What Alice Munro knew and remained silent about

A NEW LEGACY

What Alice Munro knew and remained silent about

Recently, The New York Times ran a scathing article about the late Nobel Prize-winning short story writer Alice Munro's treatment of her daughter Andrea Skinner. Andrea was raped by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, at the age of nine. Her mother's response was bereft of empathy and disdainful, writes HERMAN LATEGAN.

ANGELA TUCK
ANGELA TUCK

IT was dark and the middle of the night. I was already asleep. My school friend was in his own bed, softly snoring.

I woke up because someone had put his hand under my blanket and started playing with my private parts. I was about 14, going on 15.

He lifted my blanket, I was petrified, and he performed oral sex on me. I dissociated. What was I supposed to do?

The man who was raping me was a mentor, a prominent journalist, and worse, the father of the friend who was sleeping in the other bed. This is old news, I have written about it before, but what reminded me of it was a promotion for an article in The New York Times that recently appeared in my Facebook feed.

The article, “What Alice Munro Knew", appeared in December. The Nobel Prize winner's daughter Andrea was raped by her stepfather at the age of nine (and after). When her daughter told her and her father (Alice Munro's ex-husband) about it, their reactions were inhumane and cold.

I tracked other international publications that wrote about it – I felt my throat tighten with each article. Reading each of them made me physically sick every time, my body ached and my vocal chords were affected.

I could hardly speak. Because for a long time I had also kept a secret and when I spoke out at last no one believed me. Those who came to be in the know did nothing. It wasn't made public until decades later, as with Andrea.

By the way, recently when I interviewed an artist, he asked me without missing a beat: “But how are children supposed to learn about sex if older people don't show them the ropes?"

Even worse, an old friend told me (about my own rape): “But it must have been fun!"

***

Alice Munro died at the age of 92 on May 12, 2024 in Ontario, Canada. She had written 28 books and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Many of Alice's stories focus on the dilemmas and challenges young women face as they grow older. They often struggle with the limitations to which they are exposed in a small-town environment.

A few months after her death, a piece written by her daughter Andrea Skinner appeared in the Toronto Star. Within a day, Munro's reputed literary legacy was if not shattered, called deeply into question. Or was it?

Andrea begins by recounting how in 1976 she went to visit her mother in Clinton, Ontario, Canada. One night when her mother was out, her husband, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into Andrea's bed and raped her. She was nine years old.

Andrea Skinner (left)
Andrea Skinner (left)

“I was a happy child – active and curious," she writes. Jokingly, she adds: “Just then I realized I couldn't be a sheepdog, it was a big disappointment, because I loved sheep and dogs."

The next morning she could not get out of bed. She woke up with her first migraine, which in later years would develop into a chronic and paralysing condition. It is still a big challenge for her.

She asked to return to her father, Jim Munro, her stepmother, Carole, and her stepbrother, Andrew. They lived in Victoria, about 500 km away. Her stepfather took her to the airport the day she flew back.

On the way there he asked her to play a game, “show me". When she refused, he asked her to tell him about her “sex life". When she didn't answer, he told her about his.

Back in Victoria, she told her stepbrother. She tried to joke about it, but he took it seriously and advised her to tell his mother.

She did, and her stepmother then told her father. He didn't say anything. In a way she was relieved, because she thought her mother would blame her. But because he didn't do anything about it, she now felt like a stranger in both houses. She was alone.

Andrea often went back to her mother after this. Her stepfather's unpredictable moods clouded the atmosphere in the house. When she was alone with him, he made suggestive jokes of a sexual nature.

He often showed her his penis and told her about other little girls he liked. She was still too young to really understand what was going on.

When she was 11, a friend of her stepfather told her mother that Fremlin had exposed himself to her 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when her mother asked him if he had done the same with Andrea, he denied that too.

Once he told Andrea in the presence of her mother that many societies were less prudish and that it was quite normal for adults to teach children about sex by having sex with them. Her mother said nothing.

Andrea looked away so that Munro couldn't see her face turning red. As a teenager, she developed even worse migraines, as well as bulimia and insomnia. She had always been a bright student, but at university her grades dropped sharply.

She didn't finish her degree. At 25, she could see no future for herself. One day she was visiting her mother, who told Andrea about a short story she had read.

In this piece, a young woman dies of suicide after her stepfather had raped her. “Why didn't she tell her mother?" Munro wanted to know.

A month later, inspired by her mother's reaction to the story, Andrea finally sat down and told her mother the truth in a letter. Though she had displayed sympathy for a fictional character, Munro did not feel the same about her own daughter.

Munro called her other daughter, Sheila, and told her she was leaving her husband. She went off to live in her sectional title apartment in Comox. Andrea writes that when she visited her mother there, she was amazed at how Munro made it all about herself, her scars.

She believed the reason her ex-husband had withheld the information from her was to humiliate her. She felt abandoned.

“Didn't she realise I was the victim? I was a child!" writes Andrea.

In the meantime, her stepfather threatened her with death if she dared to go to the police. He wrote letters to her family blaming Andrea, saying she had provoked him. “She almost destroyed my marriage at the age of nine," he wrote. The fact that her family hadn't intervened only proved that they agreed with him, he boomed.

He had taken pictures of her when she was 11, in which she wore his underpants, and threatened to make them public. Despite everything, Munro returned to Fremlin. She said she had been told too late and whatever had happened was between Andrea and her stepfather.

The years rolled by – nothing was said. Andrea's father, Jim, often had lunches with her mother. Before Jim died, Andrea asked him if they had ever talked about the rapes.

“No," was his reply, “your name was never mentioned." When Andrea gave birth to twins, she told Munro she did not want her children near her stepfather.

Her mother's reaction? “Oh, how inconvenient. You know I don't drive, right? How am I going to see you?”

The Star reports: “‘I blew my top,’ Andrea said. ‘I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter?’ The next day, Munro called her back – not to apologize but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end of their relationship.”

Two years later, when Andrea turned 38, she saw an interview with her mother in The New York Times. She was quoted as saying how wonderful Fremlin was as her husband, how much she loved him and that she had a very close and wonderful relationship with all three of her daughters. After reading the article, she was too sick to move for three weeks.

She finally went to the police to make a case. Four months after the interview (in 2005) Fremlin was charged with indecent assault. He admitted guilt and was sentenced to a two-year probationary period.

The case was soon forgotten and hardly caused any ripples in the press. “My mother's fame meant that the silence could rage on." Munro stayed with Fremlin until his death in 2013.

Andrea never reconciled with her mother. She tried to tell her story to several people, and even the press was indifferent to it. She felt that the voices of children like her's were being silenced. She was right. Until Munro's death last year, when the Toronto Star published the truth.

The hefty article, “What Alice Munro Knew: The Nobel-winning author’s husband was a pedophile who targeted her daughter and other children. Why did she stay silent?” appeared in December in The New York Times. The article continues: “In Canada, Munro was known as ‘Saint Alice,’ a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else: maternal dereliction.”

And: “Munro seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay. Why did she not protect her daughter? What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life?”

Time magazine asked: “What to do now about her work? The story of Fremlin and her daughter has changed all that [how we view her work]. It hasn’t changed Munro’s work, but it changes the way we see the author.”

***

It always amazes me that pedophiles think the children they dishonour will forget. No, they don't.

A friend, now 50, tells me she remembers very well. She was three and in the kitchen with her mother. Her grandfather walked in and picked her up. He very subtly slipped his hand under her dress and rubbed her vagina. Right there in the kitchen, with her mother labouring behind the cooking pots.

“Did you ever tell your mother?" I asked.

“No, never."

  • Read Time's piece, “Reckoning With Alice Munro’s Darkest Secret
  • Read The Conversation, “Rereading Alice Munro in the light of the secrets she kept and pain she caused

VWB


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