| David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker True writers are utterly themselves, their voices as unique as a fingerprint. And yet there are moments when I am reading Rachel Aviv, experiencing the acuity of her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her sentences, that I recall another New Yorker writer, Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021. This week we are publishing a piece by Rachel that I am quite sure Janet would have admired. When the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Alice Munro, the secretary of the Swedish Academy praised her writing for exploring the lives of “those who choose not to choose,” and added, “Of key importance are all the things her characters could not or did not wish to understand there and then, but that, only long afterward, stand revealed.” At least some of the more than fifty stories by Munro that were published in The New Yorker took on new and troubling resonances in the months following her death, in May. A shocking family history was made public by Alice’s daughter Andrea, who revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by her mother’s partner, Gerald Fremlin. Despite knowing the details of the abuse, Alice Munro had stayed with Fremlin and became estranged from Andrea. How could Alice Munro have made such a choice? Various stories in the press have made attempts to explore the question, but none with the depth of reporting or mind present in “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice.” In this piece, for this week’s issue, Rachel Aviv explores the competing impulses of freedom and surrender, coldness and warmth, and silence and expression that defined Munro’s life and work, revealing the devastating impact her decisions had on her daughter and others around her. She speaks extensively to Andrea and her sisters, Jenny and Sheila, and reads Munro’s letters and stories closely, to consider what we can learn from a great artist’s work—and the essential things that it cannot explain. Aviv, who has been a staff writer at the magazine since 2013, has written brilliantly in these pages about Lucy Letby, a British nurse who was found guilty of killing seven babies in her care; the writer Alice Sebold and the man who was wrongfully convicted of her rape; and a standout Ivy League student who was accused of lying about her past trauma. Her latest story is part of an issue that includes a glimmering profile by Rachel Syme of the actor Adam Scott; criticism by Hua Hsu, Jennifer Homans, and Helen Shaw; a rollicking humor piece by Patricia Marx; and much more—all made possible by your continued support. | 
