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Her husband sexually abused her daughter from age nine, but she refused to leave him and blamed the victim. Now a horrifying conspiracy of silence is being unmasked...
With her searingly honest stories about childhood traumas, sexual awakenings and dull, lifeless marriages, few could write about human nature and relationships as powerfully as Alice Munro.
But until her death in May, aged 92, fewer still knew that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature harboured a dark secret that ripped apart her own family.
Just two months after she was feted in obituaries as one of the greatest short story writers, the literary star’s daughter has horrified Munro’s many admirers by revealing she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine.
Andrea Skinner as a girl. She has horrified the many admirers of Alice Munro, below, by revealing she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine
Worse — much worse, for a writer acclaimed for writing so acutely and sympathetically about relationships between mothers and daughters — Munro chose to stay with her paedophile husband even after he was convicted of his crimes, because she ‘loved him too much’.
Andrea Robin Skinner, 58, says the truth was smothered for decades by not only her family but — because of her mother’s fame — ‘many influential people’ who knew something of what had happened but said nothing. On Facebook yesterday, Andrea said the ‘focus of my story is the danger of silence’.
Munro’s second husband, cartographer Gerald Fremlin, first sexually assaulted Andrea one night in 1976 at her Canadian mother’s home in Ontario, where she would spend her summer holidays as part of a joint-custody arrangement with Andrea’s father.
Fremlin ‘climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old.’
D escribing herself as a once ‘happy child’, she recalled: ‘The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d woken up with my first migraine, which developed over the years into a chronic, debilitating condition that continues to this day.’
She recalls Fremlin, then in his 50s, driving her to the airport when the time came for her to return to her father, Jim Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia.
‘In the car, he asked me to play a game called “show me”. When I said no, he made me tell him about my “sex life”, prying me for details of innocent games I played with other children. Then he told me about his sex life.’
Andrea, the youngest of Alice Munro’s three daughters (a fourth died shortly after birth), told her stepmother, Carole, about the abuse. Carole alerted the girl’s father. Jim, a bookshop owner who’d married Alice in 1951 but separated from her in 1974, didn’t tell his former wife.
He also instructed Andrea’s much older sisters, Sheila and Jenny, to keep it secret from their mother, saying that the needs of the feted writer ‘were greater than his child’s needs’.
All of them, Jenny now admits, were intimidated by Munro’s growing literary fame.
Andrea also feared that her mother ‘would blame me if she ever found out’ because she was already paranoid that Fremlin favoured her daughter over her.
Just weeks after the Nobel laureate's death at the age of 92, Munro's daughter Andrea Skinner detailed the accusations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a harrowing essay
It meant that Andrea was subjected to years of further sexual abuse when she returned to her mother’s home each summer.
Fremlin, who’d once been an aspiring poet, repeatedly exposed himself to her, masturbated in front of her and propositioned her.
‘When I was alone with Fremlin, he made lewd jokes, exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighbourhood he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs,’ she wrote in the Toronto Star this month.
Alice Munro’s behaviour was, in its own way, just as horrifying as Fremlin’s. When Andrea was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told Alice that he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter.
When Munro challenged him he denied it, and when asked about Andrea, he ‘reassured her that I was not his type,’ she says.
‘In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as “prudish” as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults.
‘My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.’
As she entered her teens, Andrea no longer held the same allure for Fremlin but her ordeal left her suffering from bulimia, insomnia and migraines, and she struggled at university.
In 1992, Andrea, then 25, broke the ‘conspiracy of silence’ within the family after Alice Munro had mentioned to her a story she’d read about a girl who commits suicide after being sexually abused by her stepfather.
Munro asked her why she thought the poor girl didn’t tell her mother. A month later, Andrea wrote to her mother revealing what had happened to her as a child.
As she always did, says her daughter, Munro twisted the scandal around so that she became the victim, accusing her first husband of keeping the abuse secret to humiliate her, but then admitted that Fremlin had confessed to her about having ‘friendships’ with children, leaving her feeling ‘betrayed’.
She reacted ‘as if she had learned of an infidelity’.
Munro ‘was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself,’ Andrea recalls. ‘Did she realise she was speaking to a victim — that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it.’
Fremlin, meanwhile, threatened to kill Andrea if she went to the police. He wrote to her father and step-mother, claiming she’d been a nine-year-old ‘home wrecker’, a ‘Lolita’ who had been intent on ‘sexual adventure’.
Astonishingly, he apologised not for abusing a girl but for being ‘unfaithful’ to Munro.
Despite everything, after a brief separation, Munro returned to Fremlin, whom she’d first met at university and married in 1976, and stayed with him until he died in 2013.
‘She said that she had been “told too late”,’ says Andrea, that ‘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 was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.’
In 2002, Andrea — who’d become a yoga instructor and is now a therapist working with child abuse victims — had twins and told her mother that Fremlin could never come near them. When Munro complained that it would be a ‘terrible inconvenience for her’ as she couldn’t drive, Andrea ‘exploded’ and refused to have anything more to do with her.
However, the literary world continued to fawn over her and, two years later, Andrea couldn’t suffer in silence any longer when Munro told a newspaper interviewer how Fremlin was the great love of her life and she was so lucky to have him, adding that she had a ‘close relationship’ with all of her children.
Alice Munro, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro, receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 2013
Andrea went to the police — armed with the compromising letters Fremlin had sent. Upon his arrest, Munro yelled in fury that Andrea was a liar, according to a police detective. In 2005, he admitted indecently assaulting her but, given he was 80, got off with two years’ probation and was banned from any contact with children under 14 for two years. The case attracted next to no media attention.
So who had known of Alice Munro’s appalling secret?
‘Everybody,’ says Andrea’s step-mother Carole. She recounted being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, ‘Is it true?’ to which she replied that it was.
Both Munro’s publisher and acclaimed biographer admit they’ve known since 2005 — the latter, Robert Thacker, left it out as he ‘viewed it as a private matter’ and saw Fremlin as the offender, not Munro.
Her friend Margaret Atwood, celebrated author of A Handmaid’s Tale, insists she only heard the ‘horrifying’ details very recently. ‘Why did she stay? Search me,’ she says. ‘I think they were from a generation and place that shovelled things under the carpet.’
She added: ‘You realise you didn’t know who you thought you knew.’
As the literary world rushes to ‘re-evaluate’ a revered writer, a Canadian university and her home town are reconsidering their memorials to Alice Munro. Many fans are simply mulling over whether they can read her again.
And so another name has been added to a long list in the endless debate over whether it really is acceptable to appreciate great art while condemning its flawed creator.