The daughter of Canadian literary icon Alice Munro has accused the late author of turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather.
Just weeks after the Nobel laureate’s death at age 92, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, detailed the allegations against her late stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, in a heartbreaking essay for the Toronto Star.
The Toronto Star reports that Skinner, now 58, went to police about the abuse in 2005, when Fremlin was 80.
Fremlin, a cartographer, was given a suspicious sentence and given two years’ probation; Munro decided to stay with him until her death in 2013.
Skinner said she wanted “my story to become part of the stories people tell about my mother… I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t address the reality of what had happened to me and the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him.”
The daughter of literary icon Alice Munro says she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine and that her mother kept him with her after finding out.
Just weeks after the Nobel laureate’s death at the age of 92, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner detailed the allegations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a heartbreaking essay.
In her essay, Skinner wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was 50.
She said the first sexual assault occurred during a visit to Munro and Fremlin’s home in Ontario, after Fremlin climbed into the bed she was sleeping in.
Skinner said she told her stepmother, who told her father, who did not confront Munro.
In the years that followed, Skinner says Gremlin would often expose himself to her, telling her about his mother’s sexual needs and “about the girls in the neighborhood he liked.”
“At the time I didn’t know it was abuse. I thought I was doing a good job of avoiding the abuse by looking away and ignoring their stories,” Skinner wrote.
Skinner added that Gremlin lost interest in her as she entered her teens, but continued to suffer the consequences of the abuse and developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines.
It was after Munro reacted to a story about a character who died by suicide after being sexually assaulted by his stepfather that Skinner decided to tell his mother the truth.
Skinner, photographed as a child, wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was 50.
Skinner’s essay has shaken up the literary world, where Munro is praised for perfecting the contemporary short story and known for exploring themes such as sex and trauma.
Skinner wrote a letter describing the abuse and says Munro “reacted exactly as I feared she would, as if she had learned of an affair.”
“It turned out that, despite her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me,” he wrote.
Skinner added of her mother: ‘She said she had been “told too late” … (that) she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if it expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children and make up for the failings of men.
“She insisted that what had happened was a matter between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
Munro reportedly left their marital home and moved into a condominium he owned. Meanwhile, Fremlin wrote letters to the family admitting to the abuse but blaming Skinner, describing her as a “homewrecker” and accusing her of entering his bedroom “in search of sexual adventures.”
Skinner says Fremlin wrote in a letter: ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I intend to make it public… I shall make available for publication a number of photographs, in particular some taken at my cottage near Ottawa which are extremely telling… one of Andrea in my underpants.’
But Munro returned to Fremlin and remained with him until his death.
Nobel Prize winner in Literature Alice Munro, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro (left), receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 2013
Skinner says he never reconciled with his mother, but now has a good relationship with his siblings Andrew, Jenny and Sheila.
Skinner’s essay has shaken up the literary world, where Munro is praised for perfecting the contemporary short story and known for exploring themes such as sex and trauma.
The characters in Munro’s stories were often girls and women who led seemingly normal lives but struggled with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging.
Canadian writer and magazine editor Michelle Cyca wrote in X: ‘Many people reflexively deny that Alice Munro could have knowingly spent her life with the pedophile who abused her daughter, or are quick to say that they never liked her writing.
“It’s harder to accept the truth that people who make transcendent art are capable of monstrous acts.”
Meanwhile, American novelist and essayist Brandon Taylor wrote: I am so in awe of her courage… (her account) is ‘personally devastating because I recognise so much of my own story in her experience’.
Munro died in May after suffering from dementia for at least a decade.
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