TORONTO – The daughter of the late Nobel laureate Alice Munro accused the author’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin, of sexual abuse, writing that her mother stayed with him because she “loved him too much” to leave.
Munro, who died in May at age 92, was one of the most celebrated and beloved writers in the world and a source of continued pride for her native country, Canada, where the reckoning with the author’s legacy now focuses.
Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter with her first husband, James Munro, wrote in a essay published in the Toronto Star that Fremlin sexually assaulted her in the mid-1970s – when she was 9 years old – and continued to harass and abuse her until she became a teenager. Skinner, whose essay was published on Sunday, wrote that at age 20 she told the author about Fremlin’s abuse. Munro left her husband for a while, but eventually returned and was still with him when he died in 2013.
“She reacted exactly as I feared, as if she had learned of infidelity,” Skinner wrote. “She said she was told ‘too late,’ that she loved him too much, and that it was our misogynistic culture’s fault if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s failings. She was convinced that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.
Skinner wrote that as a result, she became estranged from her mother and siblings. Shortly after The New York Times Magazine published a 2004 story in which Munro talked about Fremlin, Skinner decided to contact the Ontario Provincial Police and provided them with letters in which Fremlin admitted to abusing her, the Toronto Star reported in a supplementary news also published on Sunday. At age 80, he pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence – a sentence that was not widely publicized for almost two decades.
The news surprised and saddened the literary world, although some readers – and Skinner herself – cited parallels in the author’s work, for which she received the Nobel Prize in 2013 and dubbed “master of the contemporary short story” by the judges.
Author Margaret Atwood, a Canadian colleague and longtime friend of Munro told the Star that she didn’t learn Skinner’s story until after Fremlin died and Munro was battling dementia.
“The kids probably wondered why she stayed with him,” Atwood said. “All I can add is that she was not very adept at real (practical) life. She wasn’t very interested in cooking or gardening or anything like that. She found it an interruption, I imagine, rather than therapy, as some do.
The owners of Munro’s Books, a prominent independent store in Victoria, British Columbia, issued a statement Monday expressing support for Skinner and calling her account “heartbreaking.” The author co-founded the store in 1963 with Skinner’s first husband and father, James Munro, who continued to run the store after their divorce in 1971. Two years before her death in 2016, he handed the store over to four employees.
“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 links with the store we have previously celebrated,” the store said in a released statement. Monday.
In Skinner’s account, she wrote that she had told her father – with whom she lived most of the year – about the initial assault, but he told her not to tell her mother and continued to send her to Munro and Fremlin during the summers. .
“The current store owners have become part of our family’s healing and are modeling a truly positive response to disclosures like Andrea’s,” says a statement from Skinner and other family members posted on the store’s website. “We fully support the owners and employees of Munro’s Books as they chart a new future.”
Although Skinner spent many years estranged from her brothers, they reconciled and her family spoke to the Toronto Star in support of Skinner. Although they felt the world needed to know about the cover-up and that sexual violence should be discussed, the Star reported, Munro’s children believe his acclaimed literary reputation is deserved.
“I still feel she is a great writer – she deserved the Nobel,” her daughter Sheila Munro told the Star. “She dedicated her life to this and manifested this incredible talent and imagination. And that’s all she really wanted to do in life. Write down these stories and share them.
Sheila Munro, also an author, wrote about her mother in the 2002 book “Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro”, project suggested by Alice Munro. Sheila makes no reference to Skinner’s abuse, but notes that her mother frequently turned to her private life and that she struggled to separate Munro’s fiction “from the reality of what actually happened.”
Munro biographer Robert Thacker noted to the Associated Press that Munro stories like “Silence” and “Runaway” center on distant children. In “Vandals,” a woman mourns the loss of an ex-boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who we learn assaulted her young neighbor, Liza.
“When Ladner grabbed Liza and pressed himself against her, she felt a sense of deep danger within him, a mechanical crackling,” Munro wrote, “as if he would exhaust himself with a stroke of light, and nothing would be left but black. smoke, burning smell and frayed wires.”
Thacker, whose “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives” was released in 2005 — the same year Fremlin was convicted — told the AP that he had long known about Fremlin’s abuse but omitted it from his book because it was an “academic analysis of your career.” .”
“I was hoping that one day there would be repercussions,” said Thacker, who added that he even spoke to the author about it. “I don’t want to go into details, but it destroyed the family. It was devastating in many ways. And it was something she spoke deeply about.”
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Italy reported from New York.
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