Andrea Skinner has told her story, and asked fans of her mother—Alice Munro—to incorporate it into our personal stories about Munro.

I agree to her terms. It’s the least I can do.

I feel grateful that Skinner finally shared her burden, and sad that she bore it alone for so long. It’s an honor to be trusted to hold this truth with her.

I absorb it.
It’s hard to absorb.

The hardest part, for me, about bearing witness to Skinner’s story has nothing to do with her mother’s work—it’s just that it’s so painful. The image of a suffering child, hurt by her stepfather and emotionally abandoned by both parents, suddenly finding herself utterly alone with so much pain, causes me anguish. I’m a mother, and I want to step back in time and mother Andrea Skinner. But I can’t step through that glass, and it makes me angry to know that the real mother she had let her down so terribly.

The second hardest part of the story for me personally, as a passionate lifelong fan of Alice Munro’s writing, is that I am not surprised by her monstrousness. In fact, if you had asked me to guess whether or not she was a good mother I would have guessed that she was not. I would have guessed that she was an ambivalent mother at best, who probably wrestled in her own family with generational trauma, sexual abuse, abandonment, and the competing urges of selfishness and selflessness.

It’s all right there in the work.

Women in a life-or-death struggle with the demands of womanhood, trying to survive it, trying to survive men and work and weather and powerlessness in the face of great violence and their own desires, desperately gaming out how to perform in their communities and families as women, while still remaining alive, as people.

Cynthia Ozick was right: Munro was our Chekhov, and this was her subject.
It’s exactly why so many of us revere her work.

I’ll revisit her writing and recast the meaning of some of it, I’m sure. But the place Munro’s work holds in my psyche won’t change. It can’t—it’s too late. That ship has sailed around my world, wound itself in and out of every bay of my mind, explored every sea within me many times by now.

And my opinion of Munro as a person won’t change, because I never had an opinion of her as a person. She wasn’t a celebrity to me. She was an artist. I never revered her personally.

It’s really my opinion of myself that changes, every time we learn that an artist whose art is crucial to me has done terrible things.

With every year that passes I gather more and more evidence that the art I love most is mostly made by people who struggle mightily with, and occasionally give in to, frightening darkness.

I don’t think this is a coincidence.

I tell myself that their work helps me struggle with darkness, so that I won’t give into it myself. So that my personal behavior can stay “good”. That might be true, but it’s still just the story I tell myself.

This is what I think about each time another revelation arrives. This, and my personal culpability in each individual’s monstrousness.

Each time, I run the numbers—how much money did I give her, how did I contribute to the inflation of her reputation, and what did she do with it? Did she access more victims?

It is fashionable to blame capitalism for everything these days, but for me the real problem with great artists being harmful people lies here, in the rewards we offer them for their greatness: power, money, and admiration.

I passionately believe that when we grant people power, we are responsible for how they use it.

I feel deep sorrow for Skinner, but I don’t feel complicit in Skinner’s abuse because I bought Munro’s books. I don’t think Munro’s fame is what allowed her to hurt her daughter. Her motherhood did that.

I don’t feel about Munro like I did about R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein. I know that by giving them my ears and eyes and money I made it easier for them to hurt more people, no question. That’s a truth I must hold.

Today, I am just carrying sadness for Andrea Skinner. And sadness that I will always love the work of the mother who hurt her.

Maybe my love is like her mother’s: dangerous, selfish, ravenous. But even more horrible still…not blind.

I see my own truth, that greatness and goodness don’t always coexist. Maybe they don’t even OFTEN coexist. Worst of all, maybe I don’t want them to.

But wealth and goodness should. Power and goodness must.

It’s hard to bear witness to myself, to know that I would personally be sad if all the art in the world came from people with an unbroken history of human decency. I’d be hungry for different art.

But I know too that I am even sadder about the way we keep creating monsters, by responding to great artistic achievement with accolades and applause and power and money, allowing the characters of the artists to warp and their egos to bloat and their worst selves to metastasize, their monstrousness given wheels and placed on a clear road of permission, zooming them toward more harm.

I’m not sure what to do with this sadness. Usually, I would turn to art for an answer, but maybe that’s not enough anymore. Maybe we need more goodness and less greatness. Maybe now is the time to kill our idols before they kill us first.

Maybe one day we will live in a world where power is never abused, and all the art will be made by good people, for good people. By then, like Alice Munro, I’ll be dead. Maybe my son won’t be. Maybe my grandchildren will never hunger for art about darkness, made by those who know it.

That’s a nice story to tell myself.