You Can’t Ever Get Close
On my last afternoon in Prague, I set out for Kafka’s grave. But having misread the guidebook, I ended up stumbling around a muddy cemetery for over an hour before I found someone to ask for directions. The security guard explained that Kafka was buried elsewhere, in the Jewish cemetery. Obviously. I raced up the road, trying to get there before it closed for the day.
I was too late: the tall iron gates were already locked. I briefly considered scaling one of the stone walls, breaking in, and I might have tried it if the cemetery weren’t on a busy street. Instead I walked along the perimeter in case I could see Kafka’s resting place through the bars of one of the gates. I was in luck. There they were: Hermann, Julie, and Franz, the latter’s headstone heaped with small stones, the Jewish tradition. I had collected some myself in the wrong cemetery. I stood at the gate for a few minutes, head bowed, hands clasping the iron bars, and tried to reflect on what Kafka’s work had meant to me, but I couldn’t think of anything very profound. Then I had an idea. I reached into my pocket, drew my arm back, and lobbed a few stones over the gate in Kafka’s direction. I don’t think any of them quite made it onto his grave, but at least I’d done my best, under the circumstances, to pay my respects.
I love visiting the places that formed the writers who have helped form me. Elsewhere in Prague, I looked for the balcony referenced in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the one where Communist party leader Klement Gottwald was photographed giving a speech in 1948. I didn’t care about the historical event, just the way Kundera discusses the photo’s significance. In Buenos Aires, I sat on the small hill outside Borges’s library and drank té con leche at his favourite café. In Copenhagen I was thrilled to find Kierkegaard’s grave quite by accident and in Chile I visited all three of Neruda’s houses.
The term literary tourism evokes a contradiction: literature is an exercise in imagination, while tourism plunges us into the real. Travellers confront practical difficulties like sunburn, missed connections, language barriers, and figuring out how to refold a map. They are active in the world. They get things done. Readers, on the other hand, cogitate. They solve textual problems: who committed a murder, what an image signifies. The appeal of literary tourism lies in its potential to connect the concrete, public world with the abstract, deeply personal experience of reading a book, enriching our understanding of both.
*
The only time I’ve gone somewhere for the sole purpose of delving into a writer’s milieu was when I drove out to Wingham, Ontario, the epicentre of Alice Munro country, in the summer of 2016. I relished the opportunity to overpack, so between my guitar, Coleman cooler, and camping chairs, my rusted Acura’s trunk looked like a game of Tetris once my new boyfriend, R, had finished packing it. The car’s air conditioner died many years ago, so the sunroof was open and the windows were down as we headed through the clogged Toronto streets up to Highway 401. We had somehow managed to cram everything in, though I did have to drive with a loaf of bread on the floor just behind my heels, wedged up against my seat.
From the 401, we drove northwest through Brampton, finally approaching Huron County via country roads. Past Orangeville, the view opened up: unlike other parts of southern Ontario, the bush and farmland here struck me as almost perfectly flat. We saw an Amish couple travelling by buggy in the opposite direction, the man lifting his hat in greeting. We also passed the usual rural sights of grain silos and weather-beaten barns and grazing livestock. Munro herself once commented that the scenery in this part of the province is not particularly, well, scenic: “There is not much call for those places on the highway where people can stop and give their attention to the view.” She seemed to love this quality, however, writing that she was “intoxicated” by the landscape.
I became a Munro superfan via Runaway, which I read around the time it was published in 2004; in particular, I loved the triptych of stories about Juliet, a Munro stand-in. In “Silence,” Juliet is abandoned by her only child, cut off for no discernable reason when Penelope joins some sort of religious cult. I had been devastated for Juliet, beguiled by what Jonathan Franzen, in the book’s New York Times review, called Munro’s “almost pathological empathy for her characters.”
This empathy doesn’t appear to have extended to her own children, however. In 2024, the Toronto Star published the shocking story that Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, had been estranged from Munro for decades due to her decision not to leave Gerald Fremlin, the man who began sexually abusing Skinner when she was nine. Munro found out in the early 1990s, when Skinner was twenty-five, and stayed with Fremlin until his death, even after his 2005 conviction for having assaulted her daughter.
I understand why people are interested in the question Claire Dederer posed in her viral essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”, although it doesn’t strike me as particularly useful or generative. (Women artists, Dederer notes, are considered monstrous when they abandon their children.) I also agree with the writer and childhood sexual abuse survivor Brendan Taylor, who argued, after the news broke about Munro, that questions like Dederer’s erase Skinner’s suffering, inscribing Munro’s readers as victims instead, betrayed by their favourite author. I would also submit that fans are not required to devise an identical response to the art of people who do terrible things. As Dederer herself cannily points out: “We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority… The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you?”
There’s simply no need for a collective response here. People for whom Munro’s writing still brings pleasure can read her work without fearing that they’re somehow morally abased by her parenting failures. People who no longer want to read or teach it, due to sheer disgust (or for any other reason), can avoid it without being castigated for allowing emotion to cloud their aesthetic judgment. Those who never liked Munro’s books can continue to dislike them without gloating (please). It’s all right for each of us to choose our own path forward. The only thing I feel is certain: no one can read her work the same way ever again.
*
After passing a bank and a Tim Horton’s, R and I turned off Highway 86 onto Wingham’s main drag, Josephine Street. A banner high above the road advertised the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story, the reason for our visit. I was uneasy as I got out of the car. I’m often self-conscious in small towns, nervous that my companions and I are being judged for a perceived pretension. (If you come from a big city and have read even a little Alice Munro, it seems a fair assumption to make.) Like Rose in Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? I become aware of the uselessness of my hands, my inability to do the practical things most people take for granted; worse, there’s my Jewishness, my vegetarianism. Also, this was my first trip with R. I worried that we would fight or discover new, unpleasant things about each other. But mostly, I feared it might be dangerous if anyone here suspected he’d been assigned female at birth.
I’d messaged R on a dating site a few months earlier because he loved Barbara Gowdy and his photos made me swoon. I liked that he was trans. Or, perhaps more precisely, I didn’t give it much thought. Then, on our first date, I found myself studying him carefully, transphobically. From one angle, I thought he looked boyish and handsome; from another, I saw an older dyke with close-cropped hair. I was jaw-droppingly attracted to him, while panicking silently, another transphobic reaction I’m ashamed to admit. Cocktails turned into dinner at the restaurant next door. Afterwards, we squeezed under my umbrella and made our way to the Gladstone to meet a couple of his friends. Outside the hotel, he grabbed both my hands. “It’s been so long,” he muttered, “I’m not sure I remember how to do this.” And then he kissed me.
Despite intending to move slowly, I wound up at R’s apartment a few days later. His bookshelves were stocked with feminist classics and Scandinavian noir, his walls lined with local art. We talked all night. In the morning, he took my hand as he walked me to the elevator, saying he was proud to be seen with me.
Meanwhile I was so anxious I could barely function.
We went on one more date. After he admitted that he’d lied about his age online—he was fourteen years older than me, not ten—I crossly said that he should have told me before we spent the night together, and he got emotional. It was too much, too soon. I called things off. Then I texted him again a week later.
In Wingham, at Grumpy’s Old Time Eatery, the friendly waitress didn’t flinch at the timbre of R’s voice when he ordered a fish burger, and she directed him to the men’s washroom. I started to relax. We were safe here. Unremarkable.
*
Alice Munro tried to remain inconspicuous for much of her life, using her seemingly conventional lifestyle to hide the fact that she was a writer, one whose books included bad language and explicit descriptions of sex. No one smirked when she spoke at parties, or asked if she had an agent yet, or mistook her for the self-published author they’d been avoiding, thinking, Who the fuck let her in?—for the simple reason that Munro avoided such parties. In a memoir about their relationship, her daughter Sheila writes, “She has spoken of her art for dissembling, for concealment, which . . . [allowed] her to remain free and detached, almost without a self.” Sheila observes that this is a useful skill for a writer. Later in the memoir, it becomes clear that Munro’s double life while she was growing up was a way to survive. Stuck in an environment hostile towards her private, daydreaming self—from Huron County’s relentless winters to the small daily horrors she suffered and witnessed at school, her mother’s rigid expectations, Wingham’s deeply conservative values, women’s limited options at the time, and her family’s grinding poverty—Munro was determined to fight for her survival as an artist. Sheila writes that she sees her mother in her autobiographical stories “standing apart, not letting herself be overwhelmed by pity. Having to save herself, resisting something that was false and sentimental, resisting love because love means being engulfed.” Sheila never mentions what such apartness might have cost her mother. Or herself and her sisters.
The night of our second date, after a swing-dance lesson and talking for hours over dinner, I offered to drive R home. We were sitting in my car, still parked in the driveway, when I broached the subject: I’d never dated a trans person before. Was that a problem for him?
He confessed that he hadn’t dated at all since transitioning, years earlier. “Oh God,” he said, “I’m starting to dissociate.”
I put my hand on his leg. “Don’t. Stay here with me.”
He explained that most people misread him as a cis gay man. He stopped.
“And it upsets you because you feel like you aren’t being seen?”
His head tilted back, eyes squeezed shut, he nodded.
I identified as straight, if loosely, and since I’d long thought of gender as fluid and trans guys as men, I hadn’t anticipated that dating R would change anything for me. Then I started questioning myself anyway. I’d experimented with my sexuality when I was younger and had eventually decided to call myself straight to indicate a tendency, not to limit myself to partnering with cis men or to buy into gendered relationship norms. Still, I was scared shitless. So had I been concealing my true nature from myself this whole time? Did I have a true nature?
*
We’d intended to catch the festival’s opening reception, a creative response to Huron County’s book-banning debate of the 1970s, featuring a staged reading of Beverley Cooper’s new play, If Truth Be Told, as well as festival authors reading from banned books. But we arrived late and decided instead to go straight to our campsite at the provincial park near Goderich. I caught up with Cooper a few weeks later. She explained the background to her play, which is based on the period of Munro’s life soon after she moved back from British Columbia to Huron County to live with Fremlin. By 1976 a debate was raging across Ontario about banning books from high school curricula, including Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners and Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Munro defended The Diviners at public meetings in London and Clinton, while living amongst the same people who wanted it banned. Munro was already a famous writer when she moved to Clinton, yet Cooper says, “She took [the backlash] very personally. There was a time when she wouldn’t go back to Wingham; she stayed in Clinton.”
Perhaps such hidden tensions help explain why literary tourism can be a frustrating experience. We visit a town, retrace an author’s steps, chat with a few residents, catch something of the cadences of a place; all of it a poor cousin to the private, complicated, mysterious currents that have shaped the author’s life. In a 2009 interview, Munro revealed that she, too, has made pilgrimages to the former homes of beloved authors. “There’s always disappointment when you see the reality,” she said. “You want to get close to something you can’t ever get close to.” Indeed, this last sentiment could also apply to her fiction: her characters’ deepest impulses remain elusive, even to themselves.
*
That first night, instead of attending Cooper’s play, we pitched our tent and brought some beers down to the beach to watch the sun set over the lake. I took selfies: R kissing my cheek, me grinning like a fool. Later, R built a fire and I got out my guitar. For his upcoming birthday, I’d learned to play a Johnny Cash tune. Then I played Ani DiFranco. “I don’t even have to ask,” I said drily. “I'm sure you know all the words.” He’d given me a million “queer points” that day for reciting ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me,” but then I’d lost them for knowing the words to every Springsteen hit. We stayed up late beside the fire, singing and passing our beers back and forth.
Over the summer, in bits and pieces, I would tell R about the grooming and sexual abuse I suffered when I was six years old. He was the first person I told, besides my therapist, and he believed me without questions or judgment. Sometimes, I wondered aloud to him if I’d made up these childhood memories, if they were some kind of perverse wish instead. He just said, “I really don’t think that’s possible.” And it was everything I needed to hear.
*
The following morning, after breakfast, we returned to Wingham. The festival’s epicentre was in Wingham’s former post office, now the North Huron Museum, a stately red brick building with arched windows and a tall clock tower. We attended a reading by Samuel Archibald. When we visited the festival’s sales table afterwards, the bookseller told us that Alice had recently come to her store and signed all the books of hers they had in stock. Did we know she still lived in the area, down in Clinton? We did.
The next event featured a talk by Robert Thacker, Munro’s biographer. The audience of elderly White women (and R and me) sat at long tables covered in lavender paper in the museum’s basement. We ate sandwiches and gourmet cupcakes from brown paper bags while Thacker spoke about the role of Huron County in Munro’s work. Taking evident pleasure in his subject, Thacker traced the process through which Munro created Alice Munro country, which he called “a country of the mind,” over the course of her career. She began fictionalizing Wingham after her mother’s death in 1959, incorporating motifs that would recur until her last book, Dear Life, appeared in 2012. Thacker claimed that Alice Munro country as we now know it only came into being after her permanent return to the area.
Munro’s hardscrabble, Presbyterian characters have always felt exotic to me, partly because of their religion and class, but mostly because of how sturdily affixed they are to local history and landscape. Perhaps this rootedness is what led me to avoid reading Munro for so long: I associated her with such bland, wholesome Canadiana as the Canada Food Guide and the Group of Seven. I was wrong, of course. Even apart from her Gothic sensibility, explorations of gender and class, and raw approach to sexuality, the interior worlds of Munro’s characters are often richly disturbing: their shifts feel so momentous as to keep one in breathless suspense. To travel to Alice Munro country is to accept inevitable failure, to know that one will never see this place and its people as acutely as she did. Now, of course, I wonder how she saw herself.
*
After the talk, we burst from the museum into a magnificent afternoon. R wanted to go back to Lake Huron and spend the rest of the day at the beach, but I didn’t feel that we’d properly experienced the Munro-ness of Wingham yet.
So I dragged him to the Alice Munro Literary Garden, converted from a parking lot, sitting beside the museum’s clock tower. Due to lingering resentment in the town—Munro often fictionalized local families and events—police were present, as a precaution, at its dedication ceremony on Munro’s seventy-first birthday in 2002. When we visited, it was a cheerful spot, featuring a metal arch, a bench, and a stone path inlaid with marble blocks bearing the names and publication dates of Munro’s books on one side, and of her awards on the other. The path encircled a sculpture of a young girl lying on her stomach, lost in a book. To the left as we faced her was a mailbox with free pamphlets inside, the cumbersomely titled Self-Guided Tour of Points of Interest in the Town of Wingham Relating to Alice Munro.
Following the pamphlet’s directions, we visited the public school Munro attended and the radio station where she first read her stories on-air as a teen, the hospital where she was born, and a charming brick bungalow where she once lived part-time. R kept wanting to take pictures of me and I posed, feeling cute in my sailor dress and wide straw hat. I would have liked to walk to the Laidlaw homestead in Lower Town, where Munro grew up, but I feared testing his good-natured patience. We agreed to visit it instead on our way back to Toronto the following day.
*
Goderich is another point in the small-town constellation of Munro country. Markets have been held in its large octagonal square since the 1840s, only two decades after the Laidlaws, Munro’s ancestors and some of the area’s first settlers, arrived from Scotland. That Sunday, I bought jars of country jam and apple chutney at the market. R bought a second-hand metal file. I admired his intense focus as, brow furrowed, he dug through the various tools. When we finished browsing, we asked one of the vendors, a stout woman with long, somewhat straggling curls, to recommend a restaurant. “You should try Pat and Kevin’s,” she said sunnily. “It’s new.” As we walked away, she added, “Kevin is our mayor.”
Pat and Kevin’s on the Square turned out to be a big, crowded diner. Our distracted waitress brought over menus designed with comic-book iconography. High-camp groaners like, “By golly, there’s more choice here than there are trees in Courthouse Park,” entertained us while we waited to order.
A notification sounded on R’s phone; it was the date, apparently, of a minor Jewish holiday. “Why does your phone know this?” I asked.
“I downloaded a Jewish calendar,” he said. “I’ve been reading up.”
“You’ve been reading up about Jewish holidays?”
“I was thinking you might want me to convert.”
I had a sudden, thrilling vision of R wearing a yarmulke and stomping on a wine glass if we were to get married. “You’d really be willing to do that,” I said, “for me?”
*
In Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan lives at the end of the Flats Road where the “houses were set further apart and looked in general more neglected, poor, and eccentric than town houses would ever be.” Today this road is called Turnberry Street; when Munro was growing up, it was Lower Town Road, the place where she invented stories on her long walks to school.
We reached the end of Turnberry Street and turned onto West Street, still a dirt and gravel road, passing a sign saying Total Indulgence to arrive at the house where Munro lived, apart from one winter that she spent in town, until she was eighteen. The bewildering sign and the half-dozen or so cars in various states of disrepair weren’t what we were expecting. We checked the directions again. Since we seemed to be in the right place, I stood on the lawn in front of the brick farmhouse while R snapped more photos with my cellphone.
The house was simple, notable only for the pattern of yellow brick that nicely set off the façade’s dominant red. The property lay right at the point where the edges of town met countryside, bordered to the south by a section of the Maitland River, with a sunset view over the uninhabited hills to the west. On higher ground than the rest of Lower Town, the property would have been spared the worst of the river’s frequent floods.
In his biography of Munro, Thacker describes the house’s interior when the Laidlaws lived there. Built in the 1870s, it had two bedrooms upstairs and a dining room, living room, and kitchen on the main floor. There was no indoor plumbing until well into the 1940s. Munro’s mother painted the linoleum to look like a rug (they couldn’t afford a real one). In “Dear Life,” which the New Yorker published as memoir, Munro returns once more to her childhood: Wingham and Lower Town, her father’s failing business, her mother’s illness and stifled ambitions, the long road she walked to school, and most of all, this house. “Dear Life” is the eponymous last story in Munro’s last collection: her final literary statement.
Although Thacker knew about Fremlin’s conviction for indecent assault—Skinner informed him via email before the biography went to press in 2005—he refused to include this fact in the book, insisting that his biography was a scholarly overview of Munro’s oeuvre. Yet it now seems obvious that her stories are full of thematic material inspired by her inability to protect her daughter, and herself, from Fremlin. Near the end of “Dear Life,” for example, Munro wrote, “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.” As Skinner told the New York Times, Fremlin’s pedophilia was “intimately linked” to her mother’s work.
Munro’s close friend Margaret Atwood was also quoted in the Times saying she thought it “very, very likely” that Munro was sexually abused as a girl. Given that the majority of abusers are known to their child victims, if Atwood is right, Munro’s childhood home might be where this abuse occurred.
*
We were about to get back in the car when the owner of the house came out to greet us. He was a genial, low-key man in a ball cap and grey T-shirt who, after we apologized for being on his property and disturbing his weekend, insisted it was no problem and apologized for the outdoor “mess,” explaining that he was a car nut. With this most Canadian of introductions out of the way, he answered our questions about the house.
“I bought the property in 1987,” he explained. “At the time I’d never heard of Alice Munro. I just liked the look of the barn.” The low white building at the back of the farmhouse was his wife’s beauty salon, called Total Indulgence. They moved to Wingham after he took a job at the local foundry, where Munro’s father also worked for a time.
“Do a lot of tourists come here?” we wondered.
“Oh, tons,” he said. “Folks from as far away as Britain and Asia. Sometimes they ask if they can see inside the house.” For a moment, he looked uncomfortable. “But the inside has changed completely anyway.”
I resisted the temptation to ask if we could see inside the house.
Instead I asked about Robert Laidlaw’s mink and silver-fox farm: “Is this really the place?” Laidlaw had built the pens himself between the barn and the river; at times the operation had housed over two hundred creatures.
“You can see the remains of it still out there in the fields. Today it’s just a few beams and things, though.”
I resisted the impulse to ask if he could show us the ruins, or if we could wander around his property to take a look for ourselves.
Instead we chatted about his son and their shared passion for cars and drag racing. Finally, he shook each of our hands, and we thanked him for his time and apologized some more and then we climbed back into the Acura and drove away.
*
For the first year or so of my relationship with R, I still called myself straight, until I slowly came to terms with my attraction to various genders. It was only once I started accepting my queerness that I realized it had always been there: I was simply unwilling to face it. Ironically, having come out late in life, I now feel like an outsider in queer spaces. Other people’s stories give me permission, and courage.
It was the same when I finally confronted my history of sexual abuse. At my therapist’s suggestion, I attended a support group at the Gatehouse, where Skinner and her siblings also went to find healing. Their stories, and the stories of other survivors, have provided tangible evidence that I’m not as alone as I’d thought. This understanding doesn’t erase the lingering effects of the abuse, but it does make them much more bearable.
*
The weekend after our trip to Huron County, R and I brought my picnic blanket to the park and lay in the half-shade to take turns reading Alice Munro’s “The Beggar Maid” aloud to each other: the miserable story of Patrick and Rose, their bitter entanglement so unlike ours.
In that moment, engulfed by new love, for once I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Kathy Friedman is the author of the short story collection All the Shining People (House of Anansi, 2022), shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Kathy teaches in the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program at Humber Polytechnic and is the former artistic director of InkWell Workshops. Originally from Durban, South Africa, she now lives in Tkaronto, on Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt territory.
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Blessed by you, your writings. Thank you Kathy. Well done.
A simply brilliant synthesis. I marvel. Thank you!