Alice Munro remained silent about her daughter’s sexual abuse

GRAPHIC WARNING: The following details may be disturbing to some readers.

The youngest daughter of famous Canadian author Alice Munro spoke about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and the deep pain she felt when her mother decided to support her husband instead of her child.

In a first-hand essay published in the Toronto Star on Sunday, Andrea Robin Skinner described how the Nobel Prize-winning short story writer held on to her marriage to second husband Gerald Fremlin even after learning of the abuse.

In the Star article, Skinner said she chose to tell her story so Canadians could get a more nuanced picture of the Nobel laureate, who was revered as a literary icon long before her death in May.

“I … wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she wrote. “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t confront the reality of what happened to me and the fact that my mother, when confronted with the truth, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him.”

Skinner wrote in the Star that the abuse began in 1976, when she was nine years old and visiting her mother in Ontario during the summer, as she spent most of the year with her father in British Columbia. She wrote that Fremlin would climb into the bed she was sleeping in and initiate sexual contact while Munro was out of the house.

On the last day of her visit, she said, on the way to the airport, Fremlin began asking her details about her sex life and revealing details about his own life.

Skinner said she initially told her father and stepbrother what happened, but neither she nor her father immediately informed Munro.

She said Fremlin continued to expose himself to her and make sexual advances until he lost interest when she became a teenager.

Skinner said she experienced years of “private pain” because of the Fremlin’s predatory behaviour, suffered from bulimia, insomnia and migraines and dropped out of an international development program at the University of Toronto.

In her twenties, Skinner wrote Munro a letter detailing Fremlin’s abuse, but she said she received no sympathy from her mother.

“I … was overwhelmed by her sense of self-harm,” Skinner wrote in the Star. “She believed my father had forced us to keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children with whom Fremlin had maintained ‘friendships’ and emphasized her own feeling that she had been personally betrayed. Did she realize that she was talking to a victim and that I was her child? If so, I could not sense it.”

Munro stayed with Fremlin until he died in 2013. Munro said she was told about the abuse “too late,” that she loved him too much to leave, and that she could not be expected to “deny her own needs,” Skinner wrote in the Star.

She reported the abuse to police in 2005 and Fremlin eventually pleaded guilty to sexual assault.

She said the abuse she suffered remained an open secret in the Munro family for years and for a time led to her estrangement from her entire family.

Skinner, now a meditation and mindfulness teacher, said she has since reconciled with her siblings, but never with her mother.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 7, 2024.