Rachel Aviv and Anne Enright on Alice Munro

Alice Munro (Photo by John Reeves)

I see that Jane Mayer and Rachel Aviv won George Polk Awards this year. Mayer won for her “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” (newyorker.com, December 1, 2024). Aviv won for her “You Won’t Get Free of It” (The New Yorker, December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025). Congratulations to both of them. I confess I only skimmed Mayer’s piece. Political writing is not my bag. Aviv’s piece is a different matter. I read every word. It blew me away. It’s a deep dive into decades of Alice Munro’s family history and correspondence, along with her personal writing and published fiction, in order to recount her daughter Andrea’s sexual abuse and Munro’s subsequent use of that story for her own work. It shook my admiration for Munro’s writing right to its foundation. See my comment here. 

A few weeks after reading Aviv’s piece, I encountered another absorbing assessment of the Munro controversy – Anne Enright’s “Alice Munro’s Retreat” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2024). She writes,

As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all that came after it, can be found. Some people may choose not to read the later stories: they may find it egregious that Munro both dismissed the damage done to her daughter and used it to fuel her work. Yet the tug of this long-kept secret is there on the page and, as with many unpleasant discoveries, once you see it, you find it everywhere.

Enright analyzes several of Munro’s key stories. She concludes: “I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given.”

I feel the same way.