 0:17:14.000 all the way through to adulthood silence. A story from 0:17:14.080 --> 0:17:17.960 Monroe's two thousand and four collection run Away features Juliette, 0:17:18.560 --> 0:17:23.680 a well known TV personality whose adult daughter Penelope, disappears 0:17:23.720 --> 0:17:27.199 to a spiritual retreat and cuts off all contact with 0:17:27.240 --> 0:17:32.240 her mother. Juliet is bereft, and when a message finally 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:36.399 arrives summoning her to visit, she feels quote like an 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:39.160 old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain. 0:17:40.240 --> 0:17:43.320 But when Juliette arrives after a long journey, a woman 0:17:43.359 --> 0:17:47.240 representing the retreat informs her that Penelope is no longer there. 0:17:48.400 --> 0:17:51.880 She won't say where Penelope has gone only that wherever 0:17:51.960 --> 0:17:54.879 it is quote, it will be the right thing for 0:17:54.960 --> 0:17:59.960 her spirituality and her growth. The woman has a pointed 0:18:00.200 --> 0:18:03.760 herself as intermediary in the struggle for control between mother 0:18:03.800 --> 0:18:08.959 and child, which makes her, in Juliete's size, unbearable. Penelope 0:18:09.000 --> 0:18:13.840 is winning for many years, Juliette knows nothing of her whereabouts. 0:18:14.720 --> 0:18:19.720 She later muses on the cause or causes of the estrangement. Quote, 0:18:20.440 --> 0:18:22.520 you know, we always have the idea that there is 0:18:22.600 --> 0:18:25.639 this reason or that reason, and we keep trying to 0:18:25.720 --> 0:18:28.760 find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about 0:18:28.800 --> 0:18:32.600 my failures and excesses and my selfishness. Or I could 0:18:32.640 --> 0:18:36.800 say that she Penelope is harsher. No, let us say 0:18:36.840 --> 0:18:40.400 purer in her judgments than many people have the nerve 0:18:40.480 --> 0:18:45.800 to be. But what's also possible, juliet concedes, because in 0:18:45.840 --> 0:18:47.760 such matters there is never just one version? 0:18:48.440 --> 0:18:51.119 Is that quote? She couldn't stand me. 0:18:53.200 --> 0:18:57.160 In Monroe's stories, intrafamilial struggles are not just about control. 0:18:57.880 --> 0:19:02.520 They're also about shifting interpretation of events and conflicting memories. 0:19:03.119 --> 0:19:06.240 What can be mentioned and what must be buried deep. 0:19:07.760 --> 0:19:11.920 The story The Progress of Love is occupied with two sisters, 0:19:12.520 --> 0:19:19.080 pious and traumatized Marietta and worldly, jovial Beryl, their memories 0:19:19.119 --> 0:19:24.320 and interpretations of various family events differ significantly. For example, 0:19:24.840 --> 0:19:27.680 Marietta one day finds her mother standing on a chair 0:19:27.960 --> 0:19:31.760 beneath a noose. She runs for help, but returns to 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:34.399 find her mother in the kitchen behaving as if nothing 0:19:34.400 --> 0:19:38.760 has happened. Marietta records this incident as evidence that her 0:19:38.760 --> 0:19:43.600 father's womanizing drove her mother to the brink of suicide, 0:19:43.720 --> 0:19:47.679 but her sister Beryl remembers the suicide attempt as a ruse, 0:19:48.400 --> 0:19:51.880 something their mother threatened to carry out and embarked upon 0:19:52.000 --> 0:19:54.960 theatrically in the hope that her husband, upon discovering her, 0:19:55.400 --> 0:19:59.560 would mend his ways. In other words, she was acting 0:20:00.160 --> 0:20:02.760 and not meaning it, not intending to carry through the 0:20:02.800 --> 0:20:07.000 awful action. She abandoned the endeavor, believes Beryl, when it 0:20:07.040 --> 0:20:09.040 turned out to be her daughter who came across the 0:20:09.080 --> 0:20:14.159 scene rather than her errant's spouse. A recurring motif in 0:20:14.280 --> 0:20:17.879 this story, The progress of love is layers of wallpaper 0:20:17.960 --> 0:20:22.080 in the narrator's childhood home, pasted up, torn down, and 0:20:22.119 --> 0:20:26.399 papered over again. Monroe is inviting us to think of 0:20:26.440 --> 0:20:29.640 the home as a palimpsest, not so much of memories, 0:20:29.640 --> 0:20:36.960 but of fictions, irreconcilable versions of the same events. Sex, shame, love, 0:20:37.600 --> 0:20:41.919 the multidirectional power struggles between husband and wife, mother and child, 0:20:42.560 --> 0:20:47.840 sister and sister. All are interleaved, messily, wilfully resisting order. 0:20:48.520 --> 0:20:49.800 Who is right who is wrong? 0:20:50.920 --> 0:20:55.359 As is Monroe's maddening rivet and custom there aren't any answers, 0:20:55.480 --> 0:21:00.960 just more layers. 0:20:59.240 --> 0:21:03.480 Coming up after the break. The recent revelations of Alice Munroe's. 0:21:03.080 --> 0:21:22.560 Dark past, Monro's voyages through the inky murk of disputed 0:21:22.600 --> 0:21:27.160 family histories trigger something in us all. The New Yorker 0:21:27.200 --> 0:21:31.679 staff writer j Young Young Fan recently described the quote 0:21:31.840 --> 0:21:35.800 very uncomfortable and unnerving stab of recognition that she felt 0:21:35.840 --> 0:21:40.280 when revisiting Monro's evocations of a subterranean emotional landscape. 0:21:40.320 --> 0:21:41.240 That I knew too. 0:21:41.119 --> 0:21:45.359 Well of familial secrecy, of things being buried so deeply 0:21:45.840 --> 0:21:48.960 that excavation itself would be betrayal to those I loved, 0:21:49.280 --> 0:21:53.920 and possibly to myself. But in July this year, less 0:21:53.960 --> 0:21:56.200 than two months after Monroe's death at the age of 0:21:56.280 --> 0:22:00.440 ninety two, something happened that jolted these narrative obsessions off 0:22:00.480 --> 0:22:03.639 the page and into the all too real life of 0:22:03.720 --> 0:22:09.879 Monroe's own family. Monroe's estranged adult daughter, Andrea Skinner, the 0:22:09.920 --> 0:22:12.600 youngest of the writer's three daughters with her first husband, 0:22:12.960 --> 0:22:17.959 Jim Monroe, published an essay in The Toronto Star. Skinner 0:22:18.000 --> 0:22:22.880 wrote that her stepfather, Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually 0:22:22.880 --> 0:22:26.520 abused her in nineteen seventy six, when Skinner was nine. 0:22:27.760 --> 0:22:30.600 She said that her mother, Alice Monroe, when told of 0:22:30.600 --> 0:22:33.960 the abuse more than a decade later, quote, chose to 0:22:34.000 --> 0:22:38.840 stay with and protect my abuser unquote. Jim and Alice 0:22:38.880 --> 0:22:42.719 Monroe separated in nineteen seventy four, and in nineteen seventy 0:22:42.760 --> 0:22:45.920 six Monroe married Fremlin, a man she had first met 0:22:45.960 --> 0:22:50.360 in college twenty years earlier. Jim and Alice shared custody 0:22:50.359 --> 0:22:53.080 of Andrea, who stayed with her father and his new 0:22:53.080 --> 0:22:56.600 wife during school term and in the summers, joined her 0:22:56.600 --> 0:23:01.119 mother and Fremlin in rural Ontario. One night during the 0:23:01.160 --> 0:23:05.560 first such summer, when Monroe was away, Skinner asked Fremlin 0:23:05.840 --> 0:23:07.800 if she could sleep in her mother's bed, which was 0:23:07.840 --> 0:23:11.919 separate from but next to Fremlin's, During the night Fremin 0:23:11.960 --> 0:23:15.840 climbed into that bed, and while Skinner feigned sleep, began 0:23:15.920 --> 0:23:18.359 rubbing the nine year old girl's genitals and pressing her 0:23:18.400 --> 0:23:22.639 hand over his penis. In the morning, Skinner awoke with 0:23:22.680 --> 0:23:26.520 a migraine and feelings of dread. She said nothing to 0:23:26.560 --> 0:23:29.159 her mother about what had happened, but at the end 0:23:29.200 --> 0:23:31.639 of the summer, she did tell her stepbrother and stepmother, 0:23:32.359 --> 0:23:36.920 and they told her father, Jim Munroe. Jim, however, did 0:23:36.920 --> 0:23:39.399 not talk to Skinner about what had happened, and he 0:23:39.440 --> 0:23:42.920 said nothing to Munroe. When Jim sent his daughters back 0:23:42.960 --> 0:23:45.880 to Munroe and Fremlin's house the next summer, he told 0:23:45.880 --> 0:23:48.560 Skinner's two older sisters to look out for her and 0:23:48.640 --> 0:23:53.359 make sure she was never alone with Fremlin. Fremlin didn't 0:23:53.440 --> 0:23:56.480 touch Skinner again, but he evidently kept her in a 0:23:56.480 --> 0:24:00.560 state of dread. According to Skinner, he exposed him her, 0:24:00.920 --> 0:24:03.880 propositioned her for sex, and threatened that if she ever 0:24:03.920 --> 0:24:09.000 told her mother, the shock would kill her. Skinner stayed quiet, 0:24:09.040 --> 0:24:11.719 but the stress of being placed in such an impossible 0:24:11.720 --> 0:24:16.639 position took a toll. Her migraines continued, she developed bulimia, 0:24:17.480 --> 0:24:22.639 and she later struggled at college, eventually dropping out. In 0:24:22.760 --> 0:24:26.919 nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five, Skinner 0:24:26.960 --> 0:24:30.080 wrote a letter to her mother telling her about Fremlin's abuse. 0:24:31.359 --> 0:24:34.280 She said she had been quote afraid all my life 0:24:34.359 --> 0:24:39.680 that you would blame me for what happened unquote. Monroe's 0:24:39.720 --> 0:24:43.959 response was complex. Leaving Fremlin, she went to stay in 0:24:43.960 --> 0:24:47.199 one of her other homes, presumably to process what she 0:24:47.200 --> 0:24:52.000 had just been told. According to Skinner, Munroe was humiliated 0:24:52.160 --> 0:24:55.840 and felt betrayed both by Fremlin, her husband, and Skinner, 0:24:55.920 --> 0:25:00.000 her daughter. The cause of her sense of betrayal is unclear. 0:25:01.160 --> 0:25:03.560 Was it Fremlin's abuse or was it the failure of 0:25:03.600 --> 0:25:07.000 those who knew about it, perhaps including Skinner, to tell her. 0:25:08.760 --> 0:25:10.919 Skinner wrote that when she told her mother that the 0:25:10.960 --> 0:25:15.399 experience had damaged her, Munroe minimized it. But you were 0:25:15.440 --> 0:25:19.520 such a happy child, she said. Fremlin's response, meanwhile, was 0:25:19.560 --> 0:25:23.280 at once appalling and bazaarre. He wrote a letter to 0:25:23.320 --> 0:25:26.080 the whole family in which he gave his own explicit 0:25:26.080 --> 0:25:29.880 account of the abuse. He blamed Skinner with words such 0:25:29.920 --> 0:25:35.880 as home wrecker and lolita, casting himself as Nabokov's delusional narrator. 0:25:36.119 --> 0:25:41.320 Humbert Humbert Fremlan threatened to kill both himself and Skinner, 0:25:41.960 --> 0:25:44.280 and to go public with photographs of Skinner that he'd 0:25:44.280 --> 0:25:47.879 taken while she was eleven, which he described as quote 0:25:47.960 --> 0:25:53.400 extremely eloquent, unquote. He was sorry for betraying Munroe, but 0:25:53.480 --> 0:25:55.960 not it seemed, for anything he had done to his 0:25:56.080 --> 0:26:00.920 nine year old step daughter. We don't know what went 0:26:00.960 --> 0:26:03.280 through Munroe's mind as she tried to process all this. 0:26:04.480 --> 0:26:08.400 Many women have found themselves in similar predicaments. They are 0:26:08.400 --> 0:26:11.359 not the ones who have committed the abuse, but they 0:26:11.400 --> 0:26:15.760 find themselves obliged to respond to act, even as their 0:26:15.800 --> 0:26:20.520 lives and the lives of those around them threatened to implode. 0:26:20.920 --> 0:26:23.680 All we know is that Munroe returned to Fremlin after 0:26:23.680 --> 0:26:27.680 their brief separation. She explained that she had been told 0:26:27.720 --> 0:26:31.840 too late, sixteen years after the original abuse, and that 0:26:31.920 --> 0:26:36.399 she loved Fremlin too much to leave him. Although Skinner 0:26:36.480 --> 0:26:39.600 made regular subsequent visits to the home of Munroe and Fremlin, 0:26:40.160 --> 0:26:42.920 she stopped going when she became pregnant, unwilling to let 0:26:42.920 --> 0:26:48.160 Fremlin near her children. When Munroe complained about the inconvenience 0:26:48.160 --> 0:26:52.560 of this decision, Skinner erupted in anger, recounting details of 0:26:52.600 --> 0:26:56.000 the abuse and asking how her mother could have sex 0:26:56.200 --> 0:26:59.800 with someone who'd done that to her daughter. When Munroe 0:26:59.840 --> 0:27:02.840 call all to the next day to forgive Skinner for 0:27:02.920 --> 0:27:06.840