Hi, my name's Giles Harvey and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine,
where I often cover literature and the literary world.
For many years, one of my favourite authors has been Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer.
Like a lot of people, I came to think of Monroe as perhaps the greatest English language writer of her time.
She won just about every award a writer could win, including the Nobel Prize.
And when she died last May at the age of 92, there was a huge outpouring from admirers,
people not only celebrating her work, but also saying what a decent person she seemed to have been.
She had an almost saintly reputation.
In fact, in Canada she was widely known as Saint Alice.
So what we learned about her after her death was incredibly shocking.
Two months after she died, an essay came out in the Toronto Star.
It was written by Munro's youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner.
And in the essay, Andrea revealed that she was sexually abused as a child by Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin.
Andrea kept the abuse secret from her mother for many years because she believed it would devastate her.
But when she finally did tell her mother, Monroe responded coldly, as though Andrea had somehow betrayed her.
Monroe ultimately chose to remain with her husband.
Like everyone else, I was shocked and enraged when I read these revelations.
They were particularly stunning because so many of Munro's stories deal with themes of child sexual abuse.
Her characters are often abused children who largely remain silent,
and women whose husbands keep damning secrets from them.