Revelations that Nobel laureate Alice Munro knew and didn’t act on her daughter’s sexual abuse at the hands of Munro’s husband have shaken the literary world and fans of the iconic author’s work.
In a story and first-person essay for the Star, Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, started sexually abusing her when she was nine years old.
Despite revealing the abuse to her mother, Alice Munro, and her father, Jim Munro, neither parent acted, Skinner wrote.
Fremlin was convicted of indecent assault in 2005, but his assault remained an open secret for decades, even after Fremlin died in 2013, still married to Alice, and after Alice Munro died this year.
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.
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.”
Online, authors and readers alike, while supporting Skinner’s story, have struggled to process the revelations.
Another acclaimed Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, told the Star that she didn’t know about Skinner’s story until after Fremlin had died and Munro was struggling with dementia.
“The kids probably wondered why she stayed with him,” Atwood 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.”
Atwood described how Munro relied on Fremlin until his death — it wasn’t until afterwards that “we (people) realized there was something quite wrong.”
Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde and five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, took to X to share her thoughts.
The author drew parallels between the men in Munro’s work and the men in her life that led to her staying silent on her daughter’s abuse.
“If you have read Munro’s fiction over years, you will see how often terrible men are valorized, forgiven enabled; there seems to be a sense of resignation.”
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 in her post on X.
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 grapple with the legacy of Munro and her work, Barbara VanDenburgh — the former books editor with USA Today — said on X, “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, 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.
