Open Secrets

—Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

Alice Munro wanted to change the endings. She found it unbearable that the little mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s story could not get the prince despite the enormous sacrifices she made. She thought it was dreadfully sad.

She said in an interview that she used to walk around their little brick house and imagine a happy ending for the mermaid, who endured agonising pain with every step after transforming her limbs. Munro wanted her to have a happy ending, marry the prince and not die in water.

That’s what I remembered when her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner wrote about her mother’s failure to protect her from sexual abuse by her stepfather and Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin. Skinner was nine when she was abused by Fremlin. At 25, she told Munro about what happened, but Munro said she was too late. Skinner wrote that she believed Munro viewed it more as an act of infidelity.

In all of this, Munro was choosing a happy ending for herself.

Did Munro ever think if the little mermaid married the prince and lived on land, she would be forever in pain? Was she in pain? Her stories are testimonies also. Perhaps they are confessions.

Munro is no longer there. She was born in Canada in 1931 and started writing short stories and won many prizes, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013 for her work.

I wouldn’t say I have cancelled Munro. That’s too simplistic. Munro wasn’t actually telling us how to be. She was writing about fictional people living fictional lives, but reading her gave me a sense of what was out there. Love, loss, expectations, transience, desire and then, there would be a train sometimes to take you away from home out into the world. There was also abandonment.

I first read Munro in a similar landscape of Upstate New York. It was about everyday life. It was about places that aren’t in the eye of everyone. My father and mother had chosen to live quietly in Patna, a city still, but in many ways, away from ambition. Munro came from a working-class background. I found solace in that. There was a repressed longing in there and I could feel that too. And of course there was that foray into the unsettling territory. There was all that to her writing.

I first read her to find a cure for homesickness. Not that Patna was anything like Ontario. I guess I thought Munro knew how to keep the landscape intact. I didn’t want to forget where I had come from.

And then, as I picked up one story after another, I found betrayal and neglect in there and judgement, too.

I moved on to other writers. She became too bleak for me. I didn’t want to be that girl in Open Secrets who disappeared.

I remember there was that line in that book about an unsolved disappearance.

But some will say it wasn’t that way

That she met a stranger or a friend

In a big black car she was carried far

And nobody knows the end.

The title story of Munro’s eighth book, Open Secrets, is about a 13-year-old girl, Heather Bell, who disappears on a trip and nobody knows whether she is dead or has run away. In that story, the narrator says, “There will always be a tiny suggestion, in that, of her own free will.”

Was it that Munro was writing about everything that happened to her?

How do we separate the art from the artist? Some would say they can’t be separated. Others would not cancel artists because they did wrong things.

It is, after all, one’s personal choice.

We are living in a biographical age where we learn and stumble upon facts. The internet is built out of biographies and thrives on it and that’s how we are being forced into a more intimate relationship with the artist’s personhood. When I read Munro, I had not known much about Munro’s life.

But now that I do, I don’t know if I will read her again and even if I do, I am not sure if I will read her with the same trust that I once put in her.

In fact, the abuse done to her daughter was an open secret.

In the same collection, there is a story called Carried Away about a librarian who is wooed by a soldier by mail during World War I. The soldier married another girl when he returned home.

When the librarian asks a salesman, “Do you think it was all a joke on me? Do you think a man could be so diabolical?” the salesman says, “No, no. Don’t you think such a thing. Far more likely he was sincere. He got a little carried away. It’s all just the way it looks on the surface.”

The librarian is then seduced by the salesman.

I understand in a way why Munro’s women ended up with strange men and even forgave them for horrible things and how doomed these forgivers were and how sometimes they didn’t even understand what they had done.

Munro wasn’t telling us how to live. She was telling us how we live.

I have done the same. That’s why I read her.

We have gone for those who have broken us and failed us. We have given up everything to be with them and then, we have been discarded. There are so many women like her characters. We have many times ignored our instincts and we have suffered. Patriarchy does that. It makes us rearrange ourselves in order to find that idealised happy ending, which is about finding a man and understanding his insanity. Munro was a product also of her time and space.

That’s why we read. In order to not be alone, to find others who might have had a similar fate, who might have suffered similar indignities.

Frankly, I don’t know what to do with Munro.

Skinner’s story is now part of Munro’s story. You can’t separate it.

And that changes the emotional relationship with the writer.

I read a short story by her today. From her book Open Secrets.

“In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she’ll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking into an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it,” says Maureen Stephens, a character in the title story.

Maybe Munro was saying it all. That’s why we can’t separate the art from the artist. Who we are and who we become is what we write about. We write about people we have encountered; we make up stories about them, we make our confessions, we write about our secrets.

Writers aren’t saints. Munro was certainly not.

She can’t be absolved of what she did to her daughter.

You see, you can’t always hop that train and get out.

Stories also demand that we enter them again and again and each time we enter those landscapes, we return with something else, some other truth.

At least, now I know why Munro wrote about these miserable women. She was grappling with the same. This is now no open secret.

Also, thank god, the little mermaid couldn’t marry the prince.

(This appeared in the print as 'Open Secrets')