Thacker’s biography of Munro was first published in 2005. I’m currently reading the revised 2011 addition, which has an extra chapter.
Alongside it I’m re-reading A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale and JoAnn McCaig’s Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives. Plus, new to me, a terrifically good dissertation by Nadine Fladd titled Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker and Canadian Short Story Writers. I came across it while trying to locate McCaig’s dissertation, from which her truncated book project was excavated, but not having success due to . . . difficulties. More below, and in a longer piece I’m drafting.
A quick note about my relationship to biography–ambivalent, at best. I have read dozens of literary/critical biographies of authors, and a few stand out. Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Brontë, of course; the friendship memoir by Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty, about her complex relationship with writer Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face); and the parallel, much earlier Testament of Friendship by Vera Brittain. Effectively, then, I like memoirs of women writers by their equally gifted writer-friends. This is, however, not the norm in the composition of writers’ biographies.
More frequently, I have found that critical biographies of authors suffer from recurring weaknesses that are grounded in the biographer’s relationship to the subject. Decades ago, I got to know a well-known Canadian biographer, and eventually inherited her job in Canadian Studies/Lit at U of T for a period of time. She was a rigorous literary critic and her biographies were impeccably researched. But from my 1980s feminist standpoint, her choice of subjects was lamentable: sexist Canadian male writers who (again, judgey 20-something me) were overrated and irrelevant.
Why, I wondered, would a brilliant woman devote years of her life to these twits, who exploited their wives and slept with their students? I was much happier with the excellent work of Nathalie Cooke and Rosemary Sullivan on Margaret Atwood. However, it was clear from their books and from the inadvertently hilarious NFB docu-bio that Atwood was a resistant subject and, worse, didn’t seem inclined to share caches of personal documents. Even working on Atwood MSS at Fisher has been a challenge. I have a piece on the origins of Alias Grace that I’d love to publish, in a fascinating Atwood project called The Angel of Bad Judgement, but I can’t get permission to use the quotations.
So the context for my post is that I’m fascinated by critical biographies of women writers by other women writers, and I’m tepid about stepping outside this tiny circle.
Robert Thacker is clearly not a woman author and also, for me somewhat fatally, is writing from an American academic position. I’ve only met Thacker once, I think at a Western Literatures Association conference in Victoria, where he gave a keynote on Munro and adultery. That was a decade ago (thank you, academic conferences, who keep your programs up in perpetuity!). The talk is titled, more sedately, “Alice Munro in Victoria”. From my recollection, it was mostly focused on bringing together Munro’s story “Differently” and the Victoria-era years of her marriage, when both she and her then-spouse apparently dabbled in adultery in a recreational manner. Whatever–consenting adults, and all that.
But here’s my question for Thacker, which I will be exploring in some detail in a longer piece. Why were Munro’s extra-marital dalliances relevant to a discussion of her work, while her decision to remain in a long-term relationship with a man who sexually abused her daughter was not?
Thacker’s defense of knowing, but not telling, about the latter event has been challenging to follow in its logic. Here are some links: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/alice-munro-biographies-1.7268296; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/books/alice-munro-reactions.html; https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/09/alice-munro-colleagues-abuse/
And from the CBC piece, here, to me, is the crux of the matter:
“Thacker, who declined to speak to CBC for this article, told the Globe and Mail that he was aware of Skinner’s assault and her subsequent estrangement from her mother but intentionally kept it out of his biography of Munro.
In interviews with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Thacker said he didn’t include Skinner’s experience because his book was already heading to print in 2005 when she contacted him, and he wasn’t writing a ‘tell-all biography.’
Thacker also chose to keep it out of the book’s 2011 update–even after Munro herself sat down with him, asked him to turn off the tape recorder and spoke to him about what happened. He said he viewed the situation ‘as a private family matter.’”
So, to re-cap, his goal is not to be salacious. Yet in the biography and in his other published and publicly presented work, he has no qualms about discussing infidelity, Munro’s very fraught relationship with her difficult mother, or Munro’s less-than-stellar parenting choices.
Why are these not “private family matters” that his sense of biographical decorum precludes him from addressing?
I have questions.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 