“Listen, if you want to find a symbol, there’s nothing stopping you. Symbols should be like that in stories; not hauled in, but rising out of the possible, in feeling and event.” – Elizabeth Spencer
Opening Remarks
It’s always tragic to see one’s heroes torn down, tarred & feathered, with their name thrown in the mud. It’s even more tragic when the accusations are true.
Last Sunday, in the Toronto Star (remember, to bypass the paywall, just paste the URL into an incognito browser tab!), Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that her mother turned a blind eye, and was essentially complicit, to the sexual abuse that her husband Gerald Fremlin inflicted upon Skinner, his step-daughter, when she was 9 years old. For decades, Munro repeatedly ignored and brushed off any discussion on the matter, putting her marriage firmly ahead of her daughter’s well-being. In the article, Skinner writes that Munro said “she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if [she was] expected [...] to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.”
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