With her heartbreakingly honest stories of childhood trauma, sexual awakenings, and dull, lifeless marriages, few could write about human nature and relationships as powerfully as Alice Munro.
But until her death in May at age 92, even fewer knew that the Nobel Prize winner in literature harbored a dark secret that tore her own family apart.
Just two months after she was celebrated in obituaries as one of the greatest short story writers, the daughter of the literary star horrified Munro’s many admirers by revealing that she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine.
Andrea Skinner as a child. She horrified Alice Munro’s many fans by then revealing that her stepfather had sexually abused her when she was nine.
Worse — much worse, for a writer acclaimed for writing so acutely and sympathetically about mother-daughter relationships — Munro chose to stay with her pedophile husband even after he was convicted of his crimes, because “she loved him too much.”
Andrea Robin Skinner, 58, says the truth was hidden for decades not only by her family but also, because of her mother’s fame, by “a lot of influential people” who knew something of what had happened but didn’t say anything. On Facebook yesterday, Andrea said: “The focus of my story is the danger of silence.”
Munro’s second husband, cartographer Gerald Fremlin, first sexually assaulted Andrea one night in 1976 at her Canadian mother’s home in Ontario, where she was spending her summer vacation as part of a shared custody arrangement with Andrea’s father.
Fremlin “got into bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old.”
She describes herself as a “happy child” and recalls: “The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I had woken up with my first migraine, which over the years developed into a chronic and debilitating condition that continues to this day.”
She recalls that Fremlin, then 50, drove her to the airport when it was time to return to her father, Jim Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia.
‘In the car, he asked me to play a game called ‘show me’. When I said no, he made me tell him about my ‘sex life’, asking me for details of innocent games I played with other kids. He then told me about his sex life.’
Andrea, the youngest of Alice Munro’s three daughters (a fourth died shortly after birth), told her stepmother, Carole, about the abuse. Carole alerted the girl’s father. Jim, a bookstore owner who had married Alice in 1951 but separated from her in 1974, did not tell his ex-wife.
She also ordered Andrea’s older sisters, Sheila and Jenny, to keep it a secret from their mother, saying that the celebrated writer’s needs “were greater than those of her daughter.”
All of them, Jenny now admits, were intimidated by Munro’s growing literary fame.
Andrea also feared that her mother “would blame me if she ever found out” because she was already paranoid that Fremlin favored her daughter over her.
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.
This meant that Andrea was subjected to years of further sexual abuse when she returned to her mother’s home each summer.
Fremlin, who had once been an aspiring poet, repeatedly exposed himself to her, masturbated in front of her, and propositioned her.
“When I was alone with Fremlin, he would make lewd jokes, expose himself during car rides, tell me about the girls in the neighbourhood he liked and describe my mother’s sexual needs,” she wrote in the Toronto Star this month.
Alice Munro’s behaviour was, in its own way, as horrific as Fremlin’s. When Andrea was 11, former friends of Fremlin told Alice that he had exposed himself to her 14-year-old daughter.
When Munro challenged him, he denied it, and when asked about Andrea, “I assured her I wasn’t her type,” she says.
‘In front of my mother, she told me that many cultures of the past were not as “prudish” as ours and that it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by having sex with adults.
“My mother didn’t say anything. I looked at the floor, afraid she would see my face turning red.”
By the time she entered her teens, Andrea no longer held the same appeal for Fremlin, but her ordeal left her suffering from bulimia, insomnia and migraines, and she struggled at university.
In 1992, Andrea, then 25, broke the “conspiracy of silence” within the family after Alice Munro mentioned a story she had read about a girl who committed suicide after being sexually abused by her stepfather.
Munro asked her why she thought the poor girl had not told her mother. A month later, Andrea wrote to her mother to tell her what had happened to her as a child.
As she always did, her daughter says, Munro spun the scandal to make herself the victim, accusing her first husband of keeping the abuse secret to humiliate her, but then admitting that Fremlin had confessed to her having “friendships” with boys, leaving her feeling “betrayed.”
She reacted “as if she had found out about an infidelity.”
Munro “was overwhelmed by the feeling of being hurt,” Andrea recalls. “Did she realize she was talking to a victim, that I was her daughter? If she did, I couldn’t sense it.”
Meanwhile, Fremlin threatened to kill Andrea if she went to the police. She wrote to her father and stepmother telling them that at the age of nine she had been a “homewrecker”, a “Lolita” who sought out “sexual adventures”.
Surprisingly, he apologized not for abusing a child, but for having “been unfaithful” to Munro.
Despite this, after a brief separation, Munro returned to Fremlin, whom she had met at university and married in 1976, and remained with him until his death in 2013.
“She said she’d been told too late,” Andrea says, “that she loved him too much and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children and make up for men’s mistakes. She was convinced that what had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
In 2002, Andrea, who had become a yoga instructor and is now a therapist working with child abuse victims, had twins and told her mother that Fremlin would never be able to go near them. When Munro complained that she would be a “terrible nuisance to her” because she couldn’t drive, Andrea “exploded” and refused to have anything more to do with her.
However, the literary world continued to fawn over her and two years later Andrea could suffer in silence no longer when Munro told a newspaper interviewer that Fremlin was the great love of her life and that she was very lucky to have him, adding that she had a “close relationship” with all of her children.
Alice Munro, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro, receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 2013
Andrea went to the police, armed with the compromising letters Fremlin had sent her. After his arrest, Munro raged that Andrea was a liar, according to a police detective. In 2005, he admitted to indecently assaulting her, but because he was 80, he was given two years’ probation and banned from any contact with children under 14 for two years. The case attracted virtually no media attention.
So who knew Alice Munro’s terrible secret?
“Everyone,” says Carole, Andrea’s stepmother. She said she was at a dinner with a journalist who asked her: “Is it true?” To which she replied yes.
Both Munro’s publisher and her acclaimed biographer admit they have known about it since 2005; the latter, Robert Thacker, omitted it because he considered it a “private matter” and believed Fremlin, not Munro, to be the offender.
Her friend Margaret Atwood, the celebrated author of The Handmaid’s Tale, insists she only learned the “horrible” details recently. “Why did she stay? Look me up,” she says. “I think they were from a generation and a place that swept things under the carpet.”
He added: “You realise you didn’t know who you thought you knew.”
As the literary world races to “re-evaluate” a revered writer, a Canadian university and her hometown are reconsidering their tributes to Alice Munro. Many fans are simply pondering whether they can read her again.
And so another name has been added to a long list in the never-ending debate over whether it is really acceptable to appreciate great art while at the same time condemning its flawed creator.
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