Jenessa Abrams at the LARB:
SHORTLY AFTER Alice Munro died, a line from the title story of her 2009 collection Too Much Happiness began circulating on the internet: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind […] When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” The quote appeared in white font over a black background. The only attribution was to Munro, so at the time, I assumed it was something she had said in an interview. It felt piercingly ironic that the female winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was being remembered for a remark she made about women’s supposed inability to live outside the context of men. Then, I learned the line was delivered by a character in “Too Much Happiness,” Munro’s fictional account of a real 19th-century woman, Sofya Kovalevskaya. Shortly afterward, the world learned of the sexual abuse Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, experienced as a child from her stepfather, Munro’s second husband. An abuse that Munro herself had learned of decades ago and chose to ignore.
more here.
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