12/10/2025
Alice Munro told her daughter Andrea, who was 25 at the time, that she’d just read a short story about a girl who is sexually abused by her father but afraid to tell her mother. The girl becomes increasingly isolated and kills herself by jumping off a bridge. Alice said that the story left her “shaking” and that, after finishing it, she couldn’t look at her partner, Gerry. “I was used to overriding the obvious, pretending things weren’t what they were,” Andrea told Rachel Aviv. But she felt that “something shifted in that conversation. She knew. I knew she knew.”
“Dear mom,” Andrea wrote, soon afterward. “Please find a spot alone before you read this.” She described how Gerry had sexually abused her, beginning when she was nine years old and continuing until she went through puberty. After she read the letter, Alice left the house she shared with Gerry; she later told Andrea that as soon as she read the first line, she knew what it would say. She revealed that, when Andrea was 11, the parents of a 14-year-old girl had told her that Gerry had been sexually inappropriate with their daughter. Within a month of that conversation, Alice had returned to Gerry.
It wasn’t until years later, when she had Alzheimer’s, that Alice would discuss the assault and the harm it had done. “She didn’t feel invested in that person, Gerry, at all, or in the person she’d been with him,” her daughter Jenny said. “She started to lose that great terror over the truth.” Jenny and her mother had lucid conversations about Andrea’s abuse, but Alice would forget what had happened a few minutes later. In one such conversation, in 2019, Alice exhaled loudly and said under her breath, “How awful.” She looked up at Jenny and said, “It was beastly of me not to get rid of him.” Later, she asked, “Does she think about it still?” “It’s not something you get over,” Jenny replied. “Oh, God. Oh, God,” Alice said, in a high, pained voice, bowing her head and holding it in her hand. Aviv writes about the open secret that Alice Munro refused to confront—and how her daughters have done so: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Q36qzx
