Somewhere on a tiny island in the North Pacific, I row to the government dock from our lovely old 1946 wooden cruiser and hitch a ride into town, a town named after another old wooden ship from another era, HMS Ganges. It’s a small island, but now a very popular island, sadly infested with too many Tesco tractors or their like (Mercedes G-Wagons, e.g.,) on land and too many Tupperware boats (over-sized plastic yachts) by sea. We who have sailed in to one of the harbours belong to an eccentric class of old workboats, skippered by equally eccentric skippers who pour time, love, and probably too much money into keeping British Columbian mariner history alive. But I digress.

The trip into town is twofold: to get supplies and to pick up a vital piece of equipment, a small pump, for the boat (I did say it is an old wooden boat). The pump is being shipped from the mainland via seaplane to downtown Ganges and so I have a few hours to spend shopping and window shopping and maybe I’ll get something to eat. Over the past decade or so, the vibe here on the island has gone from quiet village and old-school shrub (think tie-dye and VWs) to high-end cars, linen, and cranky everyone. Gone is the beautiful gem of an island in the North Pacific that I first set eyes upon at age 17. Back then it was quiet and kind and humble. Now it’s in shock. The island is in shock.

There’s a great bakery here, one of those old hippy endeavours that used to serve huge, whole wheat cinnamon buns that basically took a week to digest but was oh so delicious. Well it’s still here, but the Tupperware boat crowd and the G-Wagon crowd now take up all the space and the lineups are out the door. The staff looks miserable so I decide to head over to the bookstore to pick up a weekend NYTs (ya, I know, but hey, there’s gotta be SOME upside to the linen crowd) before heading to the grocery store. I enter the bookstore, truly one of the best in the region, and failing to get a NYTs I grab a New York Times Book Review, which is always a thoughtful read.

There’s a lady in front of me, dressed in rather funky clothes wearing funky glasses. She gives off neither old shrub nor Tupperware/G-Wagon vibes. She’s picking up a book she’s ordered so is def. a ‘local’, albeit I can clearly see she is not really a local (the funky glasses) — I mean I’ve been coming to this island for decades and have watched the changes and can read the people pretty well. As the lady puts her book into her bag I put my mag on the counter and cheerily ask the woman at the till, ‘So, how about that Alice Munro?’

Well, dear reader, YOIKS is what I have to say when summarizing the convo in the little bookstore on the little island on the edge of the continent. We three women, of varying age and clearly of different backgrounds, albeit with an obvs love of literature, all agree at how disappointing and disgraceful the story is of how Andrea Skinner, daughter of Jim and Alice Munro, and stepdaughter of Carol Sabiston and the pedophile step-father, Gerald Fremlin who abused her, how utterly she was failed by ALL of them. And not just for a short while, but for decades. And she was failed by so many more, including many journalists she reached out to to no avail.

All three of us are appalled we say. I ask the women if they want to know how I REALLY feel about Munro and they say yes. I tell them that I for one am not ‘let down’ by Alice Munro the writer/artist because I gave up reading her a few decades ago. I tried and tried to read her short stories in The New Yorker and only got a third of the way in and gave up on them: she was just too damned cold for me. Icy cold, with that perfect, clever prose, I found the writing to be missing soul. And I found the stories cruel. So I quit, I just plain quit trying to read her just like I long ago quit trying to read Margaret Atwood. I suppose I wrote their work off as too Ontario for my liking, because, honestly, after living, working, and studying in Ont. for five years, I’d had enough of the type of people they write about and whom I found rather dull in their pursuit of things, stuff. (Though I really like the Anishinaabeg from Ont. with whom I’ve met and studied Ojibwe.) But again, I digress.

‘Me too’, says lady with funky glasses. ‘I quit reading her a long time ago too! And do you mind if I give you women MY two cents?’ ‘YES!’, we reply in unison. ‘Well Jim Munro should have protected his daughter. He sent her back AFTER she told her dad what happened? What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with the mother, the step-mother?’ We all shake our heads. I tell her I had always found, when living in Victoria, Jim to be rather preoccupied and aloof at his store, and even at a private party I once attended at his and Carol’s house. But I’d always supposed it was because I was a minor, minor, minor writer and he was attached, albeit in a divorcy way, with a truly GREAT writer and he had a serious business to run that shared her name!!

‘And Alice was a f*cking b*tch!!! I knew her in Toronto!’ the funky lady pronounced. ‘I had a bookstore and she’d come in for something or other and she would barely speak to me. She didn’t have the time of day for me even though we sold her goddamn books.’ And so our convo continued, all three of us sharing disgust at the hypocrisy of those adults, and us sharing the dirty secret that we didn’t like Alice Munro’s books, not for a long, long time (nor Atwood’s tbh). Nor Alice’s short stories in The New Yorker. I threw all of my Munro novels out before I moved to Scotland 20 years ago.

‘So what’s the plan with her books?’ I asked the bookstore person. ‘We just ordered in a bunch before all of this story broke. Nobel Prize winner and all that …’. ‘Oh dear’, we said. But she just shrugged.