Alice Munro looms large over the lives of middle-class women in Canada. Here, good mothers give her short-story collections to their daughters. Wise and knowing aunts leave them behind at the family cottage. Her works are taught to us in schools. The spines of her books are the wallpaper of a certain kind of well-appointed Canadian home—the type with an assortment of mismatched hand-painted mugs, mostly with fish on them, clustered near the sink. For many of us, it was as if the Nobel Prize-winning author wrote the diaries we never managed to keep.
All of which is to say, the news that Munro had been complicit in her husband’s sexual abuse of one of her daughters broke hard on these shores.
The news made landfall in an essay for the Toronto Star in July, less than two months after Munro’s death. In the piece, Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, revealed that in the summer of 1976, when she was 9 years old, she was sexually assaulted by her mother’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, then in his early 50s.
What followed was a series of failures that are, or should be, impossible to rationalize. Munro’s three children lived with their father, James Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia, for the school year, spending summers with their mother and stepfather in Clinton, a small town in southern Ontario. This is a region Canadians sometimes call “Alice Munro Country”, the setting of many of her stories.
Upon returning to her father’s home, Skinner told her stepbrother what had been done to her. He encouraged her to tell his mother, who told Skinner’s father, who did next to nothing. Alice Munro was not told at the time. The children continued to visit their mother, the older ones now burdened with the instruction not to leave their little sister alone with Fremlin.
Fremlin did not touch Skinner again, but he continued to abuse her for years. Until she became a teenager and his interest evaporated, he would expose himself to his stepdaughter, sometimes masturbating, and proposition her for sex.
Skinner was 25 before she told her mother her “secret” about what Fremlin had done to her in a letter. Munro left Fremlin, but only briefly—leaving her daughter’s letter behind for him to see. Fremlin in turn wrote letters of his own to his estranged wife.
It’s this bleak epistolary exchange that stops this from being a she said-he said story of the kind that’s easy for apologists to dismiss and makes it a she said-he wrote a letter in which he confessed to being an active pedophile story.
In his letters, Fremlin confessed but compared himself sympathetically to Humbert Humbert, the child rapist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, writing: “It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure”. He was not without any remorse, however, writing, “I feel dishonourable and deeply disgusted with myself for having been unfaithful to Alice after I had committed myself to her”. He insisted that the 9-year-old had been a “homewrecker” and threatened to kill Skinner if she now went to the police.
Munro chose to accept the sexual abuse of her child as a love triangle. She quickly returned to Fremlin, insisting, according to Skinner, that she had been “‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men”. She pulled out trusty old pieces of feminist principle and, before her daughter’s eyes, deftly fashioned them into a bear trap and covered it with leaves.
“She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather”, Skinner wrote. “It had nothing to do with her”.
Years later, in 2005, Skinner reported the abuse to the Ontario Provincial Police, and Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault, receiving a suspended sentence and two years’ probation—no thanks to Munro , who, years later, was anything but contrite. The case was not reported on in the press.
During this brief interval in her marriage, Munro also told Skinner that she suspected her husband might have committed one of the most notorious crimes in Canadian history.
In June 1959, the body of 12-year-old Lynne Harper was found northeast of Clinton, Ontario. She had been raped and strangled with her white blouse. Her classmate Steven Truscott was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to be hanged.
Truscott, eventually exonerated, lives with his family in my hometown, Guelph, Ontario. The story of Harper and Truscott was local lore. It acted as an all-purpose cautionary tale: Don’t trust friends, don’t trust strangers, and perhaps most of all, don’t trust the institutions you have, since childhood, been most primed to trust.
Munro never told her daughter why she thought Fremlin capable of this crime, and this dismal cliff-hanger feels like a final story she left for us, unfinished.
This is what those of us who read Munro are left with—along with some very good books, of course. And we are unsettled.
This is the Munro who had, we felt, been slyly winking at us, quietly egging on our naughty selves and letting us in on the jokes for years. The Munro who wrote that “reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over”—one that “persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man”.
This is the Munro who imbued the most fleeting details with meaning when mundane details felt like the only goddamn thing we had in our lives. She saw “the time of year when snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales”.
Munro had been there for many of us, from our years of disappointing mothers to our years of disappointed motherhood. There is a universality to her stories, because restless young people everywhere, even the ones in large cities, feel trapped in some version of a small town.
It’s already been argued that the decadeslong silence around the abuse is a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. It wasn’t just Munro who kept the secret; others knew, including her biographer. I would answer that labeling things a “uniquely Canadian” phenomenon may be the only uniquely Canadian phenomenon—except I am told the Japanese do this as well. Sorry, Canada.
In fact, what is at work here is the most universally corrosive element on Earth—fame. Fame is more powerful than love, or duty, or even sexual longing. Munro was famous—not just Canadian famous—and the people around her caved to it.
Some of them are still caving. On social media, a number of writers and others were quick to defend Munro on the grounds that one must be selfish to be an artist or that this was “a different time”. Life was impossible for divorced women “back then”, in the 1970s, when they couldn’t get mortgages or a credit card—a comical erasure of all the Munro-reading single women of my ’70s childhood.
Munro was faced with the choice to stay with Fremlin in 1992, for heaven’s sake, and he was her second husband. At the time, she told her daughter that Fremlin had “friendships” with other children. Skinner wrote that when she was 11, “former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he ‘reassured’ her that I was not his type”.
Since then another woman has come forward, of course.
When, as a young mother herself, Skinner told her mother that she did not want her own children around Fremlin, Munro complained that keeping an unrepentant child abuser away from her grandchildren would be inconvenient for her as she did not drive.
That all’s ultimately fair in love, war, and chauffeuring Munro is a fairly common sentiment. Margaret Atwood noted that Munro “wasn’t very adept at real (practical) life. She wasn’t very interested in cooking or gardening or any of that”.
For many in Canada, particularly women, it is as if we had been assigned Alice Munro our whole lives and this was the test.
Had we been paying attention? Were we going to argue that the first duty of this woman was to care for her children?
I am. And for this I will flunk right out of Munro. “To hell with your quiet interior voice”, I would write in the margin, “there is a child screaming”.
Some might ask me: Who do you think you are, to tell the great Alice Munro to do the most conventional things—get a driver’s license, call the cops, mind the kids? But inherent in this demand is the notion that had she done these things—planted a failed garden, grappled with children less in memory and more at McDonald’s—her work, cold as an Alex Colville painting, would not exist. I suspect, however, that her work would have been even better.
In what appears to be a stab at rehabilitation, it has been suggested that Munro’s short story “Vandals”, which was published in the New Yorker a year after Munro was told of Fremlin’s abuse, is a quasi-confession. I reread it in hopes that it would reveal Munro’s deep regret over her failure but was disappointed.
In the story, a young woman, Liza, and her husband trash the home of an elderly couple, Bea and Ladner. It is revealed, obliquely, that Ladner sexually abused both Liza and possibly her brother when they were children. The words “tickling” and “shame” are used to suggest the child rape, as if the Hays Code were in effect in these pages. The story lingers on the humiliation inflicted on Bea by Ladner and on her passion for him.
Here, as in life, Munro frames the abuse as a sort of love triangle. The trauma of the abused child is deployed as a literary device. Ladner is portrayed as depleted and damaged by what we can discern is his rape of Liza while her brother watches.
Liza believes Bea can save them: “Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely, she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant. None of that. Not allowed. Be good. The woman who could rescue them—who could make them all, keep them all, good. What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see. Only Liza sees”.
The parallels to Munro’s life seem obvious. Munro appears eager to distance herself/Bea from the kind of woman who lays down a “Let’s Not Rape Children Rule”. To Liza here, all parties are equally culpable. Once, I might have taken this as the author revealing the pernicious nature of child sexual abuse, but now I am markedly less sure.
In another Munro story, “Silence” (2004), a famous mother mourns the loss of her daughter. The daughter, like Liza, has found religion and, for reasons we are never told, has cut her mother out of her life almost entirely. Previously, what jumped off the page to me was the mother’s pain. Now, it is the question that the mother cries out “furiously, beseechingly” to “Mother Shipton” at the door of a spiritual center: “What did she tell you?”
I will forever reread these stories through the lens of what I now cannot unknow. Munro’s choice of subject was predominantly the lives of girls and women. Some of us, perhaps impudently, took the scrutiny she gave these souls, that steely prose she applied to their lives, to mean she recognized worth in them.
An involuntary reevaluation has begun, because the close observation and meticulous documentation of those lives, divorced from actual concern for those lives, has started to feel less like genuine interest and more like niche marketing.
I am not suggesting—and no one is seriously suggesting—that we burn the books. The work will always be there. Nor should anyone take away Munro’s Nobel Prize in Literature. But maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t name any primary schools after the woman.
Because if you’d asked me a month ago to select three elements of Canada’s national myth that we got right, I would have gone with hockey, maple syrup, and Alice Munro.
Now, I can only say: Lauren Harris, the Snowbirds, and, sure, maybe Celine Dion have a shot.
Tabatha Southey is a Canadian writer and columnist and the author of three books.