Canada’s Nobel Laureate author Alice Munroe is now being judged for her complicity in her second husband sexual abuse of her then 9-year-old daughter. “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?” (Rich as Stink)
Munroe’s short story collection The Love of a Good Woman collection offers compelling prose and narrative choices along with confounding character psyches that cannot be ignored in light of these revelations. “Her whole life was liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.” (Save the Reaper)
Society tends towards judgement, which of course is not the purpose of writing and certainly not Munroe’s fictional world. “You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass.” (My Mother’s Dream, 374)
