If you love Alice Munro’s fiction, you’ve likely spent much of the past few days wondering: How could an artist so sensitive and astute behave with such callous selfishness toward her own child? There’s so much to be appalled by in the Toronto Star’s coverage of the late Nobel laureate’s baffling response to the sexual abuse of her daughter by her second husband. Andrea Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, wrote about being molested by Gerald Fremlin at the age of 9, and two Star journalists filled out the rest of the story in a long reported piece detailing the many, many ways Skinner was failed by the adults in her life, especially her mother. That mother spent her career writing compassionately and perceptively about the inner lives of women—mothers and daughters—and yet, when her own daughter needed her, took her husband’s side.
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