“You are never separating the art from the artist. You are creating a soft fantasy to make your own life more comfortable. Because you have decided to live in such way that creates regimes of value that you do not want to own up to. You have confused your own frame of reference for an objective fact.” ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I advocate for child survivors of sex crimes, and I’ve never once met a parent who acknowledged their failures. I’ve only met one who apologized to their child (and she proceeded to fight like hell, knowing it would ruin her career and knowing she would lose- a brilliant performance for an audience of 1.). I know more Alice Munros than I care to count. They are so common they are as boring as they are evil.
Thank you for sharing your story. You deserved then, and deserve now, so much better and so much more than you received. I hope you are surrounded by love and light, having built the support network we are brainwashed into believing our families should be. (And if you aren’t, feel free to DM me for resources.)
At age 11, I told my mother about my assault hours after it happened, as soon as she got home after having left me with him "to babysit." Here is how her acknowledgement evolved over time:
"I talked to him and he said you must have been dreaming."
"It didn't happen like you say."
"It didn't happen."
It is somehow both a horror and a comfort to know that other parents in this situation are just as shitty as my mother was. Thank you for working with kids who've faced this down. I wish I'd had help from someone like you back then.
No one wants to believe; they prioritize their comfort every single time.
What’s worse is that this was the accepted parenting “wisdom” from experts at the time. “Kids forget, brain Plasticity etc. healthiest thing is to refuse to acknowledge and they will move on.” They truly believed it was empowering for the child. Children cannot be empowered they need to be protected and supported that’s why they are legally classified as dependents FFS.
You deserved better than what you got, I’m so sorry.
Spot on. “Children are resilient.” From childhood to 35 years as a social work in “family” services, I hear this from every stakeholder or obligated person, every time.
I remember being shown a clip from Child’s Play 2 in a course awhile ago, will see if I can find it online but the advice a social worker was giving to the mother who bought Chucky for her child was legit best practices at the time. It was WILD! “Kids forget, it will be fine” “but he saw murders and was mute for months” “eh, it’s cool.”
I call bs on people that say that. I still can see in my minds eye something that happened to my mom at the age of (so my mother said) 2. I have thought of it every so often for the past 50 years, and it wasn’t even anything as horrible as what happened to the author of this post and Alice Munro’s daughter.
Oh, I do, too. It’s inane to me that so-called developmental experts believed this to be true until the late 1990s. I’m so, so sorry if this was part of the paradigm of ‘care’ you received. It was reckless, rooted in theory instead of praxis, and an entire generation is owed an apology.
Thank you for this Mary-Katherine. I am also a survivor of CSA, and have my own version of this story. It's always a balm to see someone stand up for the children we once were.
I’ve learned how much of “advocacy” is selective bs from sitting in my little corner of the world. SA really shows you who people are and whether or not they should be allowed to lead anything. But I’m white/CISHET/wealthy so it’s easy to dismiss me when I say anything that makes a person uncomfortable. (Make no mistake, I have few friends in any movement, especially the one claimed by feminists.) 🤷🏼♀️🫠
It’s enraging. They are never brilliant or masterminds of any sort. They aren’t interesting in any way. All know they are doing something wrong, some offset it with charm…others with narcissism and bullying. Everyone else covers for them, like they want to help the person who is sexually attracted to children instead of THE FUCKING CHILDREN, no one ever does a damn thing. I spend more time wanting to punish the parents/aunts/cousins than the abusers.
I belong to a culture where what happened to me was most likely hushed up to protect my family’s reputation and my far in the future ability to get married. I have not discussed it with my mother and with every passing year, most likely won’t. If she cannot even acknowledge the lesser evils that happened under my parents watch, why would she want to face the reality that I was not the ‘difficult child’, it was my family that failed me? This is all the context I need to understand Munro. That most humans need to be right above all else.
First, I want to say that I'm so sorry for what you had to go through (and for what you must still go through as a result of it).
Second, I want to say that this is easily the most nuanced and thoughtful discussion of the entire situation that I've read and it really gave me a new perspective on it as well.
Thank you for that. And thanks for being a writer.
"That he molested me soon became a bit of a family joke. At first, my parents didn’t believe me. They said I was dreaming. Then they said that I would be okay. Then they would joke about it. And everyone started joking about it. My aunt stayed with him."
I will never forget the look of horror on my in-laws' faces when they first heard my mom tell the family joke story of the time my stepfather deliberately hit me with a car, as well as the look of confusion on my mother's face when my spouse's parents didn't laugh. You could have built a small yet autonomous city-state in the space of that disconnect.
This is probably the best piece of writing I've read this year. Your bravery and clarity here have moved me just as much as Andrea Skinner's original essay, and your conclusions have shaken me with their open-eyed truth. I'll be thinking about the lack of history of poor folks like my family for a long time. In some ways, I think my own writing has also been an attempt to give my life and the lives of my family a historical sense. Something to consider.
Like you, I continue to be confused that people expect other artists to somehow rise above the common, banal evils of the everyday and be "good." It reminds me of when I found out the connection between child abuse and x-rays. Once x-rays were invented, suddenly the history of familial abuse couldn't be denied. It was written right there, on children's bones. And doctors were surprised at how common it was - as though just being a parent inferred some sort of inherent, undeniable morality and ability and desire to care for children. Parents are not inherently virtuous, and neither are artists. Why would parents who are also artists be any different?
Anyway, I've written too much already. Just wanted to end with an acknowledgement that it's an incredible thing to turn your wounds into wisdom as you have here, and as ever, you have done this with such empathy and skill. I hope that you get the healing and care, love and safety that you need.
“Is that not the most Alice Munro thing you’ve ever read?” - totally agree and reminds me a little of that NYer article reckoning with Flannery O’Connor’s racism — feel like it’s a mistake to assume that just because a writer is skilled at revealing/skewering a certain cultural tendency in their work, they’re necessarily able to rise above it in their own lives.
FoC’ justifications for refusing to see James Baldwin in her home were just revelatory of who she really was. Her passive capitulation to “local culture” when she could have had James Baldwin in her living room…the only upside is James Baldwin didn’t have to endure that. I always assumed the writer ID would overcome all the others. Boy was I wrong. Aargh.
I just read Skinner's essay, and also thought it clear-eyed. It reminded me of Barry Lopez's "Sliver of Sky" in its clarity and desires. I often think of Lopez's words (and I think Skinner would agree): "I have gathered that people seem to think that what victims most desire in the way of retribution is money and justice, apparently in that order. My own guess would be that what they most want is something quite different: they want to be believed, to have a foundation on which they can rebuild a sense of dignity."
I’m a social worker and in the counselling/advocacy space, we have distilled some of the recurrent research into practice guidelines. What young ppl - children - need most is twofold: to be believed, and to have the harm source removed. So simple and obvious. To be heard and made safe. You make your point about society’s reduction, most eloquently. 🙏
thank you for this post, which is certainly the most nuanced take on this subject i've read so far. it's made me reconsider my own initial, incredulous response—not incredulity about andrea's account, but munro's lack of action to protect her. there are so many powerful lines quoted by others here, but i'll add this one to the pile: "How can a writer be someone who does not have a historical sense of her own life? I think her art is an attempt to give her life a historical sense. But in the crude day-to-day, there is just that life without history." i'm so sorry for the abuse you suffered as a child. i very much appreciate your clear-eyed view of the art monster discourse, esp. as you hate having to engage with it.
Brandon, thank you for writing this. As someone who was also sexually abused as a child, I so appreciate your willingness to write about it and to do so in the way that you did. And wow, it’s just spot on. It reminded me of something I read in Billy Jensen’s book Killers Amidst Killers. When writing about the men who kill, he says something to the effect of—we want them to be these clever, extraordinary masterminds, but the majority of them are not at all smart. They are narcissistic, opportunistic, and, most of all, quite ordinary. Thank you for writing this. ❤️
What I needed most today was someone talking about the lucid bravery of Andrea Skinner. Thank you! It's such a relief. This story--I know it too well. Your story, her story, my story--ugh. Different but always so similar. Like another commenter said--evil but boringly predictable. Skinner's essay was such an act of generosity to those us who told and were not heeded. What a beautiful writer. She is the one I will remember. Not her mother. Thanks again for this post. ❤️
This is just fantastic, Brandon. " I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too." Christ.
Personally I'm a lot more interested in artist biography and how it informs the art than you are, but I think we agree on the broader questions here. The modern obsession with 'safe' art is fascinating and frustrating to me in equal measure. I am really excited for your nonfiction books. Like. Ravenously, deliriously excited.
Congratulations, and thanks as always for sharing your mind with us. Adore you.
This is a thoughtful response to the responses. I like that it poses questions to consider. It invites deeper engagement without shaming the reader.
As a fellow member of the incest survivor club, I know that what I contribute to the conversation is not representative of everyone’s experience. What’s more: I cannot even say that every thought I articulate represents every part of my very own self, because this kind of trauma creates so many split-off selves that scramble in contradiction of each other.
And I don’t know which stimulus causes which response. Andrea’s essay? My own projected anxiety for how she and her family will cope in the aftermath of disclosure? The hyper stimulation of the ongoing responses?
Sometimes, I wonder if having this history makes me more capable or less capable of empathy? Can I ever feel for someone else’s story without simultaneously feeling for myself? Does that even matter? I think incest trauma yields a lot of unhelpful questions. I’m glad you’ve pointed out some of them bc it reminded me that I can spiral inside of the wrong questions. Wasting my life & my energy.
I also feel like the siblings are a miracle, and I pray for their continued healing & mutual support. That was the bright light in the story. While incest is common, the sibling dynamics are typically severely impaired, each child forced into roles that maintain the family’s pathology. My thoughts around this twist in ways that are very complex. It’s not my business. And yet, when I imagine the siblings, I wondered if they all want the world to stop reading Munro. I read somewhere that this is not their wish. Will the public outrage challenge their hard-earned alliance in unforeseen ways? It’s not my business. But these are the worries that invade my mind.
Even in clinical work, a therapist who is too quick to express outrage toward a complicit parent (or even the sex abuser) might alienate the patient’s self-state that had to bond, to some degree, with their abusive caregivers in order to survive. We don’t know how our public outrage helps or harms or does nothing or all of the above. I then worried about all the ways canceling Munro might endanger future victims—if we keep punishing art, are we upping the stakes against future disclosures?
I thought about 92 years. Munro died at 92! Skinner had to wait a long time. It made me think about my own work. How long am I willing to wait? Every silencing is too long. But that is really long. And the weight of her fame. Really, Andrea’s essay is more triumphant than a Nobel Prize and all the other accolades. I want to focus on that. It means more to celebrate Skinner’s voice now than to “undo” Munro’s prizes. I think there’s even a line in one of Munro’s stories about how you can’t punish the dead.
I will not throw away her books, but I was feeling compelled to make a study of her work. Like a psychoanalytic investigation. Maybe your essay here has saved me from my own potential madness in that regard. Even at age 50, I am obsessed and counter-phobic and driven to run right into the fire. But you are right. This quest to pin down the complicit mother in her stories—as if I might finally “solve” incest & save myself & every future child—it’s futile. The reason why is not high art, even though a high artist lived this life. The reason is ordinary, as you say. I already know it.
But this is where I get stuck, over and over again, caught between the extreme poles of feeling powerless and too powerful all at the same time. Hearing the Twitter screams to throw away her books felt like just another form of turning away. Another way of denying the diabolical. I want people to sit in the discomfort. And in this wish, I know that I’m resurrecting the enraged child victim in myself, who wants the world to stop and live within the reality of these crimes. Am I unkind for this? Am I being unfair? I don’t even know.
What I do know is that in real life, people are much more likely to turn away than to help a child. My experience with this is vast, beyond my own family’s. The outrage felt hypocritical to me. But would I have felt soothed by no outrage? I realize I cannot be easily soothed by anything when it comes to the topic of child abuse. Maybe I don’t want anybody to be.
I appreciate your essay. It was very grounding for me to read, thank you. I feel a little liberated from my own compulsion to “bear witness” by reading every freaking page of Munro in search of some answer. I already know the answer! You probably saved me a lot of money in therapy too. That is no small thing. That shit is expensive. I had thoughts about that too—like, are we going to prevent the surviving siblings from ongoing treatment access if we cancel Munro’s work? I don’t know where the money goes, but if it goes to them, I’m thinking: let’s buy more books.
I’m stuck in Vegas in a hotel room with Covid. My first time. (With Covid. Not Vegas). I woke up with no voice and read Andrea’s essay and I couldn’t speak. Literally. It felt like layers of silencing juxtaposed with UN-silencing all at once: on the page & in my memory & in my throat.
Anyway, thank you for this. I see a lot of survivors having intense reactions right now. This was helpful. 🙏🏻
“I realize I cannot be easily soothed by anything when it comes to the topic of child abuse. Maybe I don’t want anybody to be.” Jen, your words, alongside those of Brandon and Andrea, have ministered to me this morning. My story is so similar to all the CSA survivors in this thread. My heart has been shattered and haunted as I read the essays and the comments. I have felt like an outsider in my own family all my life. The warmth and familiarity I’ve experienced here today has made me grateful for families we receive along the way to healing.
“This is where I get stuck, over and over again, caught between the extreme poles of feeling powerless and too powerful all at the same time.” What a clear, real encapsulation of trauma impact. I see and hear you.
The part about the fear twisting in your gut that would strike in the woods when you were throwing sticks named a thing I couldn't describe until now. Thank you is the wrong thing to say, but maybe more like, I know that twisting gut fear, and it is the thing that happens and that is how it is.
I really love this article. It made me think, though. When things like this come up, we draw lines in the sand. This person is good, this person is evil. You addressed the small, human side of it, but I think that alongside that is a conversation that very much needs to be had. The conversation about the often toxic relationships between mothers and daughters.
So often you hear people say, “my mom is my best friend in the whole world,” and I just don’t understand it. In my experience it has the potential to be one of the most harmful relationships. Women are taught from a young age to view each other as competition. There are more women than men so you have to be the best and prettiest so that you can snag a husband, any husband, so that society will see you as having value. That competitiveness and jealousy often carries over into the mother/daughter relationship. Here comes a younger and (in your own mind, at least) prettier version of yourself, all set to “steal away your man,” simply by being a daddy’s girl. You see people joke about it all the time. You see reels about baby girls “stealing” their dads from their moms. Or “how my husband treats me vs how he treats our daughter.” All in good fun, I’m sure, but there’s often an underlying malice to it, because mothers often become resentful of their daughters without even realizing it.
Then you get a woman who’s been divorced (and possibly is also still emotionally wrecked and unstable from the previous relationship) and who finally remarried. And he molests your daughter, that younger version of you, that you look at and see your young self in. Decent moms (read: most moms) will raise hell and get rid of the man. Women with warped minds look at it and say “he chose you over me,” which turns into “you stole him” and then will often hate their daughters for it. I had a friend who was molested by her stepfather. She told her mom, and her mom kicked her out, for “trying to take her man.”
This type of thing is all too common. I’m not saying this is what Anne Munro thought. But it may have been. Until we can fix some of the continuous damage done in female relationships, be it mother/daughter, older/younger sister or friendships, I believe this kind of thing will continue to happen. I apologize for the long comment, but I loved the way you addressed the topic, and it just made me connect your thoughts with what I’ve touched on here.
I've taught jr high and high school for 15 years and I've seen the blame the child for the action of the adult play out way too many times. It startled me the first few times when a mother would blame their daughter for being molested or assaulted, but then I could anticipate it being an outcome that was more possible than I wanted it to be. Those mothers scare me because of how much hurt they are heaping onto their victimized children. There is far more of them than I ever would have imagined.
“You are never separating the art from the artist. You are creating a soft fantasy to make your own life more comfortable. Because you have decided to live in such way that creates regimes of value that you do not want to own up to. You have confused your own frame of reference for an objective fact.” ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I advocate for child survivors of sex crimes, and I’ve never once met a parent who acknowledged their failures. I’ve only met one who apologized to their child (and she proceeded to fight like hell, knowing it would ruin her career and knowing she would lose- a brilliant performance for an audience of 1.). I know more Alice Munros than I care to count. They are so common they are as boring as they are evil.
Thank you for sharing your story. You deserved then, and deserve now, so much better and so much more than you received. I hope you are surrounded by love and light, having built the support network we are brainwashed into believing our families should be. (And if you aren’t, feel free to DM me for resources.)
“As boring as they are evil” !!!!! GET THEM
At age 11, I told my mother about my assault hours after it happened, as soon as she got home after having left me with him "to babysit." Here is how her acknowledgement evolved over time:
"I talked to him and he said you must have been dreaming."
"It didn't happen like you say."
"It didn't happen."
It is somehow both a horror and a comfort to know that other parents in this situation are just as shitty as my mother was. Thank you for working with kids who've faced this down. I wish I'd had help from someone like you back then.
No one wants to believe; they prioritize their comfort every single time.
What’s worse is that this was the accepted parenting “wisdom” from experts at the time. “Kids forget, brain Plasticity etc. healthiest thing is to refuse to acknowledge and they will move on.” They truly believed it was empowering for the child. Children cannot be empowered they need to be protected and supported that’s why they are legally classified as dependents FFS.
You deserved better than what you got, I’m so sorry.
Spot on. “Children are resilient.” From childhood to 35 years as a social work in “family” services, I hear this from every stakeholder or obligated person, every time.
I remember being shown a clip from Child’s Play 2 in a course awhile ago, will see if I can find it online but the advice a social worker was giving to the mother who bought Chucky for her child was legit best practices at the time. It was WILD! “Kids forget, it will be fine” “but he saw murders and was mute for months” “eh, it’s cool.”
Breathtaking. It’s like a preemptive strike on trauma.
I call bs on people that say that. I still can see in my minds eye something that happened to my mom at the age of (so my mother said) 2. I have thought of it every so often for the past 50 years, and it wasn’t even anything as horrible as what happened to the author of this post and Alice Munro’s daughter.
Oh, I do, too. It’s inane to me that so-called developmental experts believed this to be true until the late 1990s. I’m so, so sorry if this was part of the paradigm of ‘care’ you received. It was reckless, rooted in theory instead of praxis, and an entire generation is owed an apology.
Thankfully it was not. My mother had her faults but that was not one of them.
Thank you for this Mary-Katherine. I am also a survivor of CSA, and have my own version of this story. It's always a balm to see someone stand up for the children we once were.
About those resources….? 🥺
Sending you a DM
Would be interested in those resources, too 🙏
http://enoughabuse.org/get-help/survivor-support/#:~:text=Survivors%20and%20Families%20Forum%20–%20Offers,affected%20by%20child%20sexual%20abuse.
Start with The Wings Foundation! Then work your way through this list:
Mary-Katherine, thank you so much! Could you repost the list as it doesn't appear here. Thank you!
Start with The Wings Foundation, then work your way through this list: http://enoughabuse.org/get-help/survivor-support/#:~:text=Survivors%2520and%2520Families%2520Forum%2520%E2%80%93%2520Offers,affected%2520by%2520child%2520sexual%2520abuse
"I know more Alice Munros that I care to count." Same, same, same.
I’m sorry. Truly.
Thank you for this. Feminism has a number of (not so) little dark spots and this is one. It is so helpful, to hear it acknowledged and said.
I’ve learned how much of “advocacy” is selective bs from sitting in my little corner of the world. SA really shows you who people are and whether or not they should be allowed to lead anything. But I’m white/CISHET/wealthy so it’s easy to dismiss me when I say anything that makes a person uncomfortable. (Make no mistake, I have few friends in any movement, especially the one claimed by feminists.) 🤷🏼♀️🫠
Oh my! I’m learning from you. But this is too terrible.
It’s enraging. They are never brilliant or masterminds of any sort. They aren’t interesting in any way. All know they are doing something wrong, some offset it with charm…others with narcissism and bullying. Everyone else covers for them, like they want to help the person who is sexually attracted to children instead of THE FUCKING CHILDREN, no one ever does a damn thing. I spend more time wanting to punish the parents/aunts/cousins than the abusers.
I belong to a culture where what happened to me was most likely hushed up to protect my family’s reputation and my far in the future ability to get married. I have not discussed it with my mother and with every passing year, most likely won’t. If she cannot even acknowledge the lesser evils that happened under my parents watch, why would she want to face the reality that I was not the ‘difficult child’, it was my family that failed me? This is all the context I need to understand Munro. That most humans need to be right above all else.
You were never the difficult child. Parenting you was an honor they didn’t deserve.
the most beautiful, perfect statement, and an arrow to the heart.
You hope he is “surrounded by love and light“? Now who’s talking fantasy here?
"Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person" as ever, you've nailed it
🎯🎯
First, I want to say that I'm so sorry for what you had to go through (and for what you must still go through as a result of it).
Second, I want to say that this is easily the most nuanced and thoughtful discussion of the entire situation that I've read and it really gave me a new perspective on it as well.
Thank you for that. And thanks for being a writer.
I am so sorry for what you had to go through.
Thank you for making it possible for me to continue reading Alice Munro. After all she is just another small person and not a perfect human being.
I wish you well and thank you again
I'm so grateful for gaining new perspectives on Substack everyday 🙂
"That he molested me soon became a bit of a family joke. At first, my parents didn’t believe me. They said I was dreaming. Then they said that I would be okay. Then they would joke about it. And everyone started joking about it. My aunt stayed with him."
I will never forget the look of horror on my in-laws' faces when they first heard my mom tell the family joke story of the time my stepfather deliberately hit me with a car, as well as the look of confusion on my mother's face when my spouse's parents didn't laugh. You could have built a small yet autonomous city-state in the space of that disconnect.
“You could have built a small yet autonomous city-state in the space of that disconnect.” What a great line!
Thank you!
I am so sorry, but your writing is just electric and perfect. You name the pulsing spaces with poetry. Thank you.,
i mean, so beautiful... every damn line.
here is a link to Skinner's archived essay sans paywall: https://archive.is/bYm7R
Thank you!
Thank you
Thank you for sharing the link
Thank you!!
thanks so much for the link!
Thanks for the link.
This is probably the best piece of writing I've read this year. Your bravery and clarity here have moved me just as much as Andrea Skinner's original essay, and your conclusions have shaken me with their open-eyed truth. I'll be thinking about the lack of history of poor folks like my family for a long time. In some ways, I think my own writing has also been an attempt to give my life and the lives of my family a historical sense. Something to consider.
Like you, I continue to be confused that people expect other artists to somehow rise above the common, banal evils of the everyday and be "good." It reminds me of when I found out the connection between child abuse and x-rays. Once x-rays were invented, suddenly the history of familial abuse couldn't be denied. It was written right there, on children's bones. And doctors were surprised at how common it was - as though just being a parent inferred some sort of inherent, undeniable morality and ability and desire to care for children. Parents are not inherently virtuous, and neither are artists. Why would parents who are also artists be any different?
Anyway, I've written too much already. Just wanted to end with an acknowledgement that it's an incredible thing to turn your wounds into wisdom as you have here, and as ever, you have done this with such empathy and skill. I hope that you get the healing and care, love and safety that you need.
This is a profoundly important, helpful comment. Thank you,
“Is that not the most Alice Munro thing you’ve ever read?” - totally agree and reminds me a little of that NYer article reckoning with Flannery O’Connor’s racism — feel like it’s a mistake to assume that just because a writer is skilled at revealing/skewering a certain cultural tendency in their work, they’re necessarily able to rise above it in their own lives.
FoC’ justifications for refusing to see James Baldwin in her home were just revelatory of who she really was. Her passive capitulation to “local culture” when she could have had James Baldwin in her living room…the only upside is James Baldwin didn’t have to endure that. I always assumed the writer ID would overcome all the others. Boy was I wrong. Aargh.
I just read Skinner's essay, and also thought it clear-eyed. It reminded me of Barry Lopez's "Sliver of Sky" in its clarity and desires. I often think of Lopez's words (and I think Skinner would agree): "I have gathered that people seem to think that what victims most desire in the way of retribution is money and justice, apparently in that order. My own guess would be that what they most want is something quite different: they want to be believed, to have a foundation on which they can rebuild a sense of dignity."
I’m a social worker and in the counselling/advocacy space, we have distilled some of the recurrent research into practice guidelines. What young ppl - children - need most is twofold: to be believed, and to have the harm source removed. So simple and obvious. To be heard and made safe. You make your point about society’s reduction, most eloquently. 🙏
"Not a shrug. But a setting the shoulder against the stone and pushing onward."
Wow. Fantastic as usual, Brandon.
thank you for this post, which is certainly the most nuanced take on this subject i've read so far. it's made me reconsider my own initial, incredulous response—not incredulity about andrea's account, but munro's lack of action to protect her. there are so many powerful lines quoted by others here, but i'll add this one to the pile: "How can a writer be someone who does not have a historical sense of her own life? I think her art is an attempt to give her life a historical sense. But in the crude day-to-day, there is just that life without history." i'm so sorry for the abuse you suffered as a child. i very much appreciate your clear-eyed view of the art monster discourse, esp. as you hate having to engage with it.
Brandon, thank you for writing this. As someone who was also sexually abused as a child, I so appreciate your willingness to write about it and to do so in the way that you did. And wow, it’s just spot on. It reminded me of something I read in Billy Jensen’s book Killers Amidst Killers. When writing about the men who kill, he says something to the effect of—we want them to be these clever, extraordinary masterminds, but the majority of them are not at all smart. They are narcissistic, opportunistic, and, most of all, quite ordinary. Thank you for writing this. ❤️
What I needed most today was someone talking about the lucid bravery of Andrea Skinner. Thank you! It's such a relief. This story--I know it too well. Your story, her story, my story--ugh. Different but always so similar. Like another commenter said--evil but boringly predictable. Skinner's essay was such an act of generosity to those us who told and were not heeded. What a beautiful writer. She is the one I will remember. Not her mother. Thanks again for this post. ❤️
Well said. We need Skinner's bravery. It's like bread and water for us in the lineage of CSA, hungry for truth.
This is just fantastic, Brandon. " I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too." Christ.
Personally I'm a lot more interested in artist biography and how it informs the art than you are, but I think we agree on the broader questions here. The modern obsession with 'safe' art is fascinating and frustrating to me in equal measure. I am really excited for your nonfiction books. Like. Ravenously, deliriously excited.
Congratulations, and thanks as always for sharing your mind with us. Adore you.
This is a thoughtful response to the responses. I like that it poses questions to consider. It invites deeper engagement without shaming the reader.
As a fellow member of the incest survivor club, I know that what I contribute to the conversation is not representative of everyone’s experience. What’s more: I cannot even say that every thought I articulate represents every part of my very own self, because this kind of trauma creates so many split-off selves that scramble in contradiction of each other.
And I don’t know which stimulus causes which response. Andrea’s essay? My own projected anxiety for how she and her family will cope in the aftermath of disclosure? The hyper stimulation of the ongoing responses?
Sometimes, I wonder if having this history makes me more capable or less capable of empathy? Can I ever feel for someone else’s story without simultaneously feeling for myself? Does that even matter? I think incest trauma yields a lot of unhelpful questions. I’m glad you’ve pointed out some of them bc it reminded me that I can spiral inside of the wrong questions. Wasting my life & my energy.
I also feel like the siblings are a miracle, and I pray for their continued healing & mutual support. That was the bright light in the story. While incest is common, the sibling dynamics are typically severely impaired, each child forced into roles that maintain the family’s pathology. My thoughts around this twist in ways that are very complex. It’s not my business. And yet, when I imagine the siblings, I wondered if they all want the world to stop reading Munro. I read somewhere that this is not their wish. Will the public outrage challenge their hard-earned alliance in unforeseen ways? It’s not my business. But these are the worries that invade my mind.
Even in clinical work, a therapist who is too quick to express outrage toward a complicit parent (or even the sex abuser) might alienate the patient’s self-state that had to bond, to some degree, with their abusive caregivers in order to survive. We don’t know how our public outrage helps or harms or does nothing or all of the above. I then worried about all the ways canceling Munro might endanger future victims—if we keep punishing art, are we upping the stakes against future disclosures?
I thought about 92 years. Munro died at 92! Skinner had to wait a long time. It made me think about my own work. How long am I willing to wait? Every silencing is too long. But that is really long. And the weight of her fame. Really, Andrea’s essay is more triumphant than a Nobel Prize and all the other accolades. I want to focus on that. It means more to celebrate Skinner’s voice now than to “undo” Munro’s prizes. I think there’s even a line in one of Munro’s stories about how you can’t punish the dead.
I will not throw away her books, but I was feeling compelled to make a study of her work. Like a psychoanalytic investigation. Maybe your essay here has saved me from my own potential madness in that regard. Even at age 50, I am obsessed and counter-phobic and driven to run right into the fire. But you are right. This quest to pin down the complicit mother in her stories—as if I might finally “solve” incest & save myself & every future child—it’s futile. The reason why is not high art, even though a high artist lived this life. The reason is ordinary, as you say. I already know it.
But this is where I get stuck, over and over again, caught between the extreme poles of feeling powerless and too powerful all at the same time. Hearing the Twitter screams to throw away her books felt like just another form of turning away. Another way of denying the diabolical. I want people to sit in the discomfort. And in this wish, I know that I’m resurrecting the enraged child victim in myself, who wants the world to stop and live within the reality of these crimes. Am I unkind for this? Am I being unfair? I don’t even know.
What I do know is that in real life, people are much more likely to turn away than to help a child. My experience with this is vast, beyond my own family’s. The outrage felt hypocritical to me. But would I have felt soothed by no outrage? I realize I cannot be easily soothed by anything when it comes to the topic of child abuse. Maybe I don’t want anybody to be.
I appreciate your essay. It was very grounding for me to read, thank you. I feel a little liberated from my own compulsion to “bear witness” by reading every freaking page of Munro in search of some answer. I already know the answer! You probably saved me a lot of money in therapy too. That is no small thing. That shit is expensive. I had thoughts about that too—like, are we going to prevent the surviving siblings from ongoing treatment access if we cancel Munro’s work? I don’t know where the money goes, but if it goes to them, I’m thinking: let’s buy more books.
I’m stuck in Vegas in a hotel room with Covid. My first time. (With Covid. Not Vegas). I woke up with no voice and read Andrea’s essay and I couldn’t speak. Literally. It felt like layers of silencing juxtaposed with UN-silencing all at once: on the page & in my memory & in my throat.
Anyway, thank you for this. I see a lot of survivors having intense reactions right now. This was helpful. 🙏🏻
“I realize I cannot be easily soothed by anything when it comes to the topic of child abuse. Maybe I don’t want anybody to be.” Jen, your words, alongside those of Brandon and Andrea, have ministered to me this morning. My story is so similar to all the CSA survivors in this thread. My heart has been shattered and haunted as I read the essays and the comments. I have felt like an outsider in my own family all my life. The warmth and familiarity I’ve experienced here today has made me grateful for families we receive along the way to healing.
“This is where I get stuck, over and over again, caught between the extreme poles of feeling powerless and too powerful all at the same time.” What a clear, real encapsulation of trauma impact. I see and hear you.
The part about the fear twisting in your gut that would strike in the woods when you were throwing sticks named a thing I couldn't describe until now. Thank you is the wrong thing to say, but maybe more like, I know that twisting gut fear, and it is the thing that happens and that is how it is.
Yes.
I really love this article. It made me think, though. When things like this come up, we draw lines in the sand. This person is good, this person is evil. You addressed the small, human side of it, but I think that alongside that is a conversation that very much needs to be had. The conversation about the often toxic relationships between mothers and daughters.
So often you hear people say, “my mom is my best friend in the whole world,” and I just don’t understand it. In my experience it has the potential to be one of the most harmful relationships. Women are taught from a young age to view each other as competition. There are more women than men so you have to be the best and prettiest so that you can snag a husband, any husband, so that society will see you as having value. That competitiveness and jealousy often carries over into the mother/daughter relationship. Here comes a younger and (in your own mind, at least) prettier version of yourself, all set to “steal away your man,” simply by being a daddy’s girl. You see people joke about it all the time. You see reels about baby girls “stealing” their dads from their moms. Or “how my husband treats me vs how he treats our daughter.” All in good fun, I’m sure, but there’s often an underlying malice to it, because mothers often become resentful of their daughters without even realizing it.
Then you get a woman who’s been divorced (and possibly is also still emotionally wrecked and unstable from the previous relationship) and who finally remarried. And he molests your daughter, that younger version of you, that you look at and see your young self in. Decent moms (read: most moms) will raise hell and get rid of the man. Women with warped minds look at it and say “he chose you over me,” which turns into “you stole him” and then will often hate their daughters for it. I had a friend who was molested by her stepfather. She told her mom, and her mom kicked her out, for “trying to take her man.”
This type of thing is all too common. I’m not saying this is what Anne Munro thought. But it may have been. Until we can fix some of the continuous damage done in female relationships, be it mother/daughter, older/younger sister or friendships, I believe this kind of thing will continue to happen. I apologize for the long comment, but I loved the way you addressed the topic, and it just made me connect your thoughts with what I’ve touched on here.
I've taught jr high and high school for 15 years and I've seen the blame the child for the action of the adult play out way too many times. It startled me the first few times when a mother would blame their daughter for being molested or assaulted, but then I could anticipate it being an outcome that was more possible than I wanted it to be. Those mothers scare me because of how much hurt they are heaping onto their victimized children. There is far more of them than I ever would have imagined.
Totally. This. 🙏