“Well, you’re forgetting a lot of things now.”
“That’s true,” Alice said.
Jenny spoke about how much it would mean to Andrea to know that she cared, and Alice began crying. Within twenty seconds she recovered, as if the memory, along with the emotion linked to it, had just been lost.
In 2016, when Andrea was forty-nine, her husband suddenly left her. “I felt ready to turn to where I had felt love,” she said. “I felt a genuine willingness and, actually, desperation.” Andrea flew to Toronto. At the airport, “I saw her at the top of the escalator, and she fell into my arms,” Jenny said. They drove directly to the Gatehouse together.
Andrea also agreed to see her father for the first time in years. When she began expressing anger, Jim, who had heart congestion and was very frail, put his hand on her shoulder and said, “I need to hear this.” Andrea felt that he was listening with love. She thought, This is the kindest dad I’ve ever had. Later, during a period of better health, “his old personality started to come back,” she said. Once, she asked him if he ever thought, when she was with her mother and Gerry in Clinton, “What is happening to Andrea right now?” He answered, “No.”
Jenny daydreamed about Andrea moving to Port Hope, a town that reminded Andrea of Victoria “without the ghosts.” They discussed the elements of an ideal house: a fireplace, a porch, oak trees, walls made of stone. In the summer of 2016, a house in Port Hope with almost everything on their list came on the market. Jenny helped Andrea buy it, and several months later Andrea moved there, with the twins, Charlie and Felix, eventually joining her. By that point, Alice was “completely gone,” Andrea said. “She didn’t know me.” Charlie said that one time they were in the upstairs dining area of a coffee shop in Port Hope, and, as they walked downstairs, they saw Alice and her caretaker ordering coffee. They waited upstairs until she left the shop.
After Charlie went away to college, Andrea came over to Jenny’s house every other night. They often lay on the bed, with Jenny’s husband, watching movies. “It’s kind of like I’m passing on this incredible love that I feel I got from my mom,” Jenny told me. “I’m probably deluding myself, but I think Mom would have loved to embrace Andrea and have her back. And I’m trying to transmit that.”
Alice’s last book, “Dear Life,” published in 2012, ends with another reflection on her abandonment of her mother. In this final rendering, her guilt has eased. If she had stayed home to care for her mother, as she felt a good daughter should, she could never have become the writer she was. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves,” she wrote in the final lines. “But we do—we do it all the time.”
It’s hard not to read these words, the last she ever published in a book, as an expression of the choices she made with Andrea, too. Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition, and, in the second half of her life, Alice reënacted the dynamic with her mother, in new form: she had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art.
And yet the reader of an Alice Munro story never knows which epiphany to trust. One revelation is overlaid on another; the story continues past the point at which another author might end it. In the spring of 2024, a few weeks before Alice died, she and Jenny were sitting in the sun, outside the nursing home where Alice had been living for the past three years. Jenny said that Alice told her, “I didn’t want that pediful.” She spit the words out, with significant effort. “I said, ‘Do you mean pedophile?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Do you mean you should have stood with Andrea?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ ”
A week after Alice died, the Gatehouse republished on its Web site an essay by Andrea about the experience of reuniting with her siblings after decades of silence. When the essay had first been posted, in 2020, Barcelos had asked Andrea to take out her mother’s name, largely because of concerns over the legal implications. But the new version referred to “my mother, Alice Munro.”
Andrew, an actor and a writer, sent the essay to many of his friends, and eventually to his colleagues, too, and Andrea sent it to three organizations for people who have experienced sexual abuse. She thought that the story would become public, but it didn’t. As publications were printing glowing remembrances of her mother, Andrea sent the essay to four journalists who had written about her mother or about sexual trauma. Her ex-husband sent it to two news outlets on the west coast of Canada. The response was “a big zero,” Andrea said.
Cartoon by Seth Fleishman
In early June, the Toronto Star published a column by a writer named Heather Mallick, who said she was crushed to realize that “political idols, once-adored writers, they’re just people, not heroes.” Andrea thought that Mallick might be subtly referencing her mother, so she e-mailed Mallick, too. But Mallick had not been aware of Andrea’s essay. She informed a top editor, and the story was proposed to Deborah Dundas, the books editor. “Lives of Girls and Women” had been a foundational book for Dundas when she was a teen-ager. “The idea of becoming a writer and having control over your own story—it meant everything to me,” she told me. She explained to her editor that she did not want to take down an idol or jeopardize her relationships in publishing. But the next day she changed her mind.
Less than three weeks later, Dundas and a colleague, Betsy Powell, a courts reporter, published a detailed article about Gerry’s abuse and how it was kept silent. The Star also published a longer version of Andrea’s Gatehouse essay, and also essays by Andrew and Jenny recounting how they had processed what happened to their sister. “We all, in our way, asked that Andrea live a lie,” Jenny wrote. Within a day, the news was reported around the world. The largest chain of bookstores in Canada announced that, though it would still carry Alice Munro books, it would remove posters of her face from their stores. Jim Munro had died, but the new owners of Munro’s Books issued a statement saying that all future proceeds from the sale of Alice’s books would go to organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse. Soon, other public figures in Canada, including a journalist and a novelist, said that they’d been inspired by Andrea to share similar stories of being silenced after abuse.
The first time I met Jenny, she told me, “In general, I just see this as a giant tragedy in my family that has a kind of wonderful result—as good as it can get. I know my parents would have wanted this.”
“Even if this hurts her reputation, your mom would still ultimately want this to be happening now?” I asked.
“Yes, I think she would,” Jenny said. “She would want this truth for Andrea. She was a master of fiction, and Andrea is a master of truth. And I think, in a way, Mom would have admired that.”
When I asked Andrea if she agreed with Jenny’s assessment, she started laughing and said, “No!”
We were sitting at a picnic table at Horse Discovery, an eighty-five-acre horse farm where Andrea leads yoga and mindfulness classes. She said that Jenny’s impression had been altered by a decade spent taking care of that “sweet Alzheimer’s lady—who wasn’t our mother.”
Andrea had known that person, too. She sometimes came over to her mother’s home to help. “It was an act of love for Jenny,” she said, not for her mother. At first, she took Alice for weekly drives. When that felt too intimate, she began doing housework, like scrubbing her floors.
Sometimes Andrea explained who she was, but Alice “would forget two minutes later, and it was easier that way,” she said. “I didn’t want to have a moment where we connected again. I wouldn’t have believed it, anyway.”
In a story from 2008, called “Deep-Holes,” Alice imagined the way that dementia could bring a mother and her estranged child back together. When the son in the story makes it clear that he does not want to see his mother again, she takes solace in the thought that “age could become her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen that look of old people, now and then—clear-sighted but content, on islands of their own making.”
Once, when Andrea came over to help, Alice told a story about how her father had beaten her after she gave names to the baby foxes on their farm. She wasn’t supposed to get attached to the animals. “My mother always told me she had no interest in animals,” Andrea said. “But I believe that happened, and I thought, Oh, the nurturing was beaten out of her.”
“Did you feel like there was some part of her that knew that she was communicating this?” I asked.
“When you say it, it seems pretty obvious,” she said. “But, no, I didn’t realize that she might be emotionally available to herself.”
I mentioned that Alice must have known how much Andrea loved animals.
“I’m willing to entertain the idea that there was some kind of knowing in there,” Andrea said. During another visit, Alice, moving in and out of coherence, had asked Andrea if it was O.K. to live on her own now and go back to college. “I had a lot of compassion for that, too, because she didn’t get to finish university,” Andrea said. Instead, she had dropped out and got married. She had no money and couldn’t write without the support of a man. Andrea said, “There was the kind of sweetness of consulting with me, like she wanted a do-over.”
When Andrea’s children were young, she took care to educate them about how to prevent sexual abuse, using her own story as an example. Not long ago, Andrea was taken aback when Charlie wrote an essay called “The Young and Pretty Condition,” for a college class, in which she described how some of her mother’s attempts to protect her innocence (like refusing to dress her in a bikini as a child, or having frank discussions about infantilizing beauty standards) gave her the impression that all old men were secretly menacing. “I think the cycle is not necessarily breakable in one fell swoop,” Andrea told me. “There are things that get pushed to the next generation, things that I didn’t intend. But the difference is that she can say these things.”
Charlie was never particularly curious about her grandmother. The family conflict didn’t feel relevant to her life. “When I was growing up, I was thinking about my problems,” she told me, almost apologetically. She speaks to her mother on the phone every day: “She’s just this beautiful, asexual creature who doesn’t need to be attractive to anybody. She’s goddess-y in her nature. She’s just glowing and energetic, and she has this joy for life that I think I have as well.”
The conversation with Charlie made me feel that Andrea was soaring through life, and in an e-mail to Andrea I admitted that I felt myself slipping into the place her siblings had spent so many years: “Look how amazing Andrea is—she’s thriving!”
“Thriving Andrea,” she responded. “What a load.” The goddess-y life of celibacy was possible because “it is easy to ignore something you are not aware of missing.” She sometimes enters a state in which all her interactions are tinged with a sense of guilt and horror that she has demanded too much from other people. “Most of all, I’m afraid of being a burden,” she wrote me.
Recently, I met her in her home, in Port Hope, which was as idyllic as it had been described: the brick-and-stone house was on a hill, surrounded by black-walnut trees, with a granite-columned staircase leading up to it. We sat beside the fire, next to a large painting by Jenny of a gnarled tree. Jenny had just told Andrea about her mother’s letter to John Metcalf, from the early seventies, in which she had described being raped. “The hardest part of that story for me was that my mother didn’t go to the class that she was supposed to be at that day,” Andrea said. “She couldn’t. She had to wander around the city. I felt like I did that a lot—rather than show up for myself. And the next thought is the rage that she got to live her life very productively. And I feel like I continue to walk aimlessly around that city.”
