To compare India Knight to Alice Munro?

[Heyyoupleasekeepgoing]

Just finished the brilliant piece in the New Yorker Magazine Here about how Alice Munro ignored the abuse of her daughter by her husband, and the general opinion (although easier to hold now she is dead) that her work should no longer be respected and read as it was.

AIBU to think of the vastly less celebrated but nonetheless still writing for the Times etc India Knight, who stood by her own paedophile partner (Eric Joyce) and was named as a mitigating factor in his sentencing for viewing and downloading the most extreme category of CSA - ie supporting his support of the severe abuse of someone’s children (and babies according to the court case)? As their promised “explanations” have not been forthcoming, please can we stop publishing/ reading her now?

I was also abused aged nine, as I said in my post above. Do I think Alice Munro’s legacy is tainted? Absolutely. Do I still read her? Also absolutely. Do I read her slightly differently now? Also yes.

Art can't be distilled down to good or bad craftsmanship. Talent doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its worth to you boils down to the emotions it elicits in you. And context - social and biographical context - will necessarily affect that. This is why people study the lives of great artists - to gain more understanding about their art. Knowing that Sylvia Plath suffered from depression and was in an abusive relationship makes her poetry more powerful, for instance.

And knowing that Alice Munro was complicit in covering up the abuse of her daughter makes her work less powerful, especially when she writes about the theme of teenage sexuality. Munro writing about an underage girl consenting to sexual activity with an older man seems less like an honest account of her own experience and more like a manipulative post facto justification of her own awful actions. I find it impossible to read without thinking of what she did. Those are now the emotions it elicits in me. That's not cancel culture, that's how art works.

I also grew up with R Kelly's music. It seems less controversial to say songs I happily danced to as a child I now find unlistenable.

Luckily with that hack India Knight there's no moral dilemma whatsoever (and that's why she can't be compared to Munro - you don't debate whether Knight's talent makes her work salvageable because she simply isn't talented).

She did mention "my partner" in the Substack the other day. She's one of those women who can't ever be without a man - her contempt for the single (and the childfree) has been a recurring theme with her for years. Which is probably how she ended up marrying a gay man, having a child with one man while married to another, and then shacking up with a nonce. At least she'll probably stop doling out relationship advice now.

But Munro’s fiction isn’t autobiography. She’s making no claim to be writing, accurately or otherwise, solely about her own experience. I agree entirely that a story like ‘Wild Swans’ reads far more problematically in the light of her choice to return to the husband who’d abused their daughter, but I was far more triggered as a CSA survivor by Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, even though that was a carefully and respectfully-written act of witnessing to historical abuses of Mennonite women and girls. I won’t be reading that again, despite its excellent intentions and the fact that Toews is incredibly talented.

(If anyone is looking for another brilliant Canadian writer, try Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows, which I’m always recommending.)

Munro wasn’t complicit, she was inactive. Big difference in them olden times. I think
these days silence is violence when it comes to CSA.

I find Munro’s passivity explosively horrible and intriguing.

The robustly confident Gerry threatened to kill himself if she left, but you don’t need to be a novelist to call bullshit there, ditto his arguments that CSA is a feminist construct.

He threatened to take her money, but again he couldn’t have got a lot.

AM didn’t seem to love Gerry all that much - maybe she did. He certainly didn’t love her very much, ever, but he helped her in practical ways.

The only answer I’ve got is a self-abasement fetish that I can see working well with the bravery AM needed for the writing.

Or maybe she didn’t think it was that big a deal, having been abused and recovered herself, or maybe she had a low opinion of men.

Hmm..'complicit' I suppose would be if she had agreed w the abuse & purposefully helped him get away w it bc of that. Instead she ignored clear warning signs & inappropriate behaviour bc she loved him. She wasn't complicit, then, but her inability inactivity allowed the abuse to happen, & then forced her daughter to deal w it without maternal support. Her act of eventually saying Andrea was lying is not inactivity. Her inactivity had the same effect as complicity would have.
It's like many larger atrocities. No, silence is not violence by itself. But if you are silent I the face of child abuse, and you could speak up if you chose, you are enabling it, no matter what your views are. That is the effect your actions are having. Just as the people who knew about the Rotherham abuse & turned a blind eye by choice were enabling, even though they weren't complicit in the sense of 'turning a blind eye bc they agreed w the criminals & wanted to help them'.
I also think 'olden times' is a bit of a red herring. Alice Munro wasn't living in small-town Ontario still. She was educated, supposedly feminist. And most uneducated people can tell child abuse & inappropriate behaviour when they see it. In a sense, Alice's supposedly educated & liberated milieu of the 1970s may have further twisted her view of what was appropriate- I think Gerry's Lolita references are symptomatic of a wider creepiness sanctioned at that time.
I've read 2 excellent but v disturbing novels about incest recently, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina & Heather Lewis' House Rules. Both are heavily autobiographical, & in both cases, in the authors' novels & lives, the mother was aware of the abuse. Dorothy Allison's mother walked in on her bf assaulting her daughter, but prioritised her love for an evil man over her daughter's safety. In House Rules, Heather Lewis' alter ego says that her mother is aware her father is molesting her & actually seems to enable it actively. (I don't know if this was the case for Lewis' real life mother, but her actual father was abusive). Allison's family were extremely poor Southerners in the 1950s, Lewis' were rich 1960s New Yorkers w connections to Nixon. In both cases, people around the family raised alarms bc of clearly disturbing behaviour, but the mothers remained willfully blind, or possibly worse.

Munro wasn’t complicit in abuse cos she didn’t know about it till 15 years later.

She chose a life as a writer above that of a mother, and Gerry was her handy house wife that enabled the writing, in effect. I suspect that was his appeal.

She’s right that she wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this if she’d been a man.

Or if Gerry hadn’t been junk. Let’s not make the mistake of blaming Munro for male violence.

But, how can she not have freaked and booted him? I still don’t get it.

I've no time for mothers who stand by their child's abuser, even if they only were aware after the fact. For those women that are aware of the abuse as it is happening, adult women in this day and age have a choice. We aren't living in an age where a woman can't support herself on her own.

@Supersimkin7 India Knight knew, because she attended court to support Joyce and part of his argument as to why he shouldn't go to prison but should be given another chance is that he had the support and love of a good woman (vomit).

He had videos of babies being raped FFS. And she still stuck by him.

Thank you. I agree that list is pretty random. Not sure why Lewis Caroll is on it. Isn't the accpeted wisdom these days that he wasn't a paedophile?

Dickens cheated on his wife.

Virgina Woolf married Leonard (Woolf) who was Jewish.

She was bloody rude about everyone, which might explain the casual prejudice.

She was awful.

Some of other inclusions on that list are very questionable- E.M Forster for example. The egregious examples are nothing more than he was of his time.

Woolf was unpleasant even for the times.

I reread Alice in Wonderland recently & while the picture is more nuanced than it's often portrayed, there's a lot of disturbing things that leave room for doubt, mentioned in my Penguin edition.
Cheating is horrible, but it was worse than that as he tried to have her locked in an asylum when she found out about his affair with a younger woman.

I don't think Forster was that bad. He could be sexist but otoh his writing can be v understanding of women, & A Passage To India is a progressive take on empire, in context.
Woolf... Leonard being Jewish is obvs no excuse for her anti Semitism. I've researched her quite a bit, but a while back. She didn't strike me as horrible in her daily life. (Tho I read a v good bio of Lydia Lopokova recently, & Woolf & her sister were horribly snobby to her) It's more that in her diary & some of her writing, her prejudices are given free rein. In her public life, she spoke up for women & against Hitler, who knows how she squared that w her diary's snobbery & anti-Semitism. I don't know if her periods of mental illness could also have affected her inhibitions about what what she was writing, or if they were unrelated.

Serafina's - thank you for your reply. Really interesting details! I didn't know a lot of those, some awful comments, esp the Kew Gardens one...

Reading what you say about Woolf, yes I recall now that she often did make unpleasant criticisms of others.
I feel like stuff like A Room of One's Own is the best of her, but too often she could be the opposite of the person she is there. She could be supportive of her friends, but clearly merciless about those she judged or was competitive with. The nastiness about Katherine Mansfield surprises me, as I remember reading they were pretty close, even flirty sometimes, & Woolf did write something v moving about Mansfield's death.
Interesting about Burnett, I'd never thought of the Secret Garden that way.. It probs is at least partly a criticism of India, but otoh in The Little Princess there is the positive Indian character, Ram Das, who helps save Sara when she's working as a skivvy. So maybe her view was more complex - I hope so.

To be fair to Virginia Woolf , and indeed the other authors listed, I've just read a lengthy New Yorker article about Neil Gaiman which makes Mrs Woolf's unpleasantness pale into nothing.

On the one hand, self- centred, upper class writer who lived before the enormous social changes brought about by WWII was a bit of a snob and a racist. Quelle surprise.

On the other hand, suave, cultured, cultivated, charming, feminist 20th century bloke turns out to be, well, if the allegations are true, far more problematic than Mrs Woolf.

Possibly also quelle surprise but far more disappointing.

Yes, IHaveAlways, Woolf certainly had a v cruel & caustic side, but in the scheme of things, it's nowhere near as bad as other sacred cows, esp modern ones who have even fewer excuses... She was so visionary in some ways, it's a shame she still clung to other prejudices, but overall she was a positive influence on the world.
I love Neil Gaiman's writing but I've always got a creepy vibe from it too, esp in some sexual scenes. I thought it was bc he had had experience w bad people, but as it turned out.... I get a similar thing w Roald Dahl & Lemony Snicket, tho neither are anything as bad as Neil Gaiman.
Sorry, I don't want to derail the thread.

I've read Wild Swans now, & the New Yorker piece. I'm researching Colette atm, & Alice Munro seems a lot like her. Colette has this story called 'The Tender Shoot ' , about a 15yo who intiates an encounter w an older man. Similarly to Wild Swans, there's an acknowledgement that even if the encounter was viewed positively or even intiated by the girl, the behaviour of the man is still extremely wrong. I think what makes me far more uncomfortable w Munro's story is that she was someone who seems to have had pretty porous boundaries around appropriate, even though she wasn't directly aware of the abuse until the 80s.

Whereas Colette, who had a similar pattern of empowered behaviour in her career but self-abasement in her relationships, was always clear in her writing that her 1st husband (a family friend who began courting her when she was 16 and he was 29, & knew her from a younger age, possibly as young as 10 🤢)'s behaviour was disgusting. Suprising considering that Colette was far from progressive in many ways, & was born in 1873 in France where attitudes to adult exploiting children have been & still are unpleasantly lax... Whereas Munro was educated, involved in the feminist movement. But valued this absolute shit, who openly condoned paedophilia in front of her, over her own daughter!

Agree with you op.
And I adored Munro. But her work often draws from her life so is very hard to disentangle. Charaxter with mysteriously estranged daughter? Can't empathise with the mother figure any more.