“Who Do You Think You Are?” The Epistemic Intimacies of Friendship

This article was written before Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Alice Munro, wrote an essay in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2024, describing her mother's silence in the face of her abuse at the hands of Munro's husband/Skinner's stepfather, Gerald Fremlin. I wish to honour Skinner's story and her courage in coming forward, as well as her wish that “… this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” I, like so many others, will continue to grapple with Munro's writing and her reflections on intimate human relationships — as well as her literary legacy — following these revelations. In this article, I explore the epistemic intimacies of friendship, drawing on both the philosophy of Steven Burns and the short stories of Alice Munro. I identify three distinctive forms of what I call “epistemic intimacy.” Friends may reflect who we are or they may shape who we are via their understandings of us. Beyond these mirroring and constructive roles, we experience epistemic intimacy with friends simply by the distinctive ways in which we attend to them, and they attend to us. Furthermore, recognizing mismatches between various forms of epistemic intimacy helps to explain why some friendships endure and others fall short.