Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

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Speaker 1 Alice Monroe was was a master of the short story in our time, the checkoff of her era. She published more than 50 stories in The New Yorker, and then in 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Speaker 1 But shortly before her death, her legacy darkened when her youngest daughter, Andrea, revealed that she'd been sexually abused by Monroe's longtime partner.

Speaker 1 This began when Andrea was just nine years old, and it was kept secret in the family even after the man confessed to it in letters.

Speaker 1 And so now Monroe's ardent readers, and there are a great many of us, are left with this terrible conundrum that a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child.

Speaker 1 In one of the most astonishing pieces of reporting that the magazine has had the honor of publishing in recent years, Rachel Aviv explores the story of Alice Monroe and her art and the terrible secret of her life and the lives of her family.

Speaker 1 I thought we should begin by talking about Alice Monroe as a writer. She published 50 short stories at the New Yorker at least,

Speaker 1 and there were people around the office for years who considered her, in many ways,

Speaker 1 you know, the checkoff of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like your understanding has shifted.

Speaker 2 To me, there's something beyond the sort of incredibly

Speaker 2 astute descriptions of people's inner lives, there's something formally that she's sort of turned the short story into

Speaker 2 sort of stretch the limits of it.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, what's the work about, really?

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, I mean, it's interesting looking at the Nobel Prize presentation.

Speaker 2 The secretary

Speaker 2 is pretty

Speaker 2 on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who

Speaker 2 only understand sort of aspects of their life years later when it's been revealed.

Speaker 2 Many of her early books are about this kind of

Speaker 2 poor rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful and there are a lot of horrific

Speaker 2 sort of freak events that happen quickly. She kind of writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it, not necessarily about herself, but about people

Speaker 2 going through sort of crises of middle age and then the crises of late age. And I think her stories are unique in the way that they kind of skip forward, like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time,

Speaker 2 and someone is sort of only grasping what happened in their past belatedly.

Speaker 2 The thing that feels

Speaker 2 sort of most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that like she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something and then those words would feel like alive to her and she would sort of write a story around those words and that this constantly happened to her where sort of

Speaker 2 It almost felt like she was moving through the world in a different way. Like things had a kind of secret intensity that she could pick up on and that she wanted to capture somehow.

Speaker 1 You know, I've been working at the New Yorker for a long time, over 30 years.

Speaker 1 And Alice died last year, right? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Last spring.

Speaker 1 I think I met her once or twice, maybe. She very rarely seemed to come to New York.
And when she did, it was like a stealth mission. She kept...

Speaker 1 far apart from that so-called literary world, didn't she?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was a a really interesting letter that she wrote to her agent, and she's saying, I cannot go on another book tour. In order to sort of be a social self, I have to take so many uppers that

Speaker 2 I can't sleep for 72 hours. And then, in order to sleep, I need to take so many downers that I'm sort of endangering my life.
And I'm in this sort of dysregulated state. And she was saying,

Speaker 2 I don't know if I can publish another book if it requires a book tour, because it sort of does damage to myself.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, now,

Speaker 1 I have the confession to make. So, this past summer, like a lot of people, I read the piece in the Toronto Star by Alice's grown daughter, Andrea.

Speaker 1 And she, it was a short memoir in which she said that she had been sexually assaulted by Alice's husband when she was very young, nine years old, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And she essentially said,

Speaker 2 you know, my stepfather sexually abused me when I was nine, and my mother protected him for our entire lives. And his name.
Jerry Fremlin.

Speaker 2 And then Jenny, who is Andrea's older sister, and Andrew, who is her stepbrother, both wrote essays as well,

Speaker 2 sort of talking about the way that the silence had shaped their lives and their families.

Speaker 1 I read this piece. My first reaction

Speaker 1 was one of, I was just startled. I mean, Alice Monroe holds

Speaker 1 a great place in my mind as a reader and frankly as a citizen of the New Yorker. She's an important figure.
And my second thought, not long thereafter, was that Rachel Levy should write about this.

Speaker 1 And before I even had a chance to call you and discuss this,

Speaker 1 I had heard that you were also thinking the same thing.

Speaker 1 How did this news affect you and then why did you decide to get on it as a piece of writing and investigations so quickly?

Speaker 2 Well, it's funny because the morning that the Toronto Star article came out, my friend who's from Toronto just emailed it to me and was like, Rachel, you should write about this.

Speaker 2 And then over the next few days, a few other people, friends, were like, You're writing about this.

Speaker 1 What did I tell you?

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 because it's about so many things that I, you know, memory, sort of family trauma, the sort of generational dynamics.

Speaker 1 The abuse against Andrea by Fremlin, the stepfather, began when she was nine years old. What exactly happened?

Speaker 2 So Alice was away, her father was dying, and

Speaker 2 Andrea asked if she could sleep in the master bedroom. And

Speaker 2 Jerry Fremlin said, okay, don't tell your mother. And from there, he got into her bed and

Speaker 2 sexually abused her.

Speaker 2 She said it didn't even occur to her to tell her mother because she felt so unsafe in that house. And then it continued until she was through puberty, this sort of

Speaker 2 him exposing himself to her and sort of trying to went on and on for years.

Speaker 1 And Fremlin, Gerald Fremlin, had

Speaker 1 a very strange

Speaker 1 way of talking about this when he eventually did. He seemed to be obsessed with Naboko's novel, Lolita, and much else.
So tell me about Fremlin.

Speaker 2 I mean, so after

Speaker 2 Andrea told her mother about the abuse in 1992, which is 16 years after it happened,

Speaker 2 Alice left Jerry Fremlin, and he then sort of unleashed this torrent of letters in which he was

Speaker 2 ostensibly defending himself,

Speaker 2 except what the letters actually were were like incredibly detailed confessions in which he explained that he was sort of responding to this nine-year-old seductress and that he knows that there are Lolitos in the world and he was simply being a humpert, a Humpert.

Speaker 1 And how did Alice Monroe initially react to this letter that she got from her daughter, Andrea, saying to her, sit down, go to a quiet place before you read this? And she gives her the news.

Speaker 1 How did Alice Monroe react?

Speaker 2 Well, she did immediately leave her partner and go to their second home on the west coast of Canada.

Speaker 2 And Andrea came there to be with her and felt the experience was not about her. It was about her mother as this sort of betrayed lover.

Speaker 2 Alice Monroe took her.. Jerry Fremlin back within a month.

Speaker 2 Within a month. Within a month.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the way she explained it to Andrea was, you know, I loved him too much. I'm too dependent.
I'm too old.

Speaker 1 How do you make sense of why she stayed? It can't just be, I loved him and I was dependent on him.

Speaker 2 She was a participant in a pretty psychologically abusive relationship and

Speaker 2 had many of the dynamics of sort of women who try to leave men and don't feel like they can exist without that man.

Speaker 2 There was a sort of confused idea about

Speaker 2 misogyny, like this sort of idea that she often would tell Andrea that it was misogynistic to expect a mother to sacrifice her own happiness

Speaker 2 because her husband has done a bad thing.

Speaker 2 And Andrea really internalized that and would tell her mother, like, yes, of course, like no one would ever ask a father to do this, only a mother, therefore I cannot ask my mother to do this.

Speaker 2 And then I think there was like this

Speaker 2 sense for Alice that the writing was the most important thing and that she was sort of

Speaker 2 on a kind of existential level, like living in this, in a way that's hard to describe, where she was sort of watching and not totally present, and

Speaker 2 maybe, you know, not able to really feel her daughter's experience, whether it was, you know,

Speaker 2 dissociation or some sort of sort of artistic distance that had become her mode of living.

Speaker 1 Aaron Trevor Barrett, let's listen to Alice Monroe talking to Joyce Davidson for the CBC. This is in 1979.

Speaker 6 Passivity is not something that the modern woman is supposed to be content with, let alone striving for.

Speaker 6 And yet,

Speaker 6 well, if you're passive, you sit back and watch things, and you let things happen. Have you been guilty of that? Oh, yes, I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them.

Speaker 6 Just to see what will happen to see what people will say to see what people will do it's probably the overriding passion of my life just to see now is that is that because you don't want to hurt them oh no that's only part of it that's the surface part that's the social behavior that one doesn't make anyone uncomfortable but it's also that

Speaker 6 everything fascinates me that happens between people

Speaker 1 the resonant phrase for me there is to see what happens,

Speaker 1 as if the most essential thing is to see what will happen and by extension, I think, to see how it becomes the material

Speaker 1 of her art.

Speaker 2 You know, there's this, that line really resonates because there's this story she wrote years before

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 2 a girl is

Speaker 2 sort of being abused sexually, like sort of being groped on a train. Which one is this? This is Wild Swans.

Speaker 2 And she says,

Speaker 2 you know, she just wanted to see what will happen. It's almost the same language, the sense of like,

Speaker 2 I'm just going to kind of keep going here because I'm so curious.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus: Just see what the human behavior will be, positive, negative, or otherwise.

Speaker 2 And she describes herself as victim and accomplice. And there's the sense of feeling like an accomplice because of that

Speaker 2 curiosity, of that wanting it to happen or

Speaker 2 wanting to not interfere with the action that will come to her.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, it's almost as if she never left her husband and reconciled with her daughters because the conflict was fruitful for her work. Is that unfair?

Speaker 1 Probably.

Speaker 2 I mean, I feel like it was more helpless than that because, like, of course, she had deep wounds from her own life. Like, she

Speaker 1 had been beaten badly by her father when she was growing up.

Speaker 2 And sort of complex dynamics, it was a power game, sort of. She would be beaten and then her mother would sort of come to her

Speaker 2 like a supplicant with all these treats and she would sort of resist and then she would fall back into it.

Speaker 2 And I think, you know, like there's this language of like art monsters, which like sure applies, but I also feel like it's maybe less interesting or true to the experience of

Speaker 2 you know just being very wounded and sort of finding a man who kind of speaks to those wounds

Speaker 1 and then what do you mean speaks to those wounds

Speaker 2 who to heal them no no not to heal them to allow her to sort of unknowingly replicate patterns from her childhood

Speaker 1 you know I went back and reread this piece in the New York Times magazine from 20 years ago by Daphne Merkin it describes the relationship of Monroe and Jerry Fremlin and it's not Merkin's fault.

Speaker 1 This was performed for her in a sense.

Speaker 1 But she described that relationship in very sporty, genial terms.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 it's just like an incredible level of sort of living,

Speaker 2 of performing. And I think she's spoken about that a lot in interviews of feeling like...

Speaker 2 She is two women.

Speaker 2 One is the woman who's sort of being what other people want her to be, and the other is the woman who's sort of living a solitary, kind of watchful, removed existence. And so,

Speaker 2 well, the interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea where she felt like...

Speaker 1 What year is it?

Speaker 2 I think it was 2004.

Speaker 2 And she felt like she was just being erased.

Speaker 2 And that was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse.

Speaker 1 How did the police react to that report?

Speaker 2 I talked to the detective, and he was, you know, praising her for being this like incredibly straightforward witness who looks him in the eye. And,

Speaker 2 you know, and she had these incredible letters to back it up. Like she was handing him the perpetrator's confession.

Speaker 1 Aaron Trevor Barrett, and what came out of that investigation?

Speaker 2 It was sort of patched up really quickly.

Speaker 2 He pled guilty to indecent assault. There was no jury.

Speaker 1 It was a one-sentence admission of guilt in which the first person pronoun was dropped.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press.

Speaker 2 And at the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her. And then abruptly she canceled the plan.

Speaker 1 Because in a sense, in publicity terms, they got away with it.

Speaker 1 It didn't blow. And we should say also that Alice Monroe in Canada, her reputation was immense.
People referred to her as the queen of the literary scene there. It was,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 people here probably at that time knew other writers, Toni Morrison or John Updike, much more than Alice Monroe somehow. But in Canada, it was a different story, no?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was surprised talking to the Toronto Star reporter who ultimately broke the story. But she said when she was first proposed the story after Andrea had sent an email,

Speaker 2 she said no, she didn't want to do it. She didn't want to take down an idol.
She didn't want to jeopardize her relationships and publishing.

Speaker 2 She'd seen Alice Monroe as this emblem of feminism, and she'd sort of been inspired by the idea you could tell your own story and take control over your own story.

Speaker 2 And ultimately, she did change her mind. But even that thought, then in 2024, there was like a day-long pause before she was ready to do it.

Speaker 2 And even before then, Andrea had reached out to a number of journalists and she got no response.

Speaker 1 I'm speaking with Rachel Leviv, who's reported for The New Yorker on Alice Monroe and her daughter Andrea Skinner. We'll continue in a moment.
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Speaker 1 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking speaking today with staff writer Rachel Aviv.

Speaker 1 In a piece that you can find on New Yorker.com called Alice Monroe's Passive Voice, Rachel Leviv probes with depth and sensitivity what happened in Alice Monroe's family after Monroe's partner sexually abused her youngest daughter.

Speaker 1 Andrea, the daughter, told members of her family about it when it happened, including her father, Jim Monroe. But nobody wanted to tell Alice Monroe.
Nobody wanted to upset her.

Speaker 1 And years later, when Jerry Fremlin admitted to the abuse, Alice stood by him. She gradually lost contact with her daughter, Andrea.

Speaker 1 Rachel, we spoke before the break about how the media ignored this story for many years, and it kind of mirrors the way Alice Monroe's family dealt with it.

Speaker 1 You spoke with Andrea Skinner repeatedly and at great length. Here's a recording she made for a survivors group in Canada called The Gatehouse.

Speaker 8 I was estranged from most of my family for many years.

Speaker 8 Though I had told most of my family about the abuse when I was 10 years old,

Speaker 8 no action was taken to protect me and I was sent back to my stepfather's house.

Speaker 8 Unfortunately, nobody did anything to stop it or help me heal at that time.

Speaker 8 And the effects of that

Speaker 8 were that I felt really devalued and

Speaker 8 even dehumanized by

Speaker 8 not just my abuser, but all of the significant people of my life.

Speaker 1 So her siblings, as well as her mother.

Speaker 1 Shut her up.

Speaker 2 There was this sense of like we all need to protect our mother.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this feeling that she was very horribly fragile and that like this refrain in the family, like she'll die if she knows.

Speaker 2 And the sisters kind of took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother, and actually Sheila almost told her mother, but they both

Speaker 2 there was this kind of mythology of like we must not impinge on this great, great career and on this fragile woman.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, now, you spoke with Robert Thacker, who's a biographer of Alice Monroe. He knew about the abuse.

Speaker 1 What was his rationale as a scholar, as a biographer, to ignore this incredibly pivotal, on-the-criminal record

Speaker 1 piece of news?

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, I mean, he just basically said,

Speaker 2 it's not the book I'm writing. writing.
I think what he said to me at one point was, every family has a thing like this.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, but how did you react to that when you heard that?

Speaker 2 You know, I try not to respond with judgment. I think I just listened.

Speaker 1 But we're sitting here. It's just us two.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 why write a biography if you're not going to sort of do?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, you know, Andrea said in a letter to him, like

Speaker 2 he had responded, you you know, I'll make sure I didn't like say anything too flattering, essentially, about Jerry. And she said, I didn't mean cross-out flattering adjectives.

Speaker 2 I meant, you know, scrap the whole book.

Speaker 1 Or write an honest biography. Right.

Speaker 2 And she said, you know, to ignore this is to ignore sort of the context in which these stories are being created.

Speaker 2 I think there was this, he was trying to hold on to this idea and the family members were too, that

Speaker 2 something

Speaker 2 that this was between Jerry and Andrea, like the sort of delusional idea that it was a two-person interaction.

Speaker 1 What's amazing is how many stories in mid- and late career are haunted by, shadowed by, or even you could say about this situation.

Speaker 1 Which is the story that, in your mind, is the most directly

Speaker 1 infested with this?

Speaker 2 I think it's Vandals from 1993.

Speaker 1 Talk about that story.

Speaker 2 I read the letters that Alice wrote to her agent, and she said, first she wrote that she had started a story, and she called it about, it was about the subject.

Speaker 2 And she said she approached it from different angles, and then she felt like she was going to throw up and she burned it. And then two months later, she had written a draft of Vandals.

Speaker 2 It's about

Speaker 2 a young girl named Liza and her younger brother. And in the summers, they go every day

Speaker 2 to play with

Speaker 2 this man and his wife who has sort of become a mother figure and the man is sexually abusing the children it sort of emerges the story is sort of structured as an investigation into whether the mother knows and chooses to look away or doesn't know but should know

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 in that story there are lines

Speaker 2 or images that are almost lifted from the letter that Andrea wrote to her mother disclosing her abuse and from a letter that Jerry wrote about their relationships.

Speaker 2 So it feels you can sort of see pieces of sort of language, sentences that must have like lit her up in some way or like made her feel like she had to build a story around it.

Speaker 1 Did Andrea go on reading her mother's stories as they came out in the magazine and in books?

Speaker 1 She did for a while.

Speaker 2 It must have been horrific.

Speaker 2 You know, she said that

Speaker 1 for a while,

Speaker 2 she almost tried to convince herself to be hopeful, and she felt like, okay, here she is. She's getting it out.
She's working through it.

Speaker 2 You know, there was one story, Rich as Stink, that has this

Speaker 2 image of a daughter wearing a wedding dress that burns. And it's this like...

Speaker 2 And Andrea said,

Speaker 2 here's this image of innocence destroyed. Like there's this feeling that her mother must understand.

Speaker 2 And then eventually, Andrea realized that, like, the insights were going to her characters and not to her daughters and not to herself.

Speaker 2 And then Andrea felt increasingly enraged by sort of the passivity of the characters, the sense of them sort of existing in this bleak survival mode.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, one of the striking things about this extraordinary piece is that Andrea

Speaker 1 doesn't go to pieces.

Speaker 1 She continues living her life and she has a life.

Speaker 1 What is it?

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, you know, I think this sort of is a defining problem in her life in a way that she appears to be thriving. Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

Speaker 1 Even to her siblings who were deceived by that in some way.

Speaker 2 Right. And that, you know, in a way, as a child, it was a coping mechanism.
There's a sense that she held the key to either destroying her family or keeping that family together.

Speaker 2 And so they all felt like she was kind of the star of the family, the one who was the most like her mother.

Speaker 2 And she and I had conversations about that where I would say, like, I'm worried I'm slipping into that state that the siblings are in, where you seem to be thriving.

Speaker 2 Your daughter just said, you have this incredible joy for life. You do seem to have this incredible joy.
I mean, something she said to me that I found really profound was

Speaker 2 one of the letters from the 70s that Alice wrote, was about being raped by a colleague.

Speaker 2 First, she says she was so numb that she just walked aimlessly around the city and missed the class she was supposed to teach that day. And then later on she says, well, we'll make a good story.

Speaker 1 The sense of dissociation is incredible. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But Andrea said, you know, when I read that letter, at first I kind of felt pain for my mother because I know that feeling of, you know, aimlessly walking around the city.

Speaker 2 And then she said the next feeling I had was rage that like she did a day of that and sort of moved on to to have this incredibly productive life.

Speaker 2 And I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city.

Speaker 1 Alice Monroe won the Nobel Prize. How did Andrea react to that news?

Speaker 2 I think what was hardest

Speaker 2 for her was watching

Speaker 2 Jenny receive the prize from the King of Sweden because Alice was

Speaker 2 too weak at that point to go to Sweden. And she felt like, oh, you know, the family really really is happier that I'm not in it, and now they can live this one reality.

Speaker 1 How do you think this affects Alice Monroe's literary legacy and how we'll read her in the future? I know lots of people that

Speaker 1 at first they said, I'm never going to read her again.

Speaker 1 Your colleague Jiang Fan, who was teaching Alice Monroe, I just had lunch with her. She's just, it just rocked her

Speaker 1 in a most elemental way.

Speaker 1 How do you think that will affect Alice Monroe's being read in the future?

Speaker 2 A question that feels almost more

Speaker 2 alive to me is

Speaker 2 the way that her writing makes you think about

Speaker 2 art at what expense, not to sort of deny that it's art

Speaker 2 and that it has value as art, but to think about what existed in its wake, sort of who was harmed, what was sacrificed.

Speaker 2 And that's probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Monroe kind of makes it visible on the page. Like it felt so

Speaker 2 literal, like

Speaker 2 trading your daughter for art.

Speaker 2 It felt like... Do you see it that way?

Speaker 2 Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision, but I think

Speaker 2 Alice did speak very

Speaker 2 with a lot of self-awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter.

Speaker 2 And that person was a writer.

Speaker 1 Shegnored her own mother.

Speaker 2 Her own mother, who was dying, who had Parkinson.

Speaker 1 So there's a certain ruthlessness to it.

Speaker 2 Aaron Trevor Barrett,

Speaker 2 but the repetition. I think that she could speak very honestly and with a lot of self-awareness about how she had to abandon her own mother to become a writer.

Speaker 2 That I'm sort of feeling that there was a certain awareness probably about how she also abandoned her daughter to be the writer she became.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And you earlier in our conversation talked about trying not to be judgmental, but in fact,

Speaker 1 writing in no small part is a collection of many judgments along the way,

Speaker 1 whether about sentences or how a story moves or the judgments you make.

Speaker 1 And in this story, the real crime is committed by the man, Geral Fremlin. We shouldn't forget that.

Speaker 1 And I wonder in the end how you do judge Alice Monroe.

Speaker 1 Generously originally. I mean, I feel horrified.
I feel horrified that

Speaker 2 it's hard because, like, you know, what would she say? Did she think the work is more important? Is that just sort of the decision she made?

Speaker 1 Do you think she thought of it in those stark terms?

Speaker 2 I think maybe, because in that, you know, one of the most

Speaker 2 chilling moments for me was when the biographer, Bob Thacker, when I read the conversation

Speaker 2 between Alice and him about, she was sort of asking him, like,

Speaker 2 what do my daughters want

Speaker 2 you to do? And he was telling her. And she stated really clearly,

Speaker 2 you know, my daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me. And I worked a long time to become who I am.

Speaker 2 And she sort of, I mean, it couldn't be more stark than that.

Speaker 1 Rachel Aviv, thank you so much.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Alice Monroe's Passive Voice is the title of Rachel Levieve's piece, and you can read it. at our website, newyorker.com.
And you can subscribe to The New Yorker for reporting like this every week.

Speaker 1 And that's also at at NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick and that's our program for today.

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Speaker 2 This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louie Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 3 October brings it all. Halloween parties, tailgates, crisp fall nights.
At Total Wine and Moore, you'll find just what you need for them all. Mixing up something spooky?

Speaker 3 Total Wine and Moore is your cocktail central for all your Halloween concoctions.

Speaker 3 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and Moore. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.

Speaker 3 See TotalWine.com for details. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.
Drink responsibly, B21.

Speaker 9 Famous Amos. It's a brand brand synonymous with chocolate chip cookies.
It's also the creation of my dad, Wally Amos.

Speaker 9 When he passed away last year, I set out to understand how he became one of the most famous black men in America and how his life and our family unraveled.

Speaker 9 From Vanity Fair, this is Tough Cookie: the Wally Famous Amos story. Available wherever you get your podcasts.