Alice Munro’s daughter claims her husband sexually abused her

TORONTO – The daughter of the late Nobel laureate Alice Munro has accused the author’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin, of sexual abuse, writing that her mother stayed with him because she “loved him too much” to leave.

Munro, who died in May at the age of 92, was one of the world’s most famous and beloved writers and a source of pride for her native Canada, where the debate about the author’s legacy is now focused.

Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter from her first marriage to James Munro, wrote in an essay in the Toronto Star that Fremlin sexually abused her in the mid-1970s – when she was nine – and continued to molest and abuse her until her teens. Skinner, whose essay appeared on Sunday, wrote that she told the author about Fremlin’s abuse in her 20s. Munro left her husband for a time but eventually returned and was still with him when he died in 2013.

“She reacted exactly as I feared she would, as if she had learned of infidelity,” Skinner wrote. “She said she was ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and it was our misogynistic culture’s fault that I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s mistakes. She insisted that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Skinner wrote that she became estranged from her mother and siblings as a result. Shortly after The New York Times Magazine published a 2004 article in which Munro gushed about Fremlin, Skinner decided to contact Ontario Provincial Police and provide them with letters in which Fremlin admitted to abusing her, the Toronto Star reported in an accompanying news article also published Sunday. At 80, he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault and received a suspended sentence – a sentence that was not widely reported for nearly two decades.

The news shocked and saddened the literary world, although some readers – and Skinner herself – pointed to parallels in the author’s work, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 and called “a master of the contemporary short story” by the jury.

Author Margaret Atwood, a fellow Canadian and longtime friend of Munro, told the Star that she only learned of Skinner’s story after Fremlin died and Munro was battling dementia.

“The kids probably wondered why she stayed with him,” Atwood said. “All I can add is that she wasn’t very well versed in real (practical) life. She didn’t have much interest in cooking or gardening or anything like that. I suppose she found it more of a break than therapy, as some do.”

The owners of Munro’s Books, a well-known independent bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia, issued a statement Monday expressing support for Skinner and calling her report “heartbreaking.” The author co-founded the store in 1963 with her first husband and Skinner’s father, James Munro, who continued to run the store after their divorce in 1971. He handed the store over to four employees two years before his death in 2016.

“Like so many other readers and writers, we will need time to process this news and the impact it may have on Alice Munro’s legacy. We have celebrated her work and connection to the store before,” the store said in a statement on Monday.

In Skinner’s report, she wrote that she had told her father – with whom she spent most of the year – about the first attack, but that he ordered her not to tell her mother and continued to send her to Munro and Fremlin during the summer.

“The current store owners have contributed to the healing of our family and have shown a truly positive response to revelations like Andrea’s,” said a statement from Skinner and other family members posted on the store’s website. “We fully support the owners and staff of Munro’s Books in their plan for a new future.”

Although Skinner was separated from her siblings for many years, they have since reconciled and her family spoke to the Toronto Star in support of Skinner. Although they felt the world needed to know about the cover-up and talk about sexual violence, the Star reported, Munro’s children believe her recognized literary reputation is well deserved.

“I still think she’s a great writer – she deserves the Nobel Prize,” daughter Sheila Munro told the Star. “She dedicated her life to it and showed incredible talent and imagination. And that’s really all she wanted to do in her life. To write these stories and publish them.”

Sheila Munro, also an author, wrote about her mother in the 2002 book Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro, a project Alice Munro suggested. Sheila does not mention Skinner’s abuse, but notes that her mother often drew on her personal life and that she had a hard time separating Munro’s fiction “from the reality of what actually happened.”

Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker noted to the Associated Press that Munro’s stories, such as “Silence” and “Runaway,” center on estranged children. In “Vandals,” a woman mourns the loss of her former boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who, we learn, attacked his young neighbor, Liza.

“As Ladner grabbed Liza and pressed himself against her, she sensed a deep danger in him, a mechanical stutter,” Munro wrote, “as if he would exhaust himself in a single flash of light and nothing would be left but black smoke and burning smell and frayed wires.”

Thacker, whose book “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives” was published in 2005 – the same year Fremlin was convicted – told AP that he had long known about Fremlin’s abuse but left it out of his book because it was a “scientific analysis of her career.”

“I expected there would be repercussions one day,” said Thacker, who added that he even discussed it with the author. “I don’t want to go into detail, but it destroyed the family. It was devastating in many ways. And it was something she talked about at length.”

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Italie reported from New York.