For years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.

“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)

I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.

All sympathy with their youngest daughter.

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