By now, we should be used to this story: A beloved artist is undone by their own bad behavior, knocked off their pedestal, their works removed to a remote shelf. Since the #MeToo movement began, publishing, just like film and music, has seen its share of idols abandoned. But the distress over the Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro has a different tenor.

The death of Munro, at 92 years old in May, was followed by an outpouring of encomium by her many fans. Her obituary in The New York Times called her the closest thing there was to a “literary saint” in her native Canada. But this week her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an op-ed in the Toronto Star revealing that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had molested her when she was a child, and that Munro had remained married to him even after learning the truth. As a young woman, Skinner went to the police and—in part on the strength of letters Fremlin had written to Skinner’s father and her stepmother that graphically described the abuse—he was convicted of indecent assault. But Skinner never spoke publicly about the case, or about her estrangement from her mother, until now.