Who will believe thee, Isabel?

So, I follow Munro's Books on Instagram. 

I follow three or four bookstores which have figured in my life, and if you've grown up in Victoria, your life will have intersected with Munro's at some point. (At several points for me.) 

This morning, I was startled and baffled by this Instagram post in my feed.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

My first reaction - after the startled bafflement -  was dread.  "The late Jim Munro?"  Oh no...  You can't have grown up in Victoria without running into Jim Munro.  He and both his wives had connections with our church, and my daughters remember his Dumbledore costume on the release day of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

My confusion deepened as I wondered why this woman's sexual abuse as a child would affect Alice Munro's legacy.

Then I googled Andrea Robin Skinner, whose name I did not recognise, and the story actually got a bit worse.

Skinner is Alice and Jim Munro's youngest daughter.  Jim didn't molest her; Alice Munro's second husband did.  After denying it, and describing his step-daughter as a nine-year-old "home-wrecker", in search of "sexual adventure" (oh gawd), he was eventually convicted in 2005, when Andrea was 38, serving two years' probation.  The stepfather died in 2013; Alice Munro stayed with him to the end, estranged from her youngest child.  The rest of the family seemed to deal with it by not mentioning it, even though, after the initial attack in 1976, the little girl told her father and stepmother what had happened when she returned home.  A lot of damage was done.

Alice Munro died about six weeks ago, after living with dementia for about a decade.  I had set aside articles in the Globe and Mail, with the intention of taking them over to Demeter, but somehow, had never done so.  Shaken, I re-read them, in a new and disturbing light.  

The three-page obituary in the first section of the May 15th edition quoted a letter Munro wrote to a friend, after getting together with her second husband:  "My life has gone rosy, again.  This time it's real. . . . He's 50 and free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like the old tire ads."

In a lengthy analysis for the weekend edition on May 18th, Sandra Martin wrote about a 1993 Munro short story entitled Vandals, about ". . . Bea Doud . . . who moves in with Ladner, a taxidermist with perverted sexual proclivities.  Doud befriends the two children who live next door to Ladner's rural property while ignoring the sadistic way her lover sexually assaults them."

I dropped the papers on the couch, clobbered by hindsight.