“What Alice Munro Knew” by Giles Harvey (The New York Times; En)

Yes, in cases like this one it’s hardly possible to separate the art from the artist, no matter how hard you try. Frankly, as a reader, you don’t need to acquiesce if you feel that the art is forever tainted. 

Munro’s response made it clear that she [the daughter—E.T.] was right to be afraid. It was “as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Andrea recalled in her essay for The Star. Munro left Fremlin and fled to their condo on Vancouver Island. When Andrea visited her there, she was amazed by Munro’s self-pity. “She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her,” Andrea wrote. “She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.” Fremlin, meanwhile, sent a series of unhinged letters to the family, in which he acknowledged the abuse but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him.

But of course she proceeded with the publication. Self-pity can be strategic, see.

I thought I’d write and tell you the fate of the latest story, because it’s usually hard to talk frankly on the phone. I’ve been working on it — the story — since March, and it’s about The Subject, though thoroughly disguised and all pretty effectively constructed. I could do all the parts but the central thing, and when I approached that — and I tried from various angles — I got sick (I mean really throwing up) and felt very bleak. This has happened three or four times, and I realized finally I might sort of break apart. So I burned it (not to be tempted to go on). That’s where matters stand now, and I’m just gingerly (no pun) trying to start something else and regain my equilibrium. Which I can do.”

But Munro, it appears, did go on with the story about “The Subject”: “Vandals,” which appeared in The New Yorker five months later, is a cleareyed meditation on willful blindness and the tragedies it can precipitate.

What makes “Vandals” so unbearably poignant — Liza’s need and Bea’s failure to protect her — is the same thing that now makes it so enraging. The empathy Munro showers on her fictional child was apparently withheld from her real one, an operation that she seems to have considered fundamental to her work as a writer.

— I think, it’s worse: she commodified the pain of her own child and transformed it into a big hit read.

(You know how to go through a paywall, so here is Andrea’s essay)