The Common Thread: Alice Munro’s Family Secret

by Deborah Blenkhorn

My childhood best friend’s social media post about the recent death of her mother, a renowned artist, triggered a memory for me as the tributes and condolences poured in for the family who mourned the loss of a powerful matriarch, the rock of their particular clan. This woman’s middle daughter (my friend’s older sister), as well as, I believe, a young cousin, had been assaulted by an uncle and had sought abortions in the late 1970s.  These facts were common knowledge in our small Ontario community, but the general feeling seemed to be that “Uncle T” had issues because he and his wife had never been able to have children of their own, and they subsequently adopted… a preteen girl. 

Those were the days! I wonder what happened to the girl who was adopted into that family clan.  She was my age, but never fit in with nor was accepted by our friend group, though my best friend would have been her adoptive cousin; we teased her as being a “Lezzie” and were unspeakably cruel in the way that only preteens can be. Of course all of that is water under the bridge of time.  It’s not time to remember that; it’s time to celebrate the life of the family matriarch, the artist: all her achievements and the lives she touched.  Who knows what she struggled with in the Uncle T years?  Was he her brother? Brother-in-law?  I don’t even know.

Does every family have a dark secret that may or may not eventually come to light? It’s a bold claim that we all have an Alice Munro skeleton in the family closet, because Munro’s condoning of her husband’s abuse of her daughter seems unthinkably horrific, incomprehensible. Not every family holds that particular secret–though no doubt a fair number of them actually do–but the differences between that situation and those of other families may be simply ones of degree.  And of course we’re not simply talking about a secret within a family; rather, it is a question of a suppressed truth. So much sacrificed for the sake of decorum, in that case the preservation of a grande dame of the Canadian literary scene. In other cases, perhaps less extreme (or perhaps not), other sacrifices were made as transgressions were (the cliche is so apt I can’t help but use it) swept under the rug.

Are we about to enter the Me Too Two era?  I almost hope so, though (again I can’t resist the cliche) the shit will totally hit the fan.  Without even stopping to think, I can list a litany of parallels.  My late mother condoned sexualized behaviour initiated by her partner (and others) towards me, on the commune where we both lived in the 1970s.  She died without my forgiveness.  Without revealing details that would compromise anyone, I can allude to the crimes I’m aware of in my friends’ lives, perpetrated by parents, siblings, roomers, priests, teachers, family friends.  I sometimes think that anyone who does not have such a story… simply hasn’t told it yet.  Is there a common thread? Yes. Power.  The corruption of it, the colonialism of it, the condoning of it.  

And what can we do?  Fight it, yes.  But first, let’s at least acknowledge what has happened. Let’s own it, and let’s try not to be complicit in the great cover-up. One more cliche: Let the chips fall where they may.

BIO:

Bio:

Deborah Blenkhorn is a writer and teacher living on Bowen Island in British Columbia. Her work fuses memoir and fiction, and has appeared in such venues as Blank Spaces, Dreamers Creative Writing, and DarkWinter Literary Magazine.