“Well, you’re forgetting a lot right now.”
“That’s true,” said Alice.
Jenny said how much it meant to her to know that Andrea cared, and Alice began to cry. Within 20 seconds, she recovered, as if she had lost her memories and associated emotions.
In 2016, when Andrea was 49 years old, her husband suddenly left her. “I felt ready to look to the places where I felt love,” she said. “I felt a real drive and actually a sense of desperation.”Andrea flew to Toronto. At the airport, “I saw her at the top of the escalator and she fell into my arms,” Jenny said. Together they drove directly to the gatehouse.
Andrea also agreed to see her father for the first time in several years. When she began to express her anger, Jim, whose heart was congested and his body was weak, placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “I want you to hear this.” I felt that Andrea was listening to me with love. She thought, “This is the kindest father I’ve ever met.” Later, when his health improved, “his old personality started to return,” she said. Once, when she was with her mother and Jerry in Clinton, she asked him if he ever wondered, “What’s going on with Andrea right now?” He answered, “No.”
Jenny fantasized about Andrea moving to Port Hope, a town that reminded her of a “ghostless” Victoria. They discussed the elements of their ideal home, including a fireplace, porch, oak trees, and stone walls. In the summer of 2016, a home went on the market in Port Hope that had almost everything listed. Jenny helped Andrea buy it, and after a few months, Andrea moved there with her twins Charlie and Felix, who eventually joined her. At that point, Alice was “completely gone,” Andrea said. “She didn’t know who I was.” Charlie said that one time she was in the upstairs dining area of a coffee shop in Port Hope, walked downstairs and saw Alice and her manager. He said he saw her ordering coffee. They waited upstairs until she left the store.
After Charlie went to college, Andrea came to Jenny’s house every other night. They often lay in bed with Jenny’s husband and watched movies. “I feel like I’m now inheriting this incredible love that my mom gave me,” Jenny told me. “I’m probably deluding myself, but I think mom wanted to hold Andrea and have her back. And that’s what I’m trying to convey.”
Alice’s last book, Dear Life, published in 2012, ends with a new reflection on abandoning her mother. In this final rendering, her guilt has been alleviated. If she had stayed home to take care of her mother, as I think any good daughter should, she would never have become the writer she is today. “We talk about things we can’t forgive and things we’ll never forgive ourselves for,” she wrote in the final line. “But we do, we do it all the time.”
These words, which she announces at the end of the book, can’t help but be read as an expression of the choice she made with Andrea. Trauma tends to lead to certain unconscious repetitions, and later in life Alice recreated her dynamic relationship with her mother in new ways. She had to trade reality for fiction and her daughter for art.
But readers of Alice Munro’s stories never know which epiphany to believe. One revelation is superimposed on another. The story continues beyond the point where another author might have ended it. In the spring of 2024, a few weeks before Alice died, she and Jenny sat in the sun outside the nursing home where Alice had lived for the past three years. Jenny said Alice said, “I didn’t want to do that.” She spat out the words with great effort. “I said, ‘Are you talking about pedophiles?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, “So you mean I should have sided with Andrea?” She said, “Yes.” ”
A week after Alice’s death, Gatehouse republished Andrea’s essay on its website about her experience reuniting with her siblings after decades of silence. When the essay was first posted in 2020, Barcelos had asked Andrea to reveal her mother’s name, primarily due to concerns about legal repercussions. However, the new version mentioned “My mother, Alice Munro”.
Andrew, an actor and writer, sent the essay to many friends and eventually colleagues, and Andrea sent it to three organizations for people who have experienced sexual abuse. She thought the story would become public, but it wasn’t. As the publication was running a passionate obituary for her mother, Andrea sent essays to four journalists who had written about her mother and sexual trauma. Her ex-husband sent it to two news outlets on Canada’s west coast. Andrea said the response was “a big zero.”
Cartoon by Seth Fleischman
In early June, the Toronto Star published a column by a writer named Heather Malick, in which she realized that “political idols and writers we once admired are just people, not heroes.” He said he was devastated by the realization. Andrea thought that Malick was subtly referring to her mother, so she sent him an email as well. But Malick was unaware of Andrea’s essay. She informed top editors and the story was suggested to book editor Deborah Dundas. Lives of Girls and Women was a foundational book for Dundas when she was a teenager. “The idea of being a writer and being able to control my own story, that meant everything to me,” she told me. She explained to the editor that she did not want to denigrate her idol or jeopardize her relationships in the publishing industry. But the next day, she changed her mind.
Less than three weeks later, Dundas and fellow court reporter Betsy Powell published a detailed account of Jerry’s abuse and how it was kept quiet. The Star also published a longer version of Andrea’s Gatehouse essay, as well as essays by Andrew and Jenny about how they dealt with what happened to their sister. “We all, in our own way, asked Andrea to live a lie,” Jenny wrote. The news was reported around the world within a day. Canada’s largest bookstore chain has announced that it will continue to stock Alice Munro’s books but will remove posters of her face from its stores. Although Jim Munro had already passed away, the new owner of Munro’s books issued a statement saying that all proceeds from future sales of Alice’s books would be donated to organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse. said. Soon, other Canadian celebrities, including journalists and novelists, said they were inspired by Andrea to share similar stories of being forced into silence after being abused.
When I first met Jenny, she said, I know my parents wanted that too. ”
“Is your mother ultimately willing for something like this to happen now, even if this damages her reputation?” I asked.
“Yes, I think you will,” Jenny said. “She would want to tell Andrea this truth. She was a master of fiction, but Andrea is a master of truth. And in a way, I think my mother would have admired that.”
When I asked Andrea if she agreed with Jenny’s assessment, she started laughing and said, “No!”
We were sitting at a picnic table at Horse Discovery, an 85-acre horse farm where Andrea teaches yoga and mindfulness classes. She said spending 10 years caring for “a sweet Alzheimer’s woman who was not our mother” changed her impression of Jenny.
Andrea knew him too. She sometimes came to her mother’s house to help. “It was an act of love for Jenny,” she said. It wasn’t about my mother. At first, she took Alice for drives every week. When she felt that was too intimate, she began doing household chores such as scrubbing the floors.
Sometimes Andrea would explain who she was, but Alice would “forget after two minutes. It was easier that way,” she says. “I didn’t want to have that moment where we reconnected. I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”
In her 2008 story “Deep Hole,” Alice imagined how a mother and child separated by dementia could be reunited. In the story, when the son makes it clear that he never wants to see his mother again, the mother is comforted by the idea that age might be on her side, turning her into someone she never knew. She had occasionally seen the wide-eyed but content look on the old man’s face on the island they had created. ”
Once, when Andrea came to help, Alice told a story about how her father beat her after naming a baby fox on the farm. She wasn’t supposed to be attached to animals. “My mother always said she wasn’t interested in animals,” Andrea said. “But I believe it happened, and I thought, oh, the upbringing got beat out of her.”
“Did you feel like somewhere in her heart she knew you were telling her this?” I asked.
“When you put it that way, I think it’s obvious,” she said. “But no, I didn’t know she could be emotionally available to herself.”
Alice said she must have known how much Andrea loved animals.
“I’m willing to accept the idea that there was some knowledge there,” Andrea said. During another visit, Alice, incoherently coming and going, asked Andrea if it was okay for her to live on her own now and go back to college. “She didn’t finish college, so I felt really bad for that,” Andrea said. Instead, she dropped out and got married. She had no money and could not write without male assistance. Andrea said, “The fact that he consulted me was naive, as if he was hoping for a do-over.”
When Andrea’s children were young, she made sure to use her story as an example to educate them on how to prevent sexual abuse. A while ago, Andrea was surprised when Charlie wrote an essay in a college class called “The Condition of Being Young and Pretty.” In it, she described her mother’s attempts to protect her innocence, including refusing to let her wear a bikini. Her childhood, or open conversations about infantilizing beauty standards, gave her the impression that all old people were secretly threatening. “I don’t think this cycle can necessarily be broken all at once,” Andrea told me. “There are some things that are pushed to the next generation and things that I didn’t intend. But what’s different is that she can say these things.”
Charlie had never been particularly curious about his grandmother. She felt that family discord had no bearing on her life. “As a child, I used to think about my problems,” she told me, almost apologetically. She speaks to her mother on the phone every day: She has goddess-like qualities. She is really radiant and energetic and I have the same joy of life. ”
Listening to her conversation with Charlie, I felt that Andrea was making great strides in life. In an email to Andrea, I admitted that I felt like I was slipping into the place her brothers had been for so many years. ”
“Andrea is fine,” she replied. “What a burden.” Her goddess-like single life is possible because “it’s easy to ignore things you don’t realize you’re missing.” She sometimes finds herself in a state where every interaction she has is filled with guilt and fear that she is asking too much of others. “More than anything, I am afraid of being a burden,” she wrote to me.
I met her recently at her home in Port Hope. The house was as idyllic as it had been said to be. The brick and stone house was perched on a hill, surrounded by black walnut trees and led by a staircase of granite columns. Also. We sat by the fireplace, next to Jenny’s large painting of a gnarled tree. Jenny had just told Andrea about a letter her mother had written to John Metcalfe in the early ’70s, in which she described being raped. “The hardest part for me about this story was that my mom didn’t go to the class she was supposed to go to that day,” Andrea said. “She couldn’t do it. She had to walk around the city. I felt like I did that a lot more than showing up for myself. And then I thought, That’s the anger she got for living her life so productively. And I feel like I keep walking aimlessly around that city.”
