Tag: Alice Munro

Back to the womb

Galit Atlas on the fantasy of independence. ‘Children create a fantasy world in which they are entirely self-sufficient.’

Mine was a caravan/tent arrangement, sealed at its base and zippered in the front to keep out spiders and crawlies. By magic it contained a refrigerator filled with innumerable delectables from the range of sweets I loved: choc coated cobblers with caramel in the middle, milk bottle lollies and White Knights, mint chocolate coated bars, along with sachets of Sherbert and aniseed balls, round lollies you could suck for hours before they disappeared. And a freezer box jam packed with ice creams, choc wedges, Cornettos and Street’s Gaytimes. All the treats we could scarcely afford on Sunday drives when our dad, if we were lucky, might splash out and buy us an icy pole.

My cocoon was warm with a thick comfortable mattress and soft blankets under which I could stay warm and I’m not sure I ever bothered with windows through which I might view the outside world. 

My cocoon was a place where I could escape from the world, stay safe and warm. I never factored in my need for people.

An ersatz return to the womb and perhaps this is the intention, the illusion of independence built on our need for others to care for us so entirely we don’t even notice their existence. They become extensions of us, when we’re tiny ahead of the slow and somewhat painful recognition that others are separate entities. And not under our omnipotent control. 

These mornings when the cold is brittle as ice and your toes tingle with numbness before you put on socks and shoes, it’s easier to stay inside the cocoon of your bed, than leap out and face the world. Sleep is more enticing then, as for hibernating bears. 

I never sleep so well in the heat of the summer. When the temperature stirs my blood to such a fury I can only toss off sheets and try my best to stay perfectly still so as not to generate any excess energy.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading a long essay from Rachel Aziv about Alice Monro’s ‘Passive voice’. A long and fascinating exploration of a story now well known, that of Munro’s youngest daughter Andrea, the youngest of her three girls, and how when she was nine and staying alone with her stepfather Gerry Fremlin while her mother was away at her father’s funeral, she asked to share the second bed in the parental bedroom. 

He mistook her desire for closeness as a sexual overture and began a long process of abusing her body as if she were an adult asking for sexual connection. Lolita he called her in some of the letters he wrote to justify his behaviour. 

The deeper story lies in the extent to which both Andreas’ parents, her father who lived elsewhere in Canada, who was the first, to learn of the abuse after Andrea told her stepbrother who told her stepmother Carole, who told her dad Jim who told his wife not to share this secret with Alice as it would kill her. Thereafter the experience was shelved though Andrea’s father asked her elder sister to accompany her on summer visits to keep her safe was Gerry, which only worked up to a point. The abuse continued.

It took until Andrea was 25 when she finally found enough courage to tell her mother about what Gerry had done, but her mother both believed her and disbelieved in so far as she behaved in ways that suggested she could not tolerate this knowledge, as Munro was dependent on this man for her ongoing life. She left him briefly at the news but soon returned and even after Fremlin was found guilty of the charge of sexual abuse of a minor, she stayed by his side. 

She stayed with him and in time became estranged from her daughter who at various times cut off contact form her entire family. Though in the end, Andrea was able to reconnect with her siblings who took some time to register the seriousness of what happened to their little sister by which time Alice was losing her mind to Alzheimer’s and could scarcely remember the story.


It’s a happy ending in so far as the sisters are reunited but not so for Andrea given the layers of trauma she now carries.

As all traumatised children who must carry the burden of their parent’s behaviours.

Reading this story, I found myself tripping over the names, the who was who was Alice and Andrea’s name, both beginning with A sometimes became interchangeable to me. Such is the crazed world of childhood sexual abuse.

And reading snippets of the crazy letters Fremlin wrote acknowledging the sexual relationship with his stepdaughter – in his mind justifying his behaviour and blaming her for her seductive behaviour – is enough to make my skin creep.

The way as William Branston writes of ‘the alchemy of dehumanization from person to thing’.

And it typically begins in childhood. No wonder we sometimes crave the illusion of absolute independence, even as we know it cannot exist. We need one another.  

Authenticity lies in the will to dare

There is a place where spiders knit, and fingers skitter across the keyboard.

A place reserved for memory and imagination when anything is possible, and boundaried only by the edges of sentences and their meaning.

I go there on mornings to spend my time dipping into the well of the past and there I find all manner of pleasurable entertainment, jammed against the ghosts of traumas past and the joys of sweet success.

All of them rub together. Writing is a plunge into the unknown in one person’s mind as long as they do not try too hard, at least not at first. At first they must improvise, as George Saunders writes, otherwise if they’re too intentional, the story sounds tired and inauthentic.

Authenticity lies in the will to dare.

In 1977 Dr J Peter Bush published Rape in Australia. The title letters in yellow against a black background with the subtitle ‘an appraisal of attitudes, victims, assailants, medicine and the law’. He was police surgeon at the time and therefore in a good position to see the hideous aftermath of rape and write accordingly.

The cover image in white, the symbol for woman cracked in half. To demonstrate the force of rape as an attack on a person’s identity. Most often a woman’s identity.

My mother gave me this book when I was in my late thirties as a birthday gift. I was appalled by her choice. She must have found the book in a bargain bin somewhere. That’s how my mother bought books, by the kilo. Romantic histories by the boot load for herself, along with anything by well-known Catholic writers as Graham Green and theologians like Teilhard de Jardin who spoke on the philosophy, history, and theories of her religion. She read the The Advocate every Sunday after Mass with religious devotion. She stuck to her faith.

My mother bought me this book, I imagined because I was a social worker then and social workers, at least in her mind, took an interest in such matters. Not that my mother did not care, but rape had not touched her so closely, or so she believed even as her husband had raped her eldest daughter when she was still a child. But my mother who knew this would not have considered it so. 

Incest was something different.

I have read the stories of Alice Munro, now doing the rounds. They speak to the horror of Munro’s ongoing knowledge that her daughter, Andrea Skinner, as a nine-year-old was sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin, Munro’s second husband and still Munro refused to leave him. Just as my mother failed to leave my father.

We writers go into such territory. We circle our wounds as Siri Hustvedt describes returning once more to the place in our unconscious that bristles with energy, the agony, and the desire. the pain and the pleasure, those energy points of human experience that rock us to our core.

Do not underestimate the power of the unconscious mind to evoke memories of matters otherwise dormant.

Like Munro, my mother stayed with her husband after she knew the ugly truth of his behaviour. But unlike Munro, or as far as we know, my mother told my father, ‘If you do this again, if you come here again, I’ll kill you.’ This when she caught my father lurched over my sister in bed. ‘Her eyes like a little bird’s,’ my mother told me years later, ‘with the blankets pulled up to her chin’.

But my father did return again and again even as my mother believed, wanted to believe, it had stopped.

How do you live with such knowledge?

Is this why she gave me the book? An unspoken acknowledgement of something she believed was of my concern because it was also her concern.

Germaine Greer at a conference in Melbourne talked about the ubiquity of rape throughout the suburbs of Melbourne every night with what she imagined were countless women unable to resist their husband’s approaches for sex.

Rape, Greer called it, and there was no protest from her audience, even as her talk was gate crashed by a trans gender activist who argued Greer was guilty of writing off a whole element in society of people who claimed a different identity from the one in which they were born

Greer spent her lifetime trying to give voice to the feminine body and here was someone who dared to suggest, although they were born with a masculine body, they could after a lifetime of privilege, convert into female form.

Greer is mistaken in the idea any trans person has endured a lifetime of privilege. It is not a privilege to enter the world in a body whose form dictates the way you’re treated for the rest of your life, whether as woman or as man.

If you believe, as some do, that the body into which you were born does not feel right for you along all the dimensions we humans have constructed for our two basic genders, then why not protest? Why not seek to find some physical form that fits your sense of your identity?

There are many who would say, you can’t because it’s impossible.

They argue you cannot take on a form of body that is not yours to begin with. People cannot sprout wings and even if we wanted, they say, though we have come close in other ways with hang gliders, aeroplanes, parachutes. All of them attempts to fly.

Even as the human body has long been one we have modified. With all manner of accoutrements, and under the knife. The engravings of some tribes in New Zealand and Africa. The skin piercings of indigenous peoples, even our pierced ears and the popularity of tattoos today. All methods of bodily enhancement.

And in this time of crazy ears and polarities, it’s worth remembering David Whyte: 

You act as though you’re alone, when even the soap dish enables you, writes

the poet, or words to this effect.

They call it the narcissism of small differences. Small or large they can make for conflict with its never-ending cycle of hurt. We see so much of this today. Time to get beyond our differences. To share the vast resources of our world and make room for one another.