Infidelities

On Alice Munro and betrayal.

The voice on the phone was my father’s, but I had never heard him sound like this. “I need you to come over right away,” he said. “Your stepmother is leaving me for another man.”

It was a scorching morning in July. I had been on my way to the pool to cool off my toddler and my heavily pregnant self. Instead, I left my child with my husband and the friends we had planned to spend the day with, hastily explaining what little I knew of the situation. Nearly twenty years later, I still remember how my friend’s eyes widened. “You’re in a Russian novel!” he exclaimed.

But the literary world that came to my mind was the short stories of Alice Munro, one of whose books I had in my bag as I sped to my father’s house. I had read virtually all of her work to date for this piece written for The New Republic two years earlier; now a new collection had appeared. The physical and temporal settings of her stories felt distant to me—mostly Canada, in the decades around or shortly after World War II—but the emotional world was immediately familiar: women chafing against boundaries set by their parents or their husbands. (“Worse than the banality of toys and sandboxes, marriage can be the source of true cruelty,” I wrote in that essay.) Whatever freedom they might achieve would be partial and not without a cost.

Most of my Alice Munro collection.

The story my father told me when I arrived was both as shocking and as unremarkable as infidelity always is. My stepmother, his wife of twenty-five years, had reconnected with her high school boyfriend several months earlier. The man’s wife had learned about their affair. Now my stepmother was holed up in the guest bedroom, debating her next move.

As much as my father’s pain, what stung me that day—and still hurts, nearly two decades later—was my stepmother’s refusal to talk to me about what was going on. Did she think I wouldn’t understand? I wondered. She had come into my life in the wake of an earlier divorce, when I was five. My own young marriage had recently undergone an upheaval and emerged intact but damaged; my husband and I would separate several years later. I already had some sense of what it takes to abandon a life partner, and what lies in the background of such a decision, invisible to family members, friends, and other interested parties. But even if I hadn’t felt it myself, I had learned it from Munro, whose stories made clear that people—perhaps women especially—are capable of the most shocking betrayals.

I’m reflecting on all this now, of course, because of the news that came out last week of Munro’s own shocking betrayal: the revelation by her daughter Andrea Skinner that Munro’s second husband, Skinner’s stepfather, sexually abused her from the age of nine, and that Munro remained loyal to her husband after Skinner informed her of the abuse. Many, many of Munro’s readers have expressed their deep distress at learning this; some have said that they no longer wish to spend time with her work.

But it does not diminish one’s sympathy for Skinner—whose hurt can only be imagined—to recognize that Munro’s fiction has long been preparing us for this. The character who knows what the moral choice is but can’t quite manage it, who succumbs to a weakness or bitterness that transforms everything that comes after, is a recurring figure in her work. To give just one example: In “Runaway,” from the 2004 book of that title, a woman nearly leaves her husband but breaks at the last moment, terrified of being alone; someone else will pay the price for her desire to be free. (This book was the one in my bag on that ill-fated day at my father’s house.)

People do the wrong things, Munro tells us; they commit crimes against each other, they betray. Even—perhaps especially—mothers and children, who are capable of inflicting the deepest wounds, whether or not they intend to. In “Oh, What Avails,” from Friend of My Youth, a mother neglects to remove a rake from the yard; her toddler son steps on it and blinds himself in one eye. Later in the same story, a long-divorced woman—one of the many in Munro’s fiction—visits her children, “who are grown up and have forgiven her.”

Do we grow up and forgive? I suppose it depends on both the depth of the wound and our capacity to recover from it. But Munro’s fiction holds out the understanding that we might not as well as the possibility that we might. Not to offer a happy ending—God knows there are few of those to be found—but to remind us that this, too, is what it is to be human: to suffer the consequences of another person’s weakness and to continue to love or not, as we are capable.

What I’m reading

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad, still! I’ll post a thread soon, really.

As ever,

Ruth