Literary world shocked Alice Munro stood by daughter’s abuser

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The Canadian literary world has been thrown into a tailspin by the revelation that Alice Munro — one of Canada’s most venerated writers — stayed with her second husband after she learned that he had sexually abused her daughter.

It has reignited a debate over to what extent an artist can be, or indeed should be, separated from their body of work. Fans and admirers of various media have struggled with that debate, from those who venerate predatory rock stars, comedians or indie musicians, to those who still find escape in the writing of child abusers.

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In an essay for Toronto Star, Andrea Robin Skinner writes that, in 1976, she was visiting her mother and stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, when he sexually assaulted her for the first time. She was nine years old and he continued to harass and abuse her until she was a teenager, she wrote. Skinner is the daughter of Munro and her first husband, James Munro.

When, 16 years later, Skinner told her mother about the abuse, Munro left Fremlin and flew to Comox, B.C., to stay with Skinner’s sister, Sheila Munro, who’s now an author herself.

“I visited her there and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself,” writes Skinner. “Did she realize she was speaking to a victim, and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it. When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous. ‘But you were such a happy child,’ she said.”

Munro eventually returned to Fremlin, and remained with him until his death in 2013. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” writes Skinner.

The owners of Munro’s Books, a prominent independent store in Victoria, issued a statement Monday expressing support for Skinner and calling her account “heartbreaking.” The author co-founded the store in 1963 with first husband and Skinner’s father, who continued to run the store after their 1971 divorce. Two years before his 2016 death, he turned the store over to four staff members.

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Skinner’s revelation has stunned Munro’s legions of fans and admirers. Hers was work — primarily short fiction — that received the highest accolades in literature. A Nobel Prize in 2013. The Man Booker in 2009. When she died in May, the praise for Munro and her body of work was effusive.

Now, that legacy has been darkened.

In 2004, The New York Times Magazine published a story in which Munro gushed about Fremlin, and Skinner decided to contact Ontario Provincial Police and provided them letters in which Fremlin had admitted to abusing her, the Toronto Star reported.

At 80, Fremlin pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence — one that was not widely reported for nearly two decades.

“I still feel she’s such a great writer — she deserved the Nobel,” Sheila Munro told the Star. “She devoted her life to it, and she manifested this amazing talent and imagination. And that’s all, really, she wanted to do in her life. Get those stories down and get them out.”

She wrote about her mother in the 2002 book Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro, a project suggested by her mother. The book makes no reference to her sister being abused, but does observe that her mother often drew upon her private life and that she struggled to separate Munro’s fiction “from the reality of what actually happened.”

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Jiayang Fan, a writer at The New Yorker — where many of Munro’s stories were first published — wrote on X that she’s teaching a course on Munro in a week and needs to rethink how to approach it. “A story I chose was Vandals, a meditation on complicity, implication & what it means to rob the most defenseless among us the ability to construct a self,” she wrote.

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Robert Thacker, who wrote a biography of Munro, told The Associated Press that her stories such as Silence and Runaway centre on estranged children. In Vandals, a woman grieves over the loss of a former boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who we learn assaulted his young neighbour, Liza.

“When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of deep danger inside him, a mechanical sputtering,” Munro wrote, “as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires.”

Some discussed whether it’s possible to separate an artist from their art.

“Lotta folks mourning the Alice Munro news not out of sympathy for her abused daughter, but for how it recontextualizes the art they love,” wrote Barbara VanDenburgh, the former books editor at USA Today, on X. “Art is not and should not be fandom. Great art is very often uncomfortable, very often the product of bad, broken people.”

“We want to believe that beauty and talent spring from some kind of essential moral quality but actually being good & being talented are orthogonal,” wrote Michelle Cyca, an editor at The Narwhal, on X.

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Thacker, whose book Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives came out in 2005 — the same year Fremlin was convicted — said he had long known of Fremlin’s abuse but omitted it from his book because it was a “scholarly analysis of her career.”

“I expected there to be repercussions one day,” said Thacker, who added that he even spoke to the author about it. “I don’t want to get into details but it wrecked the family. It was devastating in lots of ways. And it was something that she spoke deeply on.”

With additional reporting from The Associated Press

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