I have spent several years of my life feeling slightly ashamed that I haven’t read Alice Munro. Notable Nobel Prize winning Canadian author – I wondered through the years what the disconnect was. I felt slightly intimidated at times and then quite disinterested at others, thinking that I don’t really read short stories. But then I began to write them and that reasoning disappeared.
So during the pandemic, mostly to support a used bookstore in Red Deer through that strange time, I purchased a stack of books that I always meant to get to. I figured there would be plenty of time in the coming months for extra reading, so I bought my first Alice Munro through a complicated system of emailing my request in advance, phoning once I arrived at the bookstore, watching the masked owner place the large bag carefully on the front hood of my car and slowly back away before I was to quickly leap out of the car and scoop them up and drive away. It was like a strange drug deal.
I had chosen ‘My Best Stories’. If she, herself, felt these were her best, I couldn’t really go wrong. Right? I tried to muddle through a very dry forward by Margaret Atwood (of whom I’m a huge fan), but the voluminous book ended up on my bottom shelf until this past Christmas. New books and a new shelf to put them on necessitated a clearing out of the thing, and I stood there looking at that book for a long time.
Much, so much, has happened to tarnish the legend since I bought it. Would I have even purchased it now, after her daughter’s revelation that Munro was complicit in her sexual abuse. No, I wouldn’t have. I would have struggled much more making that declaration if it was an author I already followed and whose writing I loved, to be sure, but I would have made it. I have thrown out CDs and concert merch from musicians who are convicted of sexual crimes, and would never vote for a politician with that background. Authors need to be held to that same high level – perhaps even more so, given that their very act of writing is to cause an affect. To influence a mindset. That’s a lot of power to give someone whose values we don’t share. If I am going to invite them into my life and be one on one with pages and pages of a person’s thoughts, they better be a good person.
I finally hoisted the book and sat down with it. I tried to approach it simply as a reader looking for a good story – or at the very least an editor determining if the writing itself was worthy of the decades of praise. But I couldn’t see the passages through any other lens except the one that questioned this person’s integrity. I’m sure the writing is stellar – it must be, because she couldn’t have cultivated such a stunning career if it wasn’t. But I’ll never know firsthand, because I shut the book and donated it back to the used bookstore.
No judgment to those still reading her – she was a beloved Canadian. But I figure when millions of people are reading your books for decades, they should trust that you really mean what you say. Lives of girls and women, indeed.