Revelations that Nobel laureate Alice Munro was aware her husband had sexually abused her daughter but didn’t act on that knowledge have surprised the literary world and cast a devastating shadow over the Canadian author’s iconic work.
In a story and first-person essay for the Star over the weekend, Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had started sexually abusing her when she was nine years old.
Despite telling her mother and her father, Jim Munro, about the abuse, neither parent acted, Skinner wrote.
The news has drawn an anguished mix of reactions, with some struggling to hold their fondness for the writer’s stories in one hand, and the news of her daughter’s horrendous suffering in the other.
Munro herself died in May. Fellow Canadian writing icon Margaret Atwood was a close friend, and told the Star she was “shocked” when she learned about the abuse.
She said she hadn’t known about Skinner’s story until after Fremlin died and Munro was struggling with dementia.
“I don’t know much about the details and haven’t read the court case. I heard that Alice was shocked when she found out. I was certainly shocked!” Atwood said. “I don’t know what her point of view was however, as by the time I found out she was beyond talking.
“The kids probably wondered why she stayed with him,” she said.
“All I can add is that she wasn’t very adept at real (practical) life. She wasn’t very interested in cooking or gardening or any of that. She found it an interruption, I expect, rather than a therapy, as some do.”
Joyce Carol Oates, the author of “Blonde” and five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was among those looking back Monday at Munro’s work in light of her daughter making public her journey as a survivor of sexual abuse.
“If you have read Munro’s fiction over the years, you will see how often terrible men are valorized, forgiven, enabled; there seems to be a sense of resignation,” Oates wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Rebecca Makkai, a Pulitzer finalist in 2019, said Munro’s work was formative for her, but she too had been sexually abused as a child, and Skinner’s admission had left her “deeply unnerved.”
“I love her work so much that I don’t want to lose it, but am also horrified to see the meanings of many favourite (foundational, to me) stories shift under us,” Makkai wrote online.
Author Joyce Maynard said in a Facebook post that Skinner’s words “carry the unmistakable ring of truth,” but added that “I will not cease to admire — and study — the work of Alice Munro. But I am reminding myself today. … There is art. And then there is the artist.”
As readers grappled with the legacy of Munro and her work, Barbara VanDenburgh — the former books editor with USA Today — posted, “It is good for us to sit in conversation with the greatness of the work and the badness of the person and feel that tension.”
“One does not negate the other,” VanDenburgh said, “You cannot separate the life from the work.”
Others were yet more blunt.
“Being an art monster. It’s not just for men anymore,” wrote novelist Stephen Marche online. ”
“This is going to cause a massive reevaluation of so much beyond one writer. So so much.”
Skinner wrote in her essay that her voice had finally been heard decades later at The Gatehouse in Toronto, a volunteer-driven agency dedicated to helping survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
The agency’s executive director, Maria Barcelos, said it’s common for parents of abused children to dismiss the trauma their child shares with them as an adult.
Barcelos says survivors face a culture of shame and often don’t know where to find support. They are more prone to attempting suicide, suffering from anxiety and nightmares, developing eating disorders, using drugs and alcohol and being in dysfunctional relationships, she said.
Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault in 2005, but his crimes remained an open secret for decades, even after Fremlin died in 2013, still married to Munro, and after the author died this year.
Atwood described how Munro had relied on Fremlin until his death.
“I don’t know that she could have managed very well on her own,” she said. “I do know that Gerry covered for Alice’s failing brain until he died unexpectedly first. Then we (people) realized that there was something quite wrong. She disguised her condition by vagueness and laughing a lot. But it turned out she wasn’t eating.”
Munro biographer Robert Thacker told the Star he had long known of Fremlin’s abuse and that the consequences had been “devastating” on the whole family, adding that Munro had spoken with him about it knowing it would come out eventually.
“I knew this day was going to come, I just didn’t know when,” Thacker said. “I have nothing but respect for what (Skinner) is doing in telling her own story.”
Thacker, who authored “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives” which came out in 2005 — the same year Fremlin was convicted — said he expects those who decide to continue reading her work to view many of her stories through a changed lens.
“I would think that some people would go back to her stories and look for things that might be connected to it,” he said, referring to the sexual abuse.
Munro’s stories like “Silence” and “Runaway” centre on estranged children, Thacker pointed out. In “Vandals,” a woman grieves over the loss of a former boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who we learn assaulted his young neighbour, Liza.
“When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of deep danger inside him, a mechanical sputtering,” Munro wrote, “as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires.”
Munro Books, founded by Jim and Alice Munro in Victoria, B.C., released a statement “unequivocally” in support of Skinner, adding that the details of the story have been “heartbreaking” for the staff.
“Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated,” the store’s staff wrote in a statement posted online.
Opened in 1963, three years before Skinner was born, Munro’s Books was owned by Jim for decades. The business was turned over to four long-term staff members.
Posted alongside the statement from Munro’s Books, Skinner and her siblings — Andrew, Jenny and Sheila — shared a joint statement thanking the store staff and owners for their support.
“By acknowledging and honouring Andrea’s truth, and being very clear about their wish to end the legacy of silence,” the siblings wrote, “the current store owners have become part of our family’s healing, and are modelling a truly positive response to disclosures like Andrea’s.”
While the family says it wants the world to continue to adore Munro’s work, they say they also felt compelled to share how protecting the author’s legacy came at a devastating cost for her daughter.
Some, however, are refusing to support Munro’s work at all in the aftermath of Skinner’s story.
“As a mother, I can’t even …” one X user tweeted, showing a collection of Munro’s books in a garbage can.
With files from Deborah Dundas, The Canadian Press and The Associated Press
