NEW YORK — For decades, Robert Lecker has read, taught and written about Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel laureate known for her short stories. Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal and author of numerous critical studies of Canadian fiction, he considers Munro the “jewel” in the crown of his country’s literature and the source of some of the richest material for classroom discussion.
But since learning that Munro refused to leave her husband after he sexually assaulted and harassed their daughter, Lecker now wonders how to teach her job, or if she should even try.
“I have decided to teach a graduate course on Munro in the winter of 2025,” says Lecker. “Now I have serious doubts as to whether I feel ethically capable of offering this course.”
Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Munro and James Munro, wrote in the Toronto Star earlier this month that she was assaulted at age 9 by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin. She alleged that he continued to harass and abuse her over the next few years, losing interest when she reached her teens. At age 20, she told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse. But Munro, after briefly leaving Fremlin, returned and remained with him until her death in 2013. She would explain to Skinner that she “loved him too much” to remain apart.
When Munro died in May at age 92, she was celebrated worldwide for narratives that documented rare insights into the secrets, motivations, passions and cruelties of her characters, especially those of girls and women. Admirers have cited her not only as a literary inspiration but as a kind of moral guide, sometimes described as “Saint Alice.” A New York Times essay published shortly after her death, by Canadian author Sheila Heti, was titled “I Don’t Write Like Alice Munro, But I Want to Live Like Her.”
“No one knows what compromises another makes, especially when that person is as secretive as he was and turns his trials into fiction,” wrote Heti. “Yet whatever the truth of her daily existence, she still shines as a symbol of artistic purity.”
Educators in Canada and elsewhere are now rethinking their lives and their work. At Western University in London, Ontario, Munro’s alma mater, the school posted a statement on its website saying it was “taking time to carefully consider the impact” of the revelations. Since 2018, Western University has offered the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity, with the mission to “Lead the creative culture of the College of Arts and Humanities by serving as a mentor and role model.” That seat, held last school year by Heti, will be vacant as “we carefully consider Munro’s legacy and ties to the West,” according to the school.
Requests for comment from Heti’s agent and publicists were not immediately returned.
In the fall semester at Harvard University, authors and professors Laura van den Berg and Neel Mukherjee will co-teach “Reading for Fiction Writers,” a review of literary works ranging from the science fiction of Octavia Butler to “realistic” fiction. . by Munro. Van den Berg, an award-winning writer whose books include the short story collection “The Isle of Youth” and the novel “State of Paradise,” says Munro’s failure to support Skinner forced her to rethink her approach to class.
“I will never read Munro the same way again and I won’t teach her the same way,” she says. “For me, what was so painful about what Andrea Skinner went through was the silence. And feeling like she could break the silence after her mother was gone. For me, simply standing in front of a group of students and reading the talk I originally prepared would be like a second silencing.”
A former student of Lecker, Kellie Elrick, says she’s not sure it would have been better to know about Munro and her daughter. Munro’s stories enriched her life, she says, and she doesn’t regret reading them. Elrick, entering his fourth year at McGill, sees parallel, “difficult to reconcile” narratives of “Munro the writer” and “Munro the mother.”
“I think it’s perhaps both productive and dangerous to read an author’s work biographically,” she added. “It may allow us (the readers) to think we can understand things, but there are things we can never really know about the lives and intentions of the writers.”
One of the Munro stories that van den Berg and Mukherjee plan to teach is “Friend of My Youth,” narrated by a woman long estranged from her mother, whose “ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her time, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in mine.” Mukherjee, a 2014 Booker Prize finalist for the novel “The Lives of Others,” is unsure how, or if, to work through the recent news about Munro teaching “Friend of My Youth,” which the author dedicated to her. own mother.
He believes in separating “the art from the artist, that we’ve all done bad things.” He considers himself “very conflicted,” sharing van den Berg’s horror that Munro chose her husband over her daughter, but also thinking her work may have gained “more depth now that we know something about her life.” that she may be trying to come to terms with.”
“I don’t see writers as aspiring saints,” he says.
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