Simon Vance
Appearances
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
And one other thing I want to say about this is if the goal is to address not only migration, but the flow of illegal drugs across the border, Mexico sending thousands of National Guard soldiers to the border is really going to do very little to attack that problem. Because while...
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
President Trump and other leaders in the Republican Party have argued that migrants are responsible for taking a lot of the fentanyl across the border into the United States. Actual U.S. government evidence and statistics show that that's not the case. U.S. citizens overwhelmingly are the ones who are smuggling fentanyl into the U.S.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
So it's not like the fentanyl crisis is going to be solved in one month. It's not going away. It's not clear if the deployment of soldiers is going to do much about it either.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
You know, really from Mexico's perspective, I think that there's the view that the relationship with the U.S. has been transactional for a very long time now, independent of which president is in power. There are good things about that relationship and there are bad things about that relationship from Mexico's view.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
So I think that it just wasn't all that surprising for this crisis to erupt in the first place. Mexican authorities really kept a cool head throughout much of the process, which was very interesting. They didn't take the bait, though they did respond assertively on certain points. But from Mexico's point of view, I don't think that the outcome of this is all that surprising, no.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
You know, there really was a huge amount of fear and trepidation about these tariffs. There was the expectation that they would cause a devastating blow to Mexico's economy. And this is really mainly because, you know, Mexico, more than any other major economy in the world, relies on trade with the United States. Mexico exports 80% of its exports to the U.S.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
So it was just extremely vulnerable going into this situation. There was an expectation that it could take two percentage points off of GDP in Mexico. That would essentially push the economy into a recession. So there was a great deal of concern about the impact that this could have.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
Well, it was really interesting. Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, had quite a measured response to the announcement of these tariffs. I think we have to remember this isn't Mexico's first rodeo with Trump. Members of her administration have been through this experience during the first Trump administration when tariffs were imposed on some Mexican products and Mexico retaliated at that time.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
And they ended up actually renegotiating the entire free trade deal. agreement for North America. And really, it ended up being quite advantageous for Mexico in the end.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
However, it was a challenge for her to respond over the weekend because in Trump's executive order, he made a remark that was kind of incendiary in Mexican politics when he said that the Mexican government has an allegiance with drug cartels. That's kind of an explosive statement to make. And so she pushed back on that. She also said something really interesting.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
She brought up an issue which is really seen this way in Mexico, but perhaps not in the United States, which is that fentanyl is an issue of domestic demand in the U.S., that, you know, there would not be a crisis if there were not demand for this illicit substance among Americans. And so she really called on the U.S. to do more to solve the problem within its own territory.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
In addition to that, she also raised the issue of guns. Mexico is waging a legal battle in the U.S. right now over guns that are smuggled from U.S. gun shops into Mexico that are supplied to the cartels that really feed into the violence in the country. So she brought up those important points while at the same time making it clear that she was still ready to talk and keep on negotiating.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
It was incredible that Peso was crashing. Stocks were under a lot of pressure. And yet there still was a sense really among business leaders in the business establishment that this could be solved before that Tuesday deadline. They've been through this before. They know how this works.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
They know that Trump sometimes sets like a really high bar to begin with, and then the negotiations really get underway. And really, that seems to be what happened here. There was an expectation that President Scheinbaum was going to speak to the nation at a scheduled time on Monday morning. Everyone was waiting for that to happen.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
Suddenly the minutes started going by and she was late in starting. And then we all found out that these two leaders were talking by phone to one another and that they finally reached a deal that would avoid these tariffs for at least the next 30 days.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
Well, it was really interesting. Mexico agreed to deploy 10,000 National Guard soldiers to the border with the United States to combat the trade in illicit drugs and also to really curb the flow of migration into the United States. On the flip side of that, Mexico was able to show a win in those negotiations with Trump when Mexico's president said that the U.S. had agreed to help
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
curb the flow of U.S. guns heading into Mexico, which is a big issue for Mexicans' government. Those were the basic terms that were ironed out on Monday.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
Well, it is hard to tell exactly what happened to those troops that were deployed in 2021. We also have to remember that there was a previous deployment of Mexican troops back in 2019. So this has happened before, you know, this is the third time in six years that we're seeing a major deployment of Mexican troops to the border at the behest of the United States.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
So really, the question is right now, what are those troops realistically going to be able to do when we have those boots on the ground? Will they make a difference? Because it's not clear whether they made much of a difference before. Of course, the conditions right now on the US-Mexico border are really different. It's actually remarkably calm at the moment.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
Illegal crossings across this border are at their lowest level since 2020. The border is very calm for a combination of reasons. Part of this are asylum restrictions that the Biden administration put in over the past year. And part of this has to do with the Mexican government's own actions, right? They have been breaking up migrant caravans long before they make it to the border with the U.S.
The Daily
North America Averted a Trade War — for Now
They've also been detaining migrants at levels rarely seen before in recent history in Mexico. So this has resulted in really a sharp decline in illegal crossings at that border.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
There's a third track, too, which is using existing legal authorities that haven't been used in the past but we think are there.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
No, it's not that 5 million are engaged in like military conflict, but that the, I take issue that it's an aggressive interpretation. So let me back up and take some issue with the premise. I don't think that the supposition, if you look at the history and the context of those laws, is that for something to be an invasion, you have to have like 5 million uniformed combatants.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Yes, we don't have 5 million uniformed combatants. But Ross, I mean, this is where I think, and I have to be careful here, because some of this information, of course, is classified, but I think I ought to put this point. I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people's elected president of the United States. Because when you say, well, there aren't 5 million people who are waging war, okay, but are there thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people?
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And then when you take their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that who are quite dangerous people? who I think very intentionally came to the United States to cause violence or to at least profit from violence, and they're fine if violence is an incidental effect of it. Yeah, I do, man.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And I think the people underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we're under. When the president talks about how bad crime is, you know, the one thing I'd love for the American media to do a little bit more is really go
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
to a migrant community where you have, say, 60% legal immigrants and 40% illegal immigrants, the level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of, I think, truly pre-modern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to Whatever law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious action against this. It's bad. It's bad. It's worse than people appreciate.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And it's not – Donald Trump – I know most of your listeners probably hate the president I serve under and probably hate me. Maybe not your listeners, but a lot of New York Times readers.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I would just ask them, like, do not filter this through the, I see President Trump and Vice President Vance up there, and I sort of immediately assume that they're lying to me and that they're motivated by some bad value. This is not sustainable. And it's not just sustainable, like, oh, this is more immigrants than we used to have. This is a level of...
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
invasion that I think our laws, we already have laws to help us deal with. And I wish the courts were more deferential. And we're going to see, again, this is, we're very early innings in the court process. And even, you know, some of the worst, capital W worst Supreme Court decisions that have been made on, you know, the media says, oh, this is a big blow to the administration.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I mean, a lot of these things are very narrow procedural rulings. I think that we're very early innings here on what the court is going to interpret the law to mean.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Oh, sometimes no, because the people who are most victimized by this, Ross, they're not running to the FBI. They're not running to the local police. But certainly, I mean, if you look at. I mean, hell, look at the number of people dying of fentanyl overdoses. Again, just go substantively, qualitatively, you go to these communities and you see what they're dealing with.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I really think that we underappreciate just how violent these cartels are and how much they've made life, I think, pretty unbearable for, frankly, a lot of native-born American citizens, but also a lot of legal American migrants, especially those along the southern border.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Well, look, first of all, I understand your point. And making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't struggled with some of this, that I haven't thought about whether we're doing the precisely right thing. So it's a fair point, and I know that you think you've got me trapped here.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
To be clear, I think it's a totally fair question. I'm interested in what politics does to your soul. Yes, of course. So number one, the concern that you raise is fairer. The concern that you raise is fair.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
There has to be some way in which you're asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law, even to your point against some very dangerous people, that you're enforcing the law consistent with the Catholic Church's moral dictates and so forth. And also to be clear, I'm the vice. And also, I mean...
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Most importantly, American law. But we're talking about, you know, we're in Rome. And so that's why I brought up the Catholic faith part of it. The American flag is positioned behind you. Sure. So here's the thing. So.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
with a caveat that I'm the Vice President of the United States and I am hardly an expert in every single edge case or every single case that has become a viral sensation or that people have criticized us over. But I am pretty well read on some of the cases.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Typically what I find when I look at the worst cases, I mean, the ones that the media seems so preoccupied with, I would make a couple of observations about it. Number one, it is hard to take seriously. Now, this doesn't absolve me from doing my duty as an American leader and hopefully as a Christian leader too.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
But it is hard to take seriously the extraordinarily emotive condemnations of people who don't care about the problem that I'm trying to solve and that the president is trying to solve.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
So when I see people who for legitimately four years told me that I was a xenophobe for thinking that what Joe Biden was doing at the border was a serious problem, I am less willing – there's a witness element to this, and I'm less willing to believe the witness of people who are now saying that this MS-13 gang member – and we'll talk about that case in a second – this guy –
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
This guy is somehow a very sympathetic person and you violated his civil rights, et cetera, et cetera. OK, so that's number one. Number two, I still have an obligation to think about these cases. And I'll tell you, you know, a lot of times I'll read about these cases and I'll reach out to the people who are enforcing immigration law and I'll try to find out what exactly is going on.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I haven't asked every question about every case, but the ones where I have asked questions and I try to get to the bottom of what's going on, I feel quite comfortable what's happened. And the one that I've spent the most time understanding is the one of the Maryland father
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I think this guy was not just a gang member, but a reasonably high-level gang member in MS-13. I think he had engaged in some pretty ugly conduct and Legally, he had had multiple hearings before an immigration judge. He had a valid deportation order. What he also had was a sort of exception, what's called a withholding order that basically said, yes, you can deport this guy.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
No one doubts that we could have deported this guy. But you can't deport this guy to El Salvador because of particular conditions that obtained in I believe 2019 when his case was adjudicated. So you fast forward to 2025, we deport this guy, the courts hold that we've made a mistake, and then eventually it gets to the Supreme Court.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And I believe, and we're getting in the weeds a little bit of the legal technicalities, but I believe the court term is you must facilitate his return. And I sat in lunch with Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, with the president of the United States and with others, and talked about this case. And Bukele basically said, I don't want to send this guy back. I think he's a bad guy. He's my citizen.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
He's in a prison in El Salvador, and I think that's where he belongs. And our attitude was, okay, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who is a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with?
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I understand there may be disagreements about the judgments that we made here, but there's just something that it's hard to take serious when so many of the people who are saying we made a terrible error here are the same people who made no – protests about how this guy got into the country in the first place or what Joe Biden did for four years to the American southern border.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And he's also said explicitly he would follow the law and follow American courts on this. So I don't think it's unreasonable for the president to say, here's this thing I'd like to do so long as it's consistent with the law.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
So, look, I understand the point, especially as it's, you know, what the president says or what I say is refracted through the lens of an American press that, you know, I have my complaints with. But just what did the president... Again, you know, I'm going to defend my boss here. What do you say? I'm going to think about doing this. only in cases of the very, very worst people, number one.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And number two, only if it's consistent with American law. I think that if that was the headline that was reproduced, the president is considering sending the very worst violent gang members in America to a foreign prison, so long as that is a legal thing to do. I don't think that would inspire so much passionate resistance. That's my understanding of the American people.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I guess my pitch to them would be, we came into the administration with what we believed was a mandate from the American people to make government more responsive to the elected will of the people and less responsive to bureaucratic intransigence. And changing that is not perfect. And I won't even say that we've gotten every decision right.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I think that, you know, sometimes, you know, even Elon has admitted we made a mistake. We corrected the mistake. So the point is not that this is perfect. The point is that it was a necessary part of making the people's government more responsive to the people.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And I think that if you look over the next, in two years, you look at the past two years or in four years, you look at the past four years. What I hope to be able to say and what I think is true today and will still be true then is that we actually have done with some bumps. We've done a good job at making the government more responsive.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And that this sort of feeling of shock, I don't dismiss it or diminish it, but I think that the system actually needed some pretty significant reform. And I'd ask people for patience because we're on the inside of this. You elected us to do a job.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And you get to make the judgment with the benefit of hindsight, whether we were just breaking stuff or whether we were actually doing something in the service of fixing things. I promise you that I believe that we're fixing things, but ultimately the American people will be the judge of that.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I think there are sort of three ways of thinking about it, and I tend to fall in the middle. Okay, so way number one, and you see some Catholics or some Christians say this, is they'll say, well, politics is politics, policy is policy, religion is religion, and...
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
You know, we wish the pope all his best or we wish the church all its best in its moral teachings, but we got to focus on policy and these are two totally separate matters. But I think that that's wrong because it understates the way in which all of us are informed by our moral and religious values. So that's not the right way to do it.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I think another way to do it would be to say, I'm just going to do everything the Holy Father tells me to do. I think that would be- Some people were worried about that with John F. Kennedy.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And I think that would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution. But certainly, I think just my obligation more broadly as a vice president to serve the American people, you've got to think about this stuff. But I think the way that I take it is, on the migration question in particular, you have to think about what they've said. And when the church says, you know,
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Yes, we respect the right of a country to enforce its borders. You also have to respect the rights of migrants, the dignity of migrants when you think about questions like deportation and so forth. You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I'm not saying I'm always perfect at it, but I at least try to think about, okay, there are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
One issue in particular, you know, I've talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend, just because there are a lot of cardinals here in Rome. And one of the arguments that I've made, very respectfully, I've had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration, is that
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
You know, it's easy to get locked in sort of a left versus right. You know, the left respects the dignity of migrants. The right is motivated by hatred. I think far too many people, obviously that's not my view, but I think some liberal immigration advocates get locked in that view that the only reason why J.D.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he's motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance. And the point that I've tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how do we form the kind of society, again, where people can raise families, where people join in institutions together, where
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
what I think Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant. And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive to the common good immigration at the levels and at the pace that we've seen over the last few years.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly. And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, it's, and I'm sure that New York Times listeners are going to be scandalized by this line of argumentation, but I think it's really important that in some ways the deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not adequate to the task of given what Joe Biden left us.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Now, there are different estimates here of how many illegal immigrants came in under the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million?
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
There are two things that we can do. I think one thing is a little bit easier and one thing is a little bit harder. And the first thing is you just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this possible. And again, I think that we should treat people humanely. I think we have an obligation to treat people humanely.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
But I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. And that requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more beds at deportation facilities. It just requires more of the basic nuts and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of deportation.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
That's one of the main things in the big, beautiful bill that is moving through Congress right now is more money for immigration enforcement. That's what that money is for, to facilitate that deportation infrastructure. There's a much more difficult question And I think you see the president's frustration.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I've obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process, okay?
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I think that what you've seen, and I remember when I was in law school, there were all of these people who were wanting to become immigration lawyers. There was almost a certain buzz around immigration law at the time because there was so much gray area, there was so much open space where the courts would interpret how to apply these rules.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Now, in the context of the United States in 2011, 2012, 2013, when I was in law school, We had significant illegal immigration, but not that much. There was this idea that you could use the asylum claim process and you could use the refugee process and you could use all of these other tools of the immigration enforcement regime to actually make it harder to deport illegal aliens.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Then what happened is a lot of very well-funded NGOs went about the process of making it much harder to deport illegal aliens. And that's what we inherited in the year of our Lord 2025 is a whole host of legal rules. And in some cases, not even legal rules as much as arguments that had made by left wing NGOs that hadn't actually been ruled on by the courts yet. Right.
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And what we're finding, of course, is that a small but substantial number of courts are just making it very, very hard for us to deport illegal aliens. And, you know, Stephen Miller, who, of course, is sort of our immigration czar in the White House, a good friend of mine, you know, he's thinking of all of these different and new statutory authorities, right?
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Because there are a lot of different statutory authorities the president has to enforce the nation's immigration laws. And there is candidly frustration on the White House side that we think that the law is very clear. We think the president has extraordinary plenary power.
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
Yes, you have to you need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are in fact illegal aliens, not American citizens. Right. But that it's not like we're just throwing that process out. We're trying to comply with it as much as possible and actually do the job that we were left. And I OK, but let me just make one final sort of philosophical point here.
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the district courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we're running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States. Principle one, of course, is that courts interpret the law. I think principle two is that the American people decide how they're governed, right?
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
That's the fundamental small D democratic principle that's at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And to be clear, it's not most courts, but I think what the Supreme Court has to do, and I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said, The role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That's one half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch.
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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for. And that's where we are right now. We're going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible.
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
And look, my hope is that when you ask what success is, success to me is not so much a number, though obviously I'd love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported. That actually is a secondary metric of success. Success to me is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with,
The Daily
A Conversation With Vice President Vance
and that we have the infrastructure to do that allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country. That, to me, is real success. But I think whether we're able to get there is a function, of course, of our efforts, but also of the courts themselves.
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The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
The more they get away from the actual food and into the convenience of the packaging, the better they do, Robert Mosko, a food industry analyst who works at the investment bank T.D. Cowan, told me. But many chemicals used in industrial processing can taste unpleasant, metallic, or bitter.
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The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Flavour companies like the US-based International Flavours and Fragrances create masking compounds to cover up those off-notes. But those chemicals, it turns out, can taste weird too. The industry's solution is masking compounds that cover up the tastes of the original masking compounds. I feel like I'm constantly defending big food, Stucky told me when I brought up the industry's history.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
And perhaps she is right to be. Eating is more convenient now, and it can be cheap. Poor harvests don't have nearly the same impact that they might have in the past.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Breakthroughs in processing that made possible products like dehydrated chicken soups, frozen French fries and Jell-O instant puddings helped reduce domestic burdens on, for the most part, women, many of whom then entered the workforce. In 1947, at a time when food processing was in its early days, Americans were spending nearly a quarter of their disposable incomes on food.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Last year that figure was only 11%. And inflation was running high. The trade-off is obesity. Caloric consumption per capita in the United States has plateaued since 2000, while Americans have slightly intensified their physical activity. At the same time, the obesity rate has swelled by more than a third. Probably the culprit is the food.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Ultra-processed products, the consumption of which has increased over the last 25 years, are often highly refined and rich in starch and sugar. We digest them quickly in the stomach and small intestine before they get to the colon, which is home to the gut microbiome.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
As emerging research shows, when we eat unprocessed or minimally processed foods, our gut bacteria consume as much as 22% of the energy. With ultra-processed products, our bodies soak up all 100% of the calories. Right now, the industry's adaptation to a Zempic is in its infancy. A few companies have tested the waters.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Nestle, for example, has started a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1s called Vital Pursuit. Frozen pizzas, sandwich melts, and chicken balls with a sharper focus on smaller portions. But reliable data about how GLP-1s reshape people's likes and dislikes is yet to come.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
While Ozempic is threatening to turn off the industrial palette, Madsen believes that industrial foods may just need to be tweaked. Though many ultra-processed foods and drinks turn off a lot of GLP-1 users, some are breaking through.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
On GLP-1 forums, people celebrate Fairlife, a line of sweet protein shakes owned by Coca-Cola, and Mattson has already dreamed up an arsenal of other potential winners. In a glass-walled conference room, Mattson scientists prepared for me some of its foods tailored to GLP-1 users that are currently being conceptualized.
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Amanda Sinrod, a senior food scientist in a white lab coat, placed a plate of soft brown cubes on the table. She explained that she had enriched each nourish-fit brownie bite with two grams of whey protein for maintaining lean muscle mass during rapid weight loss. A peanut butter swirl would push that protein level even higher.
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Whey protein can have a grainy texture and chalky off-notes, but the nourish fits were defectless, smooth and sweet, with remote echoes of cocoa. Approximately one-third sugar and about 15% fat, the bite-sized portions were self-limiting, Sinrod said. Servings could be packaged individually. Then there was a chicken stick, wrapped in see-through plastic, that looked like a riff on string cheese.
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A supercharged mozzarella stick, Sinrod said. It had thirteen grams of protein, and its grill lines were real. For now. To scale up, the quadrilage or char marks might be faked using caramel colouring. It was a grown-up rendition of a classic kid's snack, Sinrod said, that an adult could throw in a purse. It tasted, felicitously, of citrus. GLP-1 users report craving fresh, acidic flavours.
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A small cardboard tub of salty freeze-dried chicken soup was followed by no-carb tacos, also chicken, with an endive leaf taking the role of the tortilla. Taco Bell could go for this, said Stucky, who was sitting on the other side of the table and watching me eat. To wash it down, a translucent, protein-shaken, psychedelic purple with lashings of sweetener and lingering medicinal notes of berry.
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There were other snacks, too, that were at an even more embryonic stage, including burges, a blend of frozen vegetables and seasonings to jazz up turkey meat, a two-ounce portion of yogurt that you could squeeze from a pouch like baby puree,
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strawberry sensation, mango magic, blueberry bliss, each six grams of protein, and something called satiety gum in four flavors, crisp green apple, watermelon fresh mint, cinnamon red hot mama, and minty fresh metabolism. Myazempic-optimized banquet was fine. It was fine, but compared with ripe Rainier cherries, I feared Larry Wins might have found it a little dull.
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The mild flavor profiles and engineered textures of Mattson's inventions were similar to existing packaged foods like Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson grilled and ready chicken strips. Were products like this enough, I wondered, to break through a zempic's defenses and excite people whose relationship to food has been turned on its head? GLP-1 drugs change far more than our metabolic processes.
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There are GLP-1 receptors in the hypothalamus, the area that regulates hunger and signals fullness, and in the brain's dopamine reward system, the primitive, so-called reptilian desire circuitry involved with addictive behaviors.
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It seems that GLP-1s, by regulating the release of dopamine, may make the flavor profiles of ultra-processed products, many of which have been optimized to stimulate the brain's reward system, less appealing. Does Ozempic shatter the illusion that junk tastes good by turning down the dopamine hit? Data is lacking.
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The drugs, said Gerhardt, the Michigan food addiction researcher, are still a black box. Mattson is betting on convenience winning out. Although Larry Wins is now buying mainly fruits and vegetables, he still turns to healthy choice frozen meals in a pinch. That's no surprise to Bob Nolan, a senior vice president at ConAgra Brands, the line's owner and a Mattson client.
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As people eat less, he wages, the value of convenience will grow. You're probably not going to want to be in the kitchen prepping an elaborate meal to just have a few bites, Nolan told me. Eating fewer calories makes it harder to obtain the nutrients we need, said Auerbach, the Mattson relationship manager. So selling products pumped full of protein and fiber makes sense.
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Given Big Food's track record, it's likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they're too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective.
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Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment. Companies could end up counteracting the drugs to some degree in their efforts to make foods more rewarding, she said. I asked Mattson's chief executive, Justin Schimmack, an easygoing Ursine, Minnesota native with a Ph.D.
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in food science, if he worried about that possibility. Schimmack's first job, before he drove his motorcycle from the Midwest to California, was working for General Mills on Lucky Charms. Foams are his forte. He helped invent the chemical formulas that make marshmallows change color or reveal hidden images upon their contact with milk. But making GLP-1 products for Shimmock is also personal.
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He has struggled with his weight since childhood. Near the beginning of this year, he started taking a GLP-1 drug. His food noise, the droning monotone of want that torments many who end up on the drugs, has since vanished, along with more than 50 pounds. He no longer craves sugary lattes.
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Shimmick, who is in talks with the biggest of the big food companies about designing GLP-1 optimized products, said he was not anxious about big foods trying to overwhelm the brains of GLP-1 users with hyper-rewarding compounds. "'Taste and pleasure are very important,' said Shimmick, who seemed to be choosing his words carefully, but not the only thing."
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There is an honest desire in the industry, he added, to support people in their weight loss journeys. Schimmick wouldn't say which companies he is speaking to about GLP-1 products. We are professional secret keepers, he said. Stucky had her team think about companies that might be a natural fit for their optimized creations for GLP-1 users.
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As I was finishing up my Ozempic-inspired lunch, they started throwing around ideas. Could the Nourish Fit brownie become a high-protein cake mix sold by Betty Crocker, the General Mills brand? Or Hostess, Stucky said, could easily start a GLP-1 line. Nobody would know it was from Hostess.
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Because GLP-1 side effects include gastrointestinal issues, how about reaching out to General Mills, the owner of Fiber One, Stuckey said, and offering to help it design products targeted to GLP-1 users. A 40-something restaurant owner from Pennsylvania had explained to his fellow participants in the Mattson Focus Group that since starting on Wegovy, he now has to force himself to eat.
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Beef jerky is one thing that's just about bearable, But his fiber levels are way down. So Stucky suggested a jerky infused with a fiber source. Maybe inulin? Maybe psyllium husk? That is a really disgusting idea, she said. But we're good at making things taste good.
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Trinian Taylor, a 52-year-old car dealer, pushed his cart through the aisles of a supermarket as I pretended not to follow him.
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It was a bright August day in Northern California, and I had come to the store to meet Emily Auerbach, a relationship manager at Mattson, a food innovation firm that creates products for the country's largest food and beverage companies, McDonald's and White Castle, PepsiCo and Hostess.
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Auerbach was trying to understand the shopping behavior of Ozempic users, and Taylor was one of her case studies. She instructed me to stay as close as I could without influencing his route around the store. In her experience of shop-alongs, too much space or taking photos would be a red flag for the supermarket higher-ups who might figure out we were not here to shop.
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They'd be like, you need to exit, she said. Auerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $150 in exchange for being tailed, propelled his cart through snack aisles scattered with products from Mattson's clients. He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess Ho-Hos without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos.
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We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey's Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lays. They all barely registered. Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor's happy place, the produce section. He inspected the goods. "'I'm on all of these,' he told us.
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"'I eat a lot of pineapple, a lot of pineapple cucumber, ginger, oh, a lot of ginger.' "'Taylor, who lives in Haywood, California, used to nurse a sugar addiction,' he said, but he can no longer stomach hostess treats. A few days earlier his daughter fed him some candy. "'I just couldn't,' he said. "'It was so sweet it choked me.'
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His midnight snack used to be cereal, but now he stirs at night with strange urges, salads, chicken. He has sworn off canned sodas and fruit juices and infuses his water with lemon and cucumber. He dropped a heavy bag of lemons into the cart and sauntered over to the leafy vegetables. I love Swiss chard, he said. I eat a lot of kale.
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For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can't stop eating. And now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in Ozempic, as in Wegovy, Zepbound, and several other similar new drugs, mimics a natural hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1, that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain.
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Around 7 million Americans now take a GLP-1 drug, and Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2035, the number of US users could expand to 24 million. That's more than double the number of vegetarians and vegans in America, with ample room to balloon from there.
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More than 100 million American adults are obese, and the drugs may eventually be rolled out to people without diabetes or obesity as they seem to tame addictions beyond food, appearing to make cocaine, alcohol, and cigarettes more resistible. Research is at an early stage, but they may also cut the risk of everything from stroke and heart and kidney disease to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
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The prospect of tens of millions of people cutting their caloric intake down to roughly 1,000 per day, which is half the minimum amount recommended for men, is unsettling the industry. Late last year, Lars Frogaard Jürgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food industry executives have been calling him. They are scared about it, he said.
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Around the same time, Walmart's chief executive in the United States, John Ferner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet, baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn.
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By one market research firm's estimate, food and drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before. Ozempic users like Taylor aren't just eating less, they're eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite, but to rewrite people's desires.
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They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palette. The set of preferences created by acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives.
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Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultra-processed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn't find in an ordinary kitchen. Colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners, and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.
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Mugovie destroyed my taste buds, a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding, and I love it. The day before I followed Taylor around the supermarket, I sat in on a focus group facilitated by Mattson's Consumer Insights team, listening to people describe how the weight loss drugs have transformed their cravings.
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Larry Wins, a 69-year-old from Pittsburgh, Kansas, who joined via video call, described being emptied of desire for what he used to love. Before Wegovy, said Wins, who is now thirty-five pounds lighter than he was in the spring, his whole life was fast foods. Now, my first place I hit when I get to the store is produce, he said. My favourite is Mount Rainier cherries and apples, peaches, pears.
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Most of the other participants felt like that. Almost everyone's cravings for ultra-processed foods had been replaced with a lust for fresh and unpackaged alternatives. A 32-year-old scientist who works in a university chemistry department spoke about discovering, for the first time, the true flavor of food. "'Celery tastes like celery,' she told the group, "'and carrot tastes like carrot.
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"'Strawberry tastes like strawberry. "'Since taking Wegovy,' she said, "'I just started to realize that they taste wonderful by themselves.' Kathleen Kenney, a 54-year-old who runs a sword-fighting school in Kansas City, Missouri, said at the focus group that she has always been heavy. "'I was the child of people who lived through the Depression,' she told me later.
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"'A clean-your-plate kind of family. With the help of a sequence of different weight-loss drugs, Kenney has lost more than 100 pounds.' And it has been easy, she said, because the treatments have transformed her experience of flavor and mouthfeel. A ho-ho no longer seems like food. It tastes plasticky, she said, or feels plasticky in my mouth.
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Freed from her addiction, Kenny believes that she can now taste the true ho-ho. She can perceive what hostess treats loaded with sugar actually are. Jennifer Pagano, Matson's Director of Insights and Artificial Intelligence, was leading the focus group. It sounds like, you know, I'm hearing from all of you, it's the simple pleasures of food, food in its natural state, she said. Interesting.
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Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands and figure out how to adjust. The whole field is still a little stunned, Ashley Gearhart, a food addiction researcher and psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told me over the phone.
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But for Mattson, which for nearly 50 years has invented products for the nation's biggest food conglomerates, the Ozempic threat could be a boon. I first walked into Mattson's glassy facility by the San Francisco airport on a beautiful Bay Area morning this summer.
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Barb Stuckey, the company's chief innovation and marketing officer, who describes herself as a hyper-taster and whose tongue can detect changes in barometric pressure, greeted me in the hall carrying an armful of milk cartons. I followed her through the lab, past scientists experimenting with gummies and blitzing high-protein smoothies and carrot soup, out back to the trophy wall.
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On the shelves were rows of packages and bottles for products that Mattson had either dreamed up or helped scale and shepherd to market. There were deep-fried chocolate hostess Twinkies— Not something I would put in my body, Stuckey said. Hungry man frozen meals, and a raise of frozen entrees, ice creams, and condiments from America's largest brands.
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We invent the future of food, one product at a time, read a sign on the wall. Big food is practiced at spotting perverse openings for new products in our faddish drives for self-improvement. In 1978, for example, Heinz bought Weight Watchers, added products like Cheesecake, and made a tidy profit. That acquisition heralded a trend of health-conscious rebranding that peaked in the 1980s and 90s.
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Nestle started Lean Cuisine, and Chef America began selling Lean Pockets alongside its Hot Pockets. The difference between the two was roughly 30 calories. Conagra Brands introduced Healthy Choice, a diet-conscious frozen entree brand. McDonald's made McLean Deluxe hamburgers. Nabisco came out with Snack Will's fat-free cookies.
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The public's obsession with weight loss has led to the industry's concocting some very weird substances. In 1996, PepsiCo released potato chips fried in an indigestible fat substitute called Olestra that miraculously had zero calories. One problem, Olestra impeded the absorption of essential vitamins. Another, it caused fecal incontinence.
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The substance is now used to paint decks and lubricate power tools. By the time the owner of Carl's Jr. and Cinnabon got around to buying the rights to the Atkins diet in 2010, interest in fad diets was starting to wane, and big food pivoted.
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The industry increasingly pushed foods enhanced with protein and fiber, or with herbs and minerals and antioxidants and vitamins, a trend that continues today, despite scant evidence that eating ultra-processed products infused with individual nutrients makes people healthier. There is little the industry hasn't tried to keep health-conscious consumers eating.
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Companies conceal clouds of nostalgic aromas into packaging to trigger Proustian reverie. When they discovered that noisier chips induced people to eat more of them, snack engineers turned up the crunch. Food technologists found a way to amplify the intensity of artificial sweeteners to hundreds of times beyond sugar's natural flavor.
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The structure of salt crystals can be altered to accelerate the speed at which they absorb into chemical pathways that signal saltiness, allowing the brain to perceive the flavor more intensely. In the chemosensory world, says Dan Wesson, the director of the Florida Chemical Senses Institute, referring to the science of how chemicals provoke sensations, almost anything is possible.
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Dullness has its uses, too. Companies make products like potato chips, popcorn, and mac and cheese meals bland on purpose to bypass sensory-specific satiety, the feeling when strongly flavored foods become less desirable as they are eaten.
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Big food plumbed behavioral research for clues to how the brain's reward system reacts to sugar and salt, using it to keep products tickling the bliss point, the height of delight. But there is no equivalent bliss point for fat. Fortunately for the industry, people tend to want as much fat as they can get.
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Scientists can engineer fats to melt at precisely the right temperature in the mouth, sparking the release of dopamine while creating an impression of vanishing caloric density. A Cheeto, disintegrating innocently on the tongue, tells us it contains fewer calories than it does.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Before the recent news emerged, my own opinion of Munro's fiction could hardly have been higher. She seemed to have a more direct access to reality than any of her contemporaries, whose work, by comparison, could feel contrived and paper-thin.
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It had been several years since I last picked up her books, but my memory was of paragraphs as thick with life, with fleeting earthly data, as the background of a Bruegel. In one story, set in the 1930s, a poor family has a bathroom installed in the corner of their kitchen, the only place it will fit.
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The walls are made of beaver board so that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. This leads to an unspoken agreement whereby no one ever seemed to hear or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.
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It's a short aside, but it contains, in miniature, so many of Munro's great themes. Family, shame, strategic silences, the open secret of the body and its needs. When I went back to the stories this summer, full of the same anger I saw coursing around the internet, I was afraid I would find them, as Mackay described, like half-realized confessions, misshapen, off-balance, chaotic with grief.
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Instead, I was struck by their utter composure. In the work Munro produced after learning what happened to her daughter, she seems to bear down on her horror and disgust with an implacable resolve. The struggle is made clear in an unpublished letter to her agent and close friend, Virginia Barber, dated May 1993, which was among her papers at the University of Calgary.
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I thought I'd write and tell you the fate of the latest story, because it's usually hard to talk frankly on the phone. I've been working on it, the story, since March, and it's about the subject, though thoroughly disguised and all pretty effectively constructed.
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I could do all the parts, but the central thing, and when I approached that, and I tried from various angles, I got sick, I mean really throwing up, and felt very bleak. This has happened three or four times, and I realized finally I might sort of break apart. So I burned it, not to be tempted to go on.
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That's where matters stand now, and I'm just gingerly, no pun, trying to start something else and regain my equilibrium, which I can do. But Monroe, it appears, did go on with a story about the subject. Vandals, which appeared in the New Yorker five months later, is a clear-eyed meditation on willful blindness and the tragedies it can precipitate.
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Be doubt, an aging divorcee has fallen for a man named Ladner. an army veteran with a mile-wide misanthropic streak. There is something in Bea, some hidden primal wound, that responds to Ladner's harshness. Certain women, she muses, thinking of herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them.
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Ladner lives in gothic isolation on a remote tract of land which he has transformed into a nature preserve full of taxidermied animals. Most people are shooed away, but he makes an exception for two young children, Liza and Kenny, a neglected sister and brother who live across the road and often come to play on his property.
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The pair have lost their mother, and when Bea, who is childless, starts to live there, she becomes a highly welcome stand-in. At moments, the four of them seem almost like a family. The reality is otherwise. With tremendous subtlety, Monroe reveals to us that Ladner has been sexually abusing Liza for years.
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Bee, whose perspective we inhabit for the first part of the story, seems not to notice what is happening. It is only when we shift to Liza's point of view that the truth starts coming into focus, though even then Munro inhabits the child's defenceless confusion. In a crucial scene, Ladner makes fun of Bea behind her back, imitating the clumsy way she plods into a lake.
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It is a performance intended for Liza's eyes only, a way of signalling that it is her, not Bea, with whom he shares the greater intimacy. When Bea looks around and sees what he is doing, Liza is distraught. It seemed to her that Bea would have to go away. How could she stay after such an insult? How could she put up with any of them? But Bea goes nowhere.
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Her obsessive dependency keeps her tethered to Ladner. It also thwarts Liza's unvoiced hope that Bea will somehow rescue her, or at least find a way to keep Ladner in check. She could spread safety if she wanted to, the child desperately thinks. Surely she could do it. If only she could turn herself into somebody firm and serious.
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A hard and fast, clean-sweeping sort of woman whose love was deep and sensible. It doesn't happen. Years later, in an act of vengeance, Liza comes by Bea and Ladner's house when the couple aren't at home and trashes the place. She goes about it methodically, pouring out liquor on the floor and trampling Ladner's taxidermied birds as though composing her masterpiece.
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Liza's poise is emblematic of the story as a whole, which unflappably narrates a more intangible destruction, that of her childhood self. What makes vandals so unbearably poignant, Liza's need and Bea's failure to protect her, is the same thing that now makes it so enraging.
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The empathy Munro showers on her fictional child was apparently withheld from her real one, an operation that she seems to have considered fundamental to her work as a writer. In an early story, Munro describes a fiction writer ambivalently as someone who has figured out what to do about everything they run across in this world, what attitude to take, how to ignore or use things.
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It's clear from her letter to Barber that Munro was just such a person, going quickly to work on a personal tragedy and extracting what was usable. Whatever else vandals may reveal or conceal, it is clearly a product of authority and control, qualities Munro spent her whole life chasing.
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Monroe grew up as a hostage to circumstance in Wingham, Ontario, where the Victorian age, she once remarked, ended only with World War II. Her mother was a puritanical control freak, full of voguish ideas about child-rearing. One of them involved administering enemas to regulate her daughter's bowel movements. Monroe resented all forms of coercion and often acted out.
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In the early 1940s, when her mother started showing the first signs of Parkinson's disease, fatigue, tremors, and a tripwire temper, their frequent quarrels grew explosive. Monroe's father, who raised foxes for their fur, will be summoned to adjudicate. Sheila Munro, in her poignant and illuminating memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, 2001, describes these parental courts martial.
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What my mother found most painful was her perception that a story was being told on me that wasn't true, and that she was never allowed to tell her side of the story. Munro was sometimes violently beaten, an early lesson in the power of narrative and the danger of losing control of it.
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Writer was hardly a plausible career for someone raised in rural poverty in Depression-era Wingham, especially a girl. People never asked, Am I happy? Munro later said of the place where she grew up. Self-fulfillment wasn't a concept. She began writing anyway, cannibalizing her indecorous origins.
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Her early work, published while she was raising a family in Vancouver, was assured but undistinguished. The deaths of her parents, her mother in 1959 and her father in 1976, cleared the way for a new candor and artistic leaps forward. In Royal Beatings from 1977, her first story to appear in The New Yorker, she evokes the thrashings she received as a child and the wounded reveries that followed.
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She will never speak to them. She will never look at them with anything but loathing. She will never forgive them, Rose, the protagonist, thinks of her parents. She will punish them. She will finish them. Encased in these finalities and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort beyond herself, beyond responsibility.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
This fantasy of total retribution, Monroe suggests with typical shrewdness, is how Rose consoles herself for what she has just been through. The story is more compassionate than Rose's fantasy, but still it carries a retributive sting. Monroe was finally telling her side. Many of her characters struggle to tell theirs.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
In Wild Swans, published the following year, a teenage Rose is on a train alone to Toronto when a minister climbs aboard and sits down beside her. Feigning sleep, he puts a hand on her leg. Rose is paralyzed, feeling both arousal and disgust as the man proceeds to sexually molest her. She was careful of her breathing, Munro writes. She could not believe this.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Victim and accomplice, she was born past Glasgow's jams and marmalades, past the big pulsating pipes of oil refineries. The story is acute about Rose's psychology. In the prudish atmosphere of her family home, she has learned to be ashamed of her desire, a subject that is taboo.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
It is this that has conditioned her to see herself like Liza in Vandals, as partly to blame for what is happening, both victim and accomplice. Her susceptibility to abuse is also a susceptibility to other people's narratives. This wasn't the first time Munro wrote about unwanted sexual contact.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
One of her first works of fiction, Story for Sunday, published in her college literary magazine, features a girl who is kissed on the lips by the superintendent of her Sunday school. She, too, is unexpectedly aroused. In the title story from Munro's second book, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, the sexually curious teenage heroine is groomed by the boyfriend of her family's boarder.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Whether these episodes are based on real-life experience, like the physical abuse at the heart of Royal Beatings, has become a subject of intense speculation. When an interviewer once asked Munro if her work was autobiographical, she replied, I guess I have a standard answer to this. In incident, no. In emotion, completely. In incident, up to a point, too.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who was one of Munro's friends, told me she thought it very, very likely that Munro was sexually abused as a girl, if only because sexual abuse is so common. Peeping Toms and Gropers on Trains, Atwood wrote to me, were a dime a dozen in what she called the Dark Ages. In small towns like Wingham, there was a social imperative to keep such things private.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Everybody knew stuff about other people, Atwood said. What you most feared was being shamed and ridiculed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Munro's stories themselves. Her abused young women invariably keep quiet. Monroe married her first husband, Jim, a classmate at the University of Western Ontario, in 1951, when she was twenty.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Jim was from a well-off family in Oakville, near Toronto, and he promised his bride an escape from the social world she grew up in. they shared a passion for art and literature but his undisguised disdain for her working-class origins he was always correcting her huron county accent was an ongoing source of tension munro chafed against the conventions of their suburban existence in vancouver
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Life was very tightly managed as a series of permitted recreations, permitted opinions, and permitted ways of being a woman, she said in an interview decades after they were divorced. The only outlet, I thought, was flirting with other people's husbands at parties. Monroe and Jim were both energetically unfaithful. When Andrea was born in 1967, the marriage was already on the rocks.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Not enough jelly on the diaphragm was how Munro explained the timing to her two elder daughters. Writing was Munro's vocation. Mothering was not. I'm terribly grateful that I had them, she once said of her daughters, yet I have to realize I probably wouldn't have had them if I had the choice. Sheila Munro's memoir would appear to bear this out.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The book is a portrait of unbending dedication to literature, a child's eye view of a stubbornly turned back. Munro, we learn, often wrote in the laundry room surrounded by domestic impedimenta—washer, dryer, ironing board— She snatched time for her fiction between household chores or while Sheila and her sisters were napping or at school.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She had to write, not only to write, but to write a masterpiece. And how could she possibly write a masterpiece with me dragging her fingers off the typewriter keys or pulling the pencil out of her hand, reads a starkly symbolic passage. Come and see, I would command, come and see. And she would fend me off with one hand while keeping her other hand on the keys.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Monroe had made a conscious decision to be the opposite kind of mother from her own, whom she saw, according to Sheila, as moralistic, demanding, smothering, and emotionally manipulative. And almost nothing was off limits for discussion. Haircuts and facelifts, friendships and love affairs.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
With her mother, Sheila felt, I could get places of insight and awareness and wonder that I could reach with no one else. But as she said to me recently, she has come to feel she misread the intimacy they shared.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Though her mother was deeply interested in the stories Sheila told her as she entered adulthood, she seemed to relate to them more as narratives than as events in the life of her eldest child. The point was to talk about everything and reveal everything, not to come up with a solution, Sheila said to me, describing her mother's attitude.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
You use up your childhood, Monroe told the Paris Review in 1994. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. What it's like to be used by your mother in this way is something we learn from Sheila's memoir, in which she says she has trouble distinguishing personal memories from her mother's fiction.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Monroe story. In the mid-1970s, Around the time Monroe was starting her relationship with Fremlin, she offered Sheila some candid advice about a boy she was dating, a brash undergraduate who had taken a creative writing class with Monroe.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
"'The point is you have to withdraw attention, either as a tactic or to save yourself,' Monroe wrote in a letter. "'As long as you're there suffering and bitching, but there, hung up on him, the situation is not going to change.' Being in love that way just isn't good. There must be a better, self-sufficient way to love. I'm preaching to myself as well as you. Get so you don't need him.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Work at it. Then of course he may come back all humbled and interested. Women like us have got to get away from emotional dependency or life is just one dreary, man-made seesaw. For Monroe, at least, emotional dependency was not so easily shrugged off.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Monroe and Fremlin first crossed paths in the late 1940s, when they knew each other slightly at the University of Western Ontario, enough at least for Monroe to develop a crush. Fremlin, an Air Force veteran who flew bombing missions over Germany, was a few years older than the other students.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
With his outspoken atheism and moody good looks, Fremlin struck Monroe as a byronic figure, full of danger and allure. After graduating, he sent her a fan letter about a story she published in the campus literary magazine, though to Monroe's disappointment, the message carried zero trace of romantic intent. By then she was already engaged to Jim.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
More than twenty years went by before she saw Fremlin again. By that point in the aftermath of her marriage, Munro had taken a short-term job as a writer in residence at her alma mater and was living near campus with Andrea, who was seven, and her middle daughter, Jenny, who was sixteen. Sheila, then twenty-one, was working at the bookstore that Munro and Jim had opened in Victoria.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
After a national radio interview, in which Munro mentioned that she was back in Western Ontario, she received a call from Fremlin, who asked her if she wanted to meet up. During a three-martini lunch, Munro learned that Fremlin had recently moved back to Clinton, his hometown, a half-hour drive from Wingham. He had never married or lived with a woman.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
We rapidly became very well acquainted, she later recalled, probably a euphemism. I think we were talking about living together by the end of the afternoon. Before long, she moved into Framlin's childhood home, a white Victorian gingerbread cottage with a garden full of maple trees, where he was caring for his elderly mother.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Like Munro, Fremlin was from modest circumstances, a deep source of connection for the couple. He seems to have been something like the opposite of his precursor, brusque and eccentric, where Jim was staid and genteel. It was this stick-it-up-your-ass-let's-cut-through-the-bullshit kind of attitude, Sheila said of Fremlin, whom she compared to Ladner from Vandals.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
When Bea first meets Ladner, she's in a relationship with a well-meaning high school teacher named Peter Parr, whose idea it is to drive out and take a look at Ladner's nature preserve. They are told to go away, in no uncertain terms. Peter, with his geniality and good intentions, is instantly eclipsed.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Trying to explain the phenomenon in a letter to a friend, Bea writes that she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage, because wasn't that the way in all the dreary romances? Some brute gets the woman tingling, and then it's goodbye to Mr. Fine and Decent. A few days later she is driving back to see Ladner on her own.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She had to feel sorry for herself in her silk underwear. Her teeth chattered. She pitied herself for being a victim of such wants. Monroe referred to Fremlin as her second husband, but in fact they were never legally married. Instead, the couple staged what Sheila called a mock wedding in their backyard, at which Monroe wore denim overalls and a white veil. It's unclear if anyone attended.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The sardonic gesture seems typical of their relationship, which might better be described as a cult of two. Munro suffered from a deep shame at having grown up in poverty. The plaudits she received from the outside world did little to alleviate it, Andrea believes, because they were all conditioned on her talent as a writer.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Only Fremlin, Munro felt, accepted her untransfigured self, the working-class girl with a country accent. The reverse side of acceptance was dependency. Sheila detected a power imbalance in her mother's relationship with Fremlin. Though the couple shared a passion for literature and a caustic sense of humor, they were also prone to vicious arguments.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She would be wearing sunglasses, just quietly weeping at things he had said to her, Sheila recalled. She got the sense that Fremlin often criticized Monroe's appearance. Sometimes I wondered if he harbored an aversion to the mature woman's body that he couldn't always conceal, Sheila told me.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Once in the late seventies, she arrived for a visit only to be told by her mother that the two of them, Alice and Sheila, were going to stay at a hotel. That night in their shared room, Sheila could hear her mother crying in bed.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Jenny, who wrote her own essay for The Star, remembers that there was lots of banter and jokes, often sexual or scatological jokes, between Framlin and his youngest stepdaughter. "'Mum would feign shock,' she wrote. "'I could feel the tension and darkness there. Her mum seemed helpless to ever draw the line.' In a letter to Jenny in 1992, Fremlin gave his own account of the triangle.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
We had a sort of a pedagogical theory to the effect that Andrea was a person, not a child, i.e. not a child as we were children in a very repressive adult world. The general idea was that no subjects, questions, or language were barred.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Fremlin's rhetoric echoes that of a counter-cultural movement in the 1970s that called for the sexual liberation of children and is now regarded as a bad-faith effort to mainstream paedophilia.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
"'In front of my mother,' Andrea wrote in The Star, "'he told me that many cultures in the past weren't as prudish as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults.'
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Premlin acknowledged that his sexual preferences were not in accordance with the canons of public respectability, as he put it in one of the letters he sent to Monroe's family in 1992. "'It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure,' he wrote. "'If she were, in fact, afraid, she could have left at any time. She was sexually receptive and mildly aggressive.'
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
While the scene is degenerate, this is indeed Lolita and Humbert, for Andrea to say she was scared is simply a lie or a latter-day invention. Andrea was not the only child Fremlin targeted. This August, an Ontario woman named Jane Morrie, whose parents were friends with Fremlin, told the Toronto Star that he exposed himself to her in 1969, when she was nine.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The incident followed years of grooming, she said. Andrea believes there may have been others. Fremlin owned a cabin in the Ottawa Valley, and he and Munro would sometimes take Andrea to stay there in the summers. One year she got to know a group of siblings who lived nearby, the youngest of whom a girl was around her age.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Andrea suspects that these were the children with whom Fremlin had friendships, as Munro put it in 1992. How much did Munro know? Andrea remembers another couple who were friends of Fremlin's contacting Munro around 1978 to inform her that he had exposed himself to their fourteen-year-old daughter. Fremlin denied it, but it's unclear how reassured Munro really was.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
In 2008, a few years after Thacker's biography appeared, Munro confessed to him that she had sometimes entertained dark thoughts about her partner. According to Andrea, Munro came to suspect that Fremlin was responsible for the rape and murder of Lynn Harper, a 12-year-old girl whose body was discovered in a woodlot near Clinton in 1959.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Though Munro later learned that Framlin had been elsewhere, the fact remains. She thought he had it in him. Whatever thoughts she entertained, Monroe never acted on them. Instead, they were sublimated in her fiction. Like Bea in Vandals, she was unable to become someone firm and serious, a hard and fast, clean-sweeping sort of woman.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
When Andrea first read the story around the time that it came out, and later saw the title of the book it was collected in, Open Secrets, 1994, she felt briefly hopeful that her mother had begun to reckon with what happened. I thought it was perhaps a route to more truth-telling. A step, she told me.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
When this proved not to be the case, she came to feel her mother's fiction was something like the reverse. A way of sustaining a life built on lies. In a Substack essay this summer, the novelist and critic Mary Gatesgill, who has written of her own experience of sexual abuse, posited that Monroe composed Vandals as a kind of alternate reality healing, and not just for herself.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Sometimes the inability to deal with a real situation turbocharges the need to deal with it in some other way, which can drive the making of art that is gloriously transpersonal. Like so many of Munro's stories, Vandals seems to give us back our lives more abundantly by naming the world and resensitizing our perceptions of it. Fiction is autonomous and irreducible.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
You can't judge it by how faithfully it sticks to what really happened. In fact, by granting us access to other minds, the best fiction tends to show that what really happened is always an unstable compound of perspectives. This summer, when I began talking to Sheila Munro, she cautioned me that trying to understand her mother's experience through her work was a dubious project.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Honestly, she wrote to me, I feel the only person who could answer those questions is my mother herself, and perhaps she couldn't have either. For me, the importance of the stories is in what they say about human experience in general, specifically women's experience, rather than for what they say about my mother herself.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The complexity of things, the things within things, just seems to be endless, Monroe once said. It is a fine artistic credo. In the context of the recent revelations, it also has the feeling of an alibi. By disguising herself as Bea, who is not Liza's real mother and therefore bears a lesser duty to protect her, Monroe seems to perform what Gateskill calls a genteel elision of reality.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
That's not to say the story would necessarily have been better or even more truthful had Monroe stuck more closely to the facts, but it does sharpen our awareness of how often in her work she seems to massage or euphemize an intolerable reality. Labour Day dinner from 1981 is a vivid case in point.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Roberta, another of Munro's embattled divorcees, has recently moved in with George, a retired high school teacher who is busily renovating an old farmhouse. Roberta's two daughters, Angela, 17, and Eva, 12, are visiting for the summer. They spend the rest of the year with their father up north. This domestic setup is tense and provisional.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
George makes barbed remarks about Roberta's appearance, which leave her weeping behind sunglasses. She senses that he sees her daughters as spoiled freeloaders, refusing to help out around the house and garden. The girls, meanwhile, are wary of George, who is trigger-happy with belittling jokes. They are also grieved by his effect on their mother.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
I have seen her change, Angela confides to her diary, which Roberta has read, from a person I deeply respected into a person on the verge of being a nervous wreck. If this is love, I want no part of it. He wants to enslave her and us all, and she walks a tightrope, trying to keep him from getting mad. The story, you sense, walks its own tightrope between blindness and insight.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
It was written at a time when Monroe must have known she was married to a paedophile, but apparently still clung to the belief that he hadn't harmed her own daughters. It is remarkable to witness her at once planting and defusing this incendiary possibility.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She has been afraid sometimes that George would hurt her children, not physically, but by some turnabout, some revelation of dislike that they could never forget, Roberta thinks. Angela, the teenager who is tall and fair-haired and embarrassed by her recently acquired beauty, spars with George flirtatiously, but Roberta feels she is not the one in most danger.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
It is twelve-year-old Eva, with her claims of understanding, her hopes of all-round conciliation, who could be smashed and stranded. Understanding and conciliation are what the story ultimately deliver. When the narrative moves into George's consciousness, he is forgivenly humanized. We see that his frustration with Angela and Eva is really a frustration with their mother.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
He dislikes what he sees as her parental absenteeism, the way that she permits them to laze around the house all day. His critique of Roberta's mothering is rooted in a kind of fatherly concern. For all their quarreling, they are essentially aligned. He wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her, assure himself that no real damage has been done.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The story ends with the couple reconciled, at least for the time being, and Roberta's daughters unharmed. Like Vandals, Labor Day dinner is an autonomous work of art. Yet it also feels like a desperate piece of wish fulfillment. How badly Monroe must have wanted to believe that her partner was basically normal and decent.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
No, it wasn't a mistake, Roberta tells herself, musing on her divorce in a passage that echoes Monroe's words about Fremlin in 1975. Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it. In her fictional world, where she exercised total authority, it was possible to construct a version of events that supported this conviction. But Munro, it seems, was wise to her escapist tendencies.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The uses and abuses of narrative come in for special scrutiny in her work. In Material from 1974, the middle-aged narrator discovers a short story by her ex-husband Hugo, a well-known writer. It describes an episode from the early years of their marriage, when Hugo vindictively flooded the apartment of their downstairs neighbor, a low-rent prostitute named Dottie.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The narrator has every reason to dislike the story, and yet she can't help acknowledging its brilliance. There is Dottie, lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvellous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic. There is no getting around it. It is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She thinks about sending him an admiring letter, but when she sits down to write it, she suddenly sees the story differently, as somehow beside the point. Material, in other words, concerns an exquisite work of art that nonetheless feels hopelessly inadequate to the lived reality behind it.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The story doesn't just expose how someone who makes beautiful things may also be capable of unfathomable cruelty, a platitude at this point. More subtly, it shows how an artistic sensibility, a disposition to see other people as grist for transformation, can give rise to a frigid disengagement.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The narrator, who isn't herself an artist, displays something of the artist's coldness when she uses Dottie, who has lost her husband and is just barely scraping by, as anecdote fodder, a way of getting laughs from her sophisticated friends. When she gets to know Dottie better, the narrator tellingly finds that she becomes less likely to store up and repeat what she said.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The difference between this sort of storytelling and the more elaborate, socially valorized sort that her ex-husband goes in for, Monroe delicately implies, is not as profound as it seems. However finely wrought, Hugo's story has done nothing to atone for his hurtful deed. This isn't enough, Hugo, the narrator finds herself writing in a fit of anger. You think it is, but it isn't.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Perhaps the truly shocking thing about Munro's decision to remain with Fremlin is that it wasn't shocking at all. In her pioneering study, Father-Daughter Incest, 1981, the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman spoke to 40 women who were sexually abused by their fathers or stepfathers.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Those daughters who did confide in their mothers were uniformly disappointed in their mothers' responses, Herman writes. Most of the mothers, even when made aware of the situation, were unwilling or unable to defend their daughters. They were too frightened or too dependent upon their husbands to risk a confrontation.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Either they refused to believe their daughters or they believed them but took no action. They made it clear to their daughters that their fathers came first and that if necessary, the daughters would have to be sacrificed. Only three of the mothers decided to leave their abusive husbands, though in each case the women soon returned. They found life without them too hard to bear.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Margaret Atwood sees Munro's decision to return to Fremlin as a matter of dependency. She had a general inability to function on a practical level without him, Atwood said. Sheila Munro disagrees. It wasn't because she couldn't look after herself, she told me. It was because she was so deeply entwined in this very volatile relationship.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Stressing that she had no desire to make excuses for her mother, Sheila said she believed that Fremlin groomed Munro along with Andrea, citing the way Munro came to see her as a sexual rival. That's straight out of the abuser's playbook, Herman said recently, when I described Sheila's theory to her.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Seeing how even someone as gifted as Monroe was vulnerable to this kind of coercive control is instructive. In a letter to Virginia Barber from June 1992, Monroe reports that, after she fled their home in Clinton, Fremlin joined her at their Vancouver Island condo. The two of them were in couples therapy, she said, and progress, as they call it, is being made.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
At the time of writing, Monroe was laid up with laryngitis. I've almost welcomed being sick, because it dulls things. But the dips aren't so bad or so deep now, she wrote, expanding on her fragile state of mind. The very bad and surprising thing was how things you'd expect to be eternally comforting, I mean the beauty of the world and poetry and stuff, hurt worst.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
And what a great boon tabloids turned out to be. Coffee held its own, but booze is another fair-weather friend. Jerry is doing really well when you consider what a reversal and loss this had to be. Andrew's okay but doesn't want to be in touch with me now G is here. We'll see. It's still so raw. You never come out with a mended teapot looking like new. And I guess you're lucky if it holds the tea.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
See how Ms. M clings to the comfy domestic images. I feel very weirdly free, in a way. For so long I've felt oddly apologetic or strange with people, and now I feel I know what the trouble was. Do I? Odd. What kind of loss Munro is referring to is hard to discern. A loss of dignity or status? But the letter makes her priorities plain. Fremlin came first, Andrea second.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Munro said as much to Andrea. She said that she had been told too late, Andrea wrote in the Star. She loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own need, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Six months later, Munro and Fremlin made another trip to their condo, where, she wrote to Barber, they had lots of practical problems to take our mind off large griefs. One day she visited Victoria, a two-and-a-half-hour drive. Knowing I would not see Andrea, I cannot request this, though we are in touch by letter.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
It's up to her, and hoping I wouldn't do something awful and pathetic, like hanging around on her street. I didn't. By that point, she and Fremlin had abandoned therapy, which Sheila recalls they struggled to take seriously. They made a joke out of it, she told me. Jerry could be so captivating and amusing that the therapist was brought into the joke as well. They remained a cult of two.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She was not interested in therapy or self-improvement, in making amends, Sheila said. She just used her experience in her art. This was as true at the end of her career as it was at the start. The stories Munro wrote after Andrea cut off contact in 2002 are rife with the pain of estrangement.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
In Runaway, published in the New Yorker in 2003, the young protagonist Carla has broken all ties to her haute bourgeois family after marrying an older man named Clark, whose rough charisma it had once seemed both proper and exquisite to submit to. Three years in, his charisma has evaporated, and he stands revealed as a sour domestic tyrant who rules her with his moods.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
To sustain their fraying sexual bond, she becomes a kind of Scheherazade, inventing stories about an elderly neighbor who she claims molested her in the months before his death. The stories which Clark takes to be true do the trick of arousing them both, and their marriage is extended one evening at a time.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The problem comes when Clark insists that she blackmail the man's widow with this fabricated dirt. Afraid to defy him, but unwilling to go through with it, Carla ends up confiding in the widow how unhappy she is with Clark. The older woman talks her into leaving him.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The same day, Carla boards a bus to Toronto, within touching distance of a new life, when she realizes that it would have no meaning without Clark infecting her with misery. She goes back to him only to discover a short while later that he has killed her pet goat, a kind of surrogate child, in an apparent act of vengeance.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
My life has gone rosy again, Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation's leading writers, the previous few years were blighted by heartbreak and upheaval. A painful separation from her husband of two decades. A retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Unable to accept this reality and what it means for their marriage, Carla wills herself into a state of denial, which is where the story leaves her. You wonder what Fremlin made of Runaway and of the other stories about trapped women that Munro produced in her final years of creativity.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Were her efforts to portray him as a kind of saviour figure in the interviews she gave around this time a form of compensation for the less flattering picture she was painting in her fiction? Or was this double bookkeeping an expression of the same denial that the character Carla, a portrait of the artist as a desperate mythomaniac, embraces at the end of the story?
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Whatever the answer, Munro's relationship with Framlin enabled her to do her greatest work. that so much of that work now reads like an indictment of the relationship is a bit of paradox. Nabokov once said he felt the initial shiver of Lolita after reading a newspaper story about an ape who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing of a charcoaled by an animal.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. It appears that this was Monroe's subject too. Andrea has not read Runaway. But when I described the story to her and its depiction of a woman who fears that she would not exist without her stifling husband, she confessed to feeling a tremor of sympathy.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
I think she was so scared that she actually wouldn't exist without him, she said of her mother's relationship with Fremlin. At the same time, Andrea stressed that she does not forgive her mother and is indifferent to her legacy. For years after Fremlin's conviction, Andrea was estranged from her siblings.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
They were ultimately reunited with the help of the Gate House, a Toronto-based organization that supports survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In 2014, Jenny, Sheila, and Andrew, their stepbrother, went there seeking guidance on how to reconcile with Andrea. So ingrained was the silence around the story of her abuse that this was the first time the three of us had spoken about it.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Andrew wrote in his own essay for The Star, also published this summer. Each of the siblings wrote Andrea a letter, and their relationships were slowly rekindled. Today, Andrea is a regular volunteer at the Gatehouse, where she leads self-care groups. Her essay has been widely celebrated for raising awareness about childhood sexual abuse, which she now sees as her guiding mission.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Many people have compared the episode to an Alice Munro story, but unlike the characters in her mother's work, Andrea spoke up.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
A series of brief but bruising love affairs in which it seems Monroe could never quite make out the writing on the wall. This time it's real, she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. He's fifty, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing, grown up.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The man was Gerald Framlin, a retired civil servant and geographer who hailed from the same corner of Ontario as Monroe. They would be together for nearly 40 years, until Fremlin's death in 2013. His knowledge of Huron County, where most of Munro's fiction is set, became a vital resource for her work.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Monroe amassed a thicket of honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater, with its falling-down barns and burdensome old churches, into a stage for the whole human comedy, like Joyce's Dublin or Faulkner's Mississippi.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Never one to take herself too seriously, she housed her many awards in a revolving spice rack at her second home, a condo on Vancouver Island. Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it, Munro concluded in her letter about Fremlin. The judgment would prove premature.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
This July, two months after Monroe's death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in the Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Monroe and Fremlin at their home in Ontario.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
According to her parents' custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria, British Columbia, with her father, Jim Monroe, and his new wife. One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was nine years old. Fremlin warned Andrea not to tell her mother.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed, but when she returned to Victoria that fall, she confided in her stepbrother Andrew. Andrew told his mother, who then told Jim Monroe. Rather than alert his ex-wife, Jim instructed the family to stay quiet. He worried that the disclosure would wreck Monroe's new relationship, and that he would then be blamed.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The next summer, Andrea returned to Ontario, accompanied by her older sister Sheila, whom Jim charged with keeping Andrea safe. For years, Andrea did her best to make sure that she was never alone with Fremlin, she told me recently, but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative to shield her mother from the truth.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Monroe knew that Andrea loved to swim, so on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex. Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Monroe.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty. For Andrea, the silence was internally corrosive. She developed a suite of ailments, bulimia, insomnia, debilitating migraines, which later forced her to drop out of college. It wasn't until 1992, when she was twenty-five, that she finally confided in Munro about what had happened.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
One day, when Andrea was visiting, Munro told her about a short story from a recently published book, Marine Life by Linda Svensson, in which a girl commits suicide after being abused by her father. Why didn't she tell her mother, asked Munro, who wrote in a blurb for the book that the story left her shaking. A month later, Andrea sent her a letter.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
When you told me about that story, she wrote, I wanted to cry and hold you and thank you and tell you. I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened. Munro's response made it clear that she was right to be afraid. It was as if she had learned of an infidelity, Andrea recalled in her essay for The Star. Monroe left Fremlin and fled to their condo on Vancouver Island.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
When Andrea visited her there, she was amazed by Monroe's self-pity. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her, Andrea wrote. She then told me about other children Fremlin had friendships with, emphasising her own sense that she personally had been betrayed.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Fremlin, meanwhile, sent a series of unhinged letters to the family in which he acknowledged the abuse, but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him. The family did what families often do after an episode of abuse. They carried on as if nothing happened. Munro took Fremlin back after just a few weeks, and for years Andrea continued to visit them.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
It was the arrival of her own children, twins born in 2002, that brought clarity to her emotional haze. Andrea told her mother she didn't want Fremlin anywhere near them. Munro objected that visiting without Fremlin would be inconvenient because she couldn't drive. I blew my top, Andrea told a reporter for the Star.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who'd done that to her daughter. The next day, Munro called her back. Not to apologize, but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end of their relationship.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
In 2004, this magazine ran a profile of Munro, who was about to publish her eleventh book, the widely celebrated Runaway. Throughout the article, Munro speaks lovingly of Fremlin, whom she says she was enormously lucky to have met. She is also described as being close today to her three daughters. Flawed by her mother's dishonesty, Andrea felt as if she was being erased.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
She gathered the letters that Fremlin sent in 1992 and took them to the police. When an officer arrived at their house to arrest him, he reported that Munro was apoplectic, denouncing her daughter as a liar. In March 2005, Fremlin, then 80, quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years' probation. For years, Andrea tried to make her story public with no success.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
In 2005, she approached the Canadian academic Robert Thacker, who was putting the final touches on a biography of Monroe, and asked him to include the abuse in his book. After stewing on it for a day or two, he declined. "'I'm an archival scholar,' he told me, explaining his decision. "'That's not the kind of book I was writing.'
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
What he was writing, he said, was a biography of Alice Munro's texts. The distinction is hard to sustain. Munro's stories, particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse, are full of violated children, negligent mothers, and marriages founded on secrets and lies.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
That Monroe apparently derived these themes from a real-life episode has made her work feel suddenly transparent, as though it has been injected with a contrast dye, revealing zones of private meaning. Monroe seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay— Why did she not protect her daughter?
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life? In the months since the revelations, I revisited Munro's stories, spoke with members of her family, and tracked down a number of her unpublished letters.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
Monroe's appalling failures as a mother seem to have been an imaginative incitement, instrumental to her artistic project, something that Andrea may have grasped before anyone else. When Thacker wrote back to Andrea in 2005, he offered to remove from his book any passages that mentioned her and Fremlin together. No, you do not understand, Andrea said to me last month, describing her response.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
This is intimately linked to the work my mother does. In Canada, Monroe was known as St. Alice, a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else, maternal dereliction. In the days after news of the abuse broke, social media filled up with photos of Munro's books discarded in recycling bins.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
The University of Western Ontario, her alma mater, announced that it was pausing its Alice Munro chair in creativity so as to carefully consider Munro's legacy and her ties to Western. Writers who once celebrated her work and openly acknowledged its influence on their own began to reconsider their allegiance.
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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
These revelations not only crush Monroe's legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were in retrospect so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions. The author, Rebecca Mackay, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, reacted in the Times. To me, that makes them unreadable at all.