Truth About Alice Munro 一个精神受虐狂，一个烂父母，一个天才作家

读完New Yorker对门罗事件的报道，气到浑身发抖。Andrea的继父，Gerry，从始至终声称是Andrea引诱了他，他才性侵Andrea。哪怕过了三十多年，Andrea的人生因此彻底被毁，Gerry在家人劝导下给Andrea写道歉信，他还要写：You had a big crush on me. 男人是有多自恋多不要脸，厚颜无耻毫不自知。而门罗更可悲，她非常清楚这件事对她女儿的影响，也知道Gerry所为多恶劣多可怕，依旧选择忽略她女儿选择继续跟Gerry生活。但门罗晚年悔恨，已得了阿兹海默症的她表示不想跟Gerry埋在一起。

门罗是复杂的。某种程度上，他与另一个烂人尼尔盖曼，Neil Gaiman，绝配，SM关系的绝配。Neil是S，门罗是M。门罗有受虐倾向。她有惊人的洞察力和共情能力，她将这种才能换作自毁般的为艺术献身。似乎有某种特异功能，她看到了任何他人都看不到的ghost。门罗细细体会这种真相背后的现实残酷，遭受精神折磨，写成小说。门罗为文学过着一种精神式的受虐生活。可能这样的自我精神折磨，才为她现实命运的遗憾与痛苦找到匹配的情感寄托，才给她史诗一样的生存意义，供给她写作才华驱使的渴望。门罗是作家，她在telling story，而人们需要story，是因为需要情感。她在泣血而歌。

结论就是，门罗并不虚伪，她也有良知，而且思想意识超前。但很遗憾，她将这种超前意识化作个人私体验，无心对身处的现实做出任何改变，更无心推动社会变革。门罗很虚弱，她不是充满力量的人。我不愿面对，但必须承认一点事实： 她一方面享受这种精神折磨；另一方面，她也享受与Gerry的亲密关系中，因此事件她占据道德高地而享有的更多权力（Gerry要对她愧疚一生）。She is a faulty parent. 她是个烂父母。

有一点值得一提：Andrea的事件引起广泛关注，得益于一位专栏作家Heather Mallick，她从少年时期就迷恋门罗，视她为偶像。她认为门罗是她文学之路的基石。Andrea的性侵事件之前有过几次公开，但毫无社会反响。大家都视而不见，闭口不谈。Heather本来也想维持门罗的女权主义英雄形象，但两天后她改变了主意，在她的Star专栏写了此事，这才引起广泛关注。并且，影响深远。

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice

原文有很多精彩描述，我摘录如下：

Many of the women in Alice’s stories have a kind of fantasy of total surrender, as if some final truth or recognition might be grasped in the depths of submission. Alice recognized that passivity was not “something the modern woman is supposed to be content with,” she told the CBC in 1979. But it could also be an asset. “I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them, just to see what will happen, to see what people will say, to see what people will do,” she said. “It’s probably the overriding passion of my life—just to see what will happen.”

Alice often spoke of how she had a real life, which was hidden, and another life, in which she was “pretending to be what people wanted me to be.” She also talked about moving through the world as “two women.” One was using the other’s life as material. As a young girl, she had recognized that her desires were so at odds with her surroundings—reading books was seen as a dangerous addiction—that exposure would bring her ridicule. Even when she was in her thirties, her brother, who had become a chemist, told her, “I’ve learned to accept my limitations, and I believe that’s what you should do. None of your writing is any good.” As a young mother, she lied rather than tell her friends that she was writing. She couldn’t write at all if another adult was in the house. “I just, I suppose, lived a very deceptive life,” she said. “But it didn’t bother me.” The outward-facing woman was self-effacing and gracious and vivacious, a compassionate listener. But the exertion of being in public—the “constant ‘work’ of that self-presentation,” Alice wrote her agent—caused her to feel so dysregulated that she felt she needed to stop going on book tours. “I’m not just being finicky, I think I’m making a true judgement of what’s dangerous for me,” she wrote.

Alice, the eldest of three children, was in her early teens when her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She felt humiliated by her mother’s symptoms—her unintelligible voice, her drooling—and also by her pleas for attention. After going to college, on a scholarship, Alice rarely returned home. In moments of despair, her mother would say, “Soon I’ll see Alice,” like a prayer. “Dearest dear,” her mother wrote her, shortly before dying. “I am just so full of love and good wishes that my letter will I fear it will burst at the corner. Please write soon (just for me) everything. I find my love and it is centred on my children."

Alice hadn’t seen her mother in two and a half years, and she didn’t go home for her funeral. “The problem, the only problem, is my mother,” she wrote, in a story that drew on these memories. In another story, she described taking “all emotion away from our dealings with her, as you might take away meat from a prisoner to weaken him, till he died.”

“She can’t work now that life has got such a grip on her”; “Or is it that her authority has waned, her independent sight has clouded, her powers are wilting”; “Her authority is not what it used to be, in the exercise of even her most private powers”; “That’s what she can’t afford to discover.”

“Sexual abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there is a context. My mother played a very large part in creating a terrifying world in which degradation—hers and mine—was guaranteed.”

Later, when a different editor asked Martin to prepare an obituary for Alice, years before her death, she said no, because she didn’t want to be put in a position where she had to omit things that she knew to be true. Instead, she prepared an essay about Alice’s work, drawing attention to several stories about maternal neglect.

Jenny said that Alice told her, “I didn’t want that pediful.” She spit the words out, with significant effort. “I said, ‘Do you mean pedophile?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Do you mean you should have stood with Andrea?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”

Charlie wrote an essay called “The Young and Pretty Condition,” for a college class, in which she described how some of her mother’s attempts to protect her innocence (like refusing to dress her in a bikini as a child, or having frank discussions about infantilizing beauty standards) gave her the impression that all old men were secretly menacing.

The conversation with Charlie made me feel that Andrea was soaring through life, and in an e-mail to Andrea I admitted that I felt myself slipping into the place her siblings had spent so many years: “Look how amazing Andrea is—she’s thriving!” “Thriving Andrea,” she responded. “What a load.”