It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother has her child’s best interests at heart, and that she will put those interests before her own. Nature has made this a necessity: Without constant care and solicitude, an infant will die. If mothers don’t protect their children, who will? How will the they survive? This is baked into us: Regardless of our feminist beliefs, we expect women to be good mothers.

So when we learn that Alice Munro—who so brilliantly chronicled the lives of girls and women, who described in such knowing detail their secret thoughts, their pain and yearning, needs and desires—played a part in a story of childhood abuse, it shakes the foundations of our belief in—what? Her writing? Her role as a model? The maternal archetype? Whatever it shakes, it does so profoundly. For it had seemed that Munro understood everything about us, the way we thought and felt, in public and private.

How is it possible that she did not understand this fundamental female thing about what a mother is?

Sexuality, and the seamy physical side of life-the shadowy, hot, shameful, unspoken part-has always been a compelling element in Munro’s writing. Those passages were both discomfiting and electrifying. Yes, we thought, these are real, these awful encounters; here is the anti-romantic aspect of sex. We stared at them in horrid fascination, safe with the author, at a distance. But now we see these stories in a different light. Now we can’t help but wonder how they relate to the fact that Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, was covertly abusing Munro’s young daughter Andrea, and that a horrifying story of sexual predation was unfolding around Munro herself. Was she somehow aware of it? Did she keep herself from knowing? Did she stay silent and complicit as it happened, protecting her........

© Time