Beyond Good and Evil
November 22, 2025 9:28 PM Subscribe
Mysteries of Love, Horror and Art. A long and thoughtful essay on the enigma of Alice Munro, a short story genius who won the Nobel Prize for Literature but who also covered up the abuse of her daughter by her husband, Gerald Fremlin. It discusses how her behavior is reflected, covered up and justified in the art of her stories: “Alice Munro’s daughters have also passed into art thanks to her acts of unsparing, unsentimental love. Acts done out of love, Nietzsche once said, stand beyond good and evil. If this is what art amounts to, we should be grateful to Alice Munro for reminding us to be properly frightened of it…
Beyond Good and Evil
November 22, 2025 9:28 PM Subscribe
Mysteries of Love, Horror and Art. A long and thoughtful essay on the enigma of Alice Munro, a short story genius who won the Nobel Prize for Literature but who also covered up the abuse of her daughter by her husband, Gerald Fremlin. It discusses how her behavior is reflected, covered up and justified in the art of her stories: “Alice Munro’s daughters have also passed into art thanks to her acts of unsparing, unsentimental love. Acts done out of love, Nietzsche once said, stand beyond good and evil. If this is what art amounts to, we should be grateful to Alice Munro for reminding us to be properly frightened of it.”
“If Fremlin’s behavior was normal at least from the perspective of criminal psychopathology, Munro’s is harder to fathom. Her decision to allow herself to become practically and emotionally dependent on an eccentric pedophile was strange enough even before he abused her daughter. No doubt she sincerely loved him, but surely a large part of why she remained in this bizarre domestic situation was because it created the conditions that she needed in order to write, to produce the art that was (as she told an interviewer) “the final thing” in her life. To use Bea Doud’s language from “Vandals,” Munro’s was a greater or at least a far stranger insanity than Fremlin’s, and her family lived inside of it.”
“If Munro thought, as she told Barbara Frum, that “the springs of creativity and sex are all together,” and her understanding of sexuality is so tightly connected to domination and even to brutality, is her fiction, then, a celebration of the cruelty of the erotic? This would not be quite correct, because she also makes space in it for that other aspect of “the dark side of human nature,” “the impulses that make us religious.” Munro believes that to be human is necessarily to seek to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible brutality of nature, including the brutality of our erotic natures. This need to tame by explanation is for her the shared origin of both religion and poetry, perhaps even of language.”