Thanks so much, Naomi! I wanted to go long on Munro and to engage with the scholarly literature (which is extensive—as the only Canadian ever to win the Nobel she is the whale in the swimming pool of “CanLit” studies) because I always thought people got her wrong. After the scandal broke this hardened into the conviction that I understood her work, and that most other people who had written about her besides Mary Gaitskill did not.

Munro, who had the reputation of a sort of feminist fairy-godmother, was as Naomi says an “art monster” to rival any anglophone writer of the past hundred years. I didn’t want to write about the sex abuse scandal in her family in itself (there’s been a lot of good writing about this in the press), but about how her later fiction reads differently when one sees that it is inspired by this domestic trauma. I think that if anything her artistic vision seems more powerful and coherent once one is aware of what inspired it. But it also emerges as frightening, self-consciously amoral. Munro’s passionate interest in the lives of girls and women and her extraordinary powers of writerly empathy concealed the desperate bleakness of her ethical vision.

I was very grateful to Paul Franz for the opportunity to do an academic article, because I wanted to offer a full reading of her work (honestly I feel I could and perhaps should write a short book!).

The full article (“The Mysteries of Love: On Alice Munro”—like Henry Begler calling his recent piece on Blake “The Man From Another Place,” I turn to David Lynch when I need an evocative catchy title) will soon be on Project Muse, and accessible via most libraries. You a can buy individual issues of Literary Imagination from the Johns Hopkins Press, and I’ve also written / am writing a few short online pieces about Munro that will be forthcoming soon. #selfpromotion