Alice Munro’s daughter says her mother supported her stepfather who sexually abused her as a child

In the years that followed, Andrea says, Fremlin made advances to her, exposed himself to her and “told me about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked.” She said he stopped abusing her when she became a teenager, but she developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines, which she attributed to the abuse.

When Andrea turned 25, she told Alice about the sexual abuse. She had previously been hesitant to reveal it. She wrote, “I spent my whole life afraid that you would blame me for what happened.” However, Alice showed no sympathy for her daughter. She wrote, “As it turns out, despite her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me.”

Fremlin died in 2013 and Alice said: “She had been ‘told too late’, she loved him too much and our misogynistic culture was to blame for me expecting her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children and make up for men’s mistakes,” Andrea wrote. “She insisted that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Fremlin had denied any wrongdoing. Andrea decided to cut off contact with her mother after she became pregnant and did not want Fremlin near her children. However, when she read a 2004 New York Times article about Munro in which her mother praised Fremlin, she decided to speak out. She wrote: “I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to tell the truth. That’s when I went to the police to report my abuse. For so long I had told myself that leaving my pain alone had at least helped my family, that I had done the moral thing and contributed to the greatest good of the greatest number. Now I was claiming my right to a full life, taking the burden of the abuse upon myself and giving it back to Fremlin.”

Many people came forward after reading Andrea’s essay. “Personally devastating, as I recognize so much of my own history and past in her experience. When the people who are supposed to love and protect you actively choose the monster under your bed over you? There are no words to describe what that does to a person,” wrote the American writer. Brandon Taylor on X.