You know…I could never bring myself to read one of her books. Ever. No matter what. I can even see covers I’d picked up and put back down.
…Now I know why.
Alice Munro treated her husband raping his nine year old stepdaughter for Years- with no adult intervention to stop him, even when she told…like the 9 yr old kid had betrayed HER. Instead of her husband.
& when the kid finally told HE THREATENED TO KILL her if she went to the police and to release child porn he’d made the 9 yr old take.
…And Munro not only stayed with him after that. She pinned it on “our-woman-hating culture.”
Munro went back to Fremlin and stayed with him until he died in 2013, Skinner wrote. Munro allegedly said “that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner wrote in her essay.
Jaclyn Diaz, NPR.
Nope. It was this “mother Hating daughter” culture, one that I’ve had enough of that is chock full of these vindictive, self serving heartless, fucked in the head women conspiring to destroy girls & then whining as they feign pinning the horrors they cosigned on the scum they knew better than to marry Just to Have a man.
Frankly?
Be the beast you are and take the bullet to the head from the kid you forced to be here that you deserve if she fucking survives your sending her to the slaughterhouse.
It is only the grace of God you don’t die at the hands of ANY child you’ve sexually assaulted, enabled the abuse of or gaslit After finding out what your “man” did to them…solely to keep your gravy train running.
AB
Skinner did press charges, eventually. And per the system, he got off. Again. Suspended sentence and probation.
I was having a knock down drag out battle with God recently on just this issue.
Many of you perusing here know that Grievechronic has it’s roots in a similar tale. I rarely talk about it now. Grievechronic speaks for itself.
But bluntly stated for those in the dark, instead of taking matters into my own hands with a friend’s gun before I left Cleveland… after my parents and their siblings participated in hiding the pedophile who’d assaulted me as a kid from the detectives on the case when I pressed charges in 2000… to stop the pedophile from attacking another kid it’s siblings had passively sacrificed to it in 1999…
… God showed me all the other diminished souls of inner kids snuffed out by sexual abuse enacted and enabled by selfish adults.
The dead and dying, drugging themselves up and/or mindlessly putting themselves in situations that mirrored the abuse adults around them rained down on them as kids.
He Paul on the road to Damascus’d me to stop a murderous rampage…by opening my eyes, showing me a vision of all the abandoned lots around the domestic violence safehouse/shelter the cops had stuck me in as the detectives worked on the case, lots full of the barely animated bodies of children who’d been victimized by adults, behind chain link fences. Smushed like they were in concentration camps in limbo.
God …said I could go the route I was going and avenge myself & my cousin…Or fry bigger fish.
By writing something that’d free those captives and help others find their ways out of this gauntlet Without wasting their lives by murdering their abusers.
GOD Asked me to help them. I agreed. Left design officially. Figured out how to write.
But I won’t lie.
There are days I regretted not following my first impulse to just erase the generation of enablers and abusers off the planet as an example. Because abusers and enablers rarely change.
Days like the day a female cousin who’d blacked out the sexual assaults against her as a toddler reached out to me thinking I was a rich author( I went broadly no contact/ changed my name) and, fiscally denied, informed me that my father was lying to everyone & saying that the reason I never returned to Cleveland was due to my big brother sexually assaulting me … instead of my father’s sibling. Who’d also violently assaulted said big brother. My father knew. He knew the abuse was happening. He’d helped cover it up. In multiple directions.
On that day…I had to hold my tongue and track down that cousin’s big sisters who’d Also been attacked mercilessly alongside that cousin blacking shit out… to “get her” and have the talk with her I didn’t have the sweet lips to have that the situation merited.
Days like the day I found out the cousin I’d gone back to Cleveland from Japan to press charges for, so Something would at least be on the books. .. but that I couldn’t rescue, ended up barely surviving a house fire years later. Technically away from the fucked up brood I’d pressed charges against, but attacked because she wouldn’t back down from a fucked up dealer who ended up killing nine kids at a sleepover with the arson he targeted her with. Why was she there? Because still none of our parents, aunts or uncles would allow her 4.0 GPA ass to stay Anywhere but where the pedophile roosted. They consciously failed their kids and got enraged by anyone speaking out against it.
And to me? Every second & third degree burn my cousin suffered through on 70% of her body is my father’s cross to bear. I had to go back to Cleveland because he would not take her in when I begged him to in 1999. & It’s so weird… I never connected the heart attack he had soon after the fire To his failure as a father, uncle and man in general…until I wrote that previous sentence.
But the craziest part is the real reason I haven’t returned to Cleveland- a city I loved growing up in (because thank fucking God that fucked abuse shit took up half of a percent of the life I chose to defiantly live on my terms regardless of the idiotic, keeping up with the Jones adults at the wheel growing up)- was because in February 2008 I did go back to Cleveland.
To the rooms where it happened, even. At fn peace.
Until I found out that my big brother… once the smartest, wildest survivor motherfucker I knew…had let these aging enabling assholes browbeat him…into proving his fucking loyalty to the fucked up family he’d been half-assed adopted into (after finding out at 18 my Dad lied about having adopted him as a kid because he “didn’t trust” his wife’s Jewish lawyer)…by leaving his fucking SONS unattended in the house. . . With the pedophile who’d brutally assaulted him from like 4 until he was like 11… who said fucked up family NEVER sought any curative therapy for, even after the hell I’d raised in 2000. Like it was a dare.
The last in person conversation I had with my brother was in 2008. It was “What the fuck are you doing? You know better!”
The second to last email I sent him was when I went apoplectic in 2021 upon finding out that my dad was basically assaulting him all over again with the slander.
The last email? When my father had a stroke last year and an Aunt my father had also terrorized her entire fucking life called me, thinking it’d make me come back. That email? ” I’ve said my piece. He’s already dead to me when it comes to shit like this. But You need to go to the fn hospital & say your piece in peace before he bounces or you’ll forever regret it. “
I’ve made my peace.
By the grace given via Grievechronic…
and a fuckton of work.
I got so healed that the name change was not just Of God, taking my birth name back…it was for them.
The point of grievechronic was never to hang this brood of enablers and vipers out to dry. Soon as God said bigger fish, it was utterly beyond them. Dust knocked off feet.
Now? Any machinations by that brood testing me… trying to affiliate with my story when that legal name change protected them WANT the smoke. Want the brimstone they’ll get.
I don’t Go back to Cleveland because I deserve a life larger than vengeance. I deserve more from this experience than being an avenging angel on the grounds of my father’s conscious crimes.
I chose to forgive and go Live the best I could. Can.
…I don’t live in rage.
But you best believe there is a conscious reservoir. Ever ready.
& I still have days where I have to sit with it, not wrestle with it. Because it is righteous rage. That God transmuted into zeal. The pinnacle of that processed rage, that revenge transcended, transmuted is the culmination of what Elysum, book nine is to me.
A book I finally finished last week after many iterations.
The aforementioned recent battle with God was over his seeming passivity over shit he’d asked me to give up my intended life over.
Why is it getting worse?
Why is nothing changing?
Why are you still letting them get away with it?
… Which brings us back to here. & Alice fucking Munro.
When I read the first sentence of Skinner’s harrowing story …I saw every time my spirit rejected the covers of her books.
… In a flash.
When I read the rest of it… it really sunk in.
They NEVER GET AWAY with it. IT is ALways on them. It permeates every fucking thing they do, every thing they produce…no matter the accolades. No matter how many out in the world drink their koolaid… believing to the contrary.
I don’t even wish joy to the demons butchering Munro in the afterlife. That’s the change.
I am however… spending my energy wishing ALL the JOY to Andrea Skinner.
Skinner said she is coming forward now because she wants her story
“to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
Andrea Skinner
But you know what else?
…the blood and emotional trauma of Every other kid in that neighborhood that he may have raped, tried to assault or even attempted to harass was front loaded into Munro’s aura while she was alive without her even knowing it…and will be on her as she moves through the Bardo.
Because that’s right… there was a blatant allusion by the now dead fucker in his taunting of Skinner over the years regarding all the lil girls in the neighborhood he “liked.” God knows what he did once Alice Munro officially cosigned on his repulsive behavior.
…and before this night is even over~ proof of life on that.
He exposed himself to the daughter of Munro’s friends, in that “God knows what else” segment. & She knew & hoped her kid that her husband raped committed suicide. Even wrote about it. Instead of protecting her kid. She farmed what she allowed to happen & hoped for a best that included her own daughter giving up her own life so she wouldn’t feel guilty about not giving up her pedophile “man”.
