Alice Munro’s daughter reveals dark family secret weeks her death

The daughter of Canadian literary icon Alice Munro has accused the late author of turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse she endured as a child at the hands of her stepfather.

Just weeks after the Nobel laureate’s death at 92, her youngest daughter Andrea Skinner detailed the accusations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a harrowing essay for the Toronto Star.

The Toronto Star reports that Skinner, now 58, went to the police about the abuse in 2005, when Fremlin was 80 years old. 

Fremlin, a cartographer, received a suspected sentence and probation for two years – with Munro choosing to stay with him until his death in 2013. 

Skinner said she wanted ‘story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother… I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.’

In her essay, Skinner wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was in his 50s.

She said the first sexual assault happened during a visit to Munro and Fremlin’s home in Ontario, after Fremlin climbed into the bed she was sleeping in.

Skinner said she told her stepmother, who told her father, who did not confront Munro.

In the following years, Skinner says Gremlin often exposed himself to her, told her about her mother’s sexual needs, and ‘about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked.’

‘At the time, I didn’t know this was abuse. I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories,’ Skinner wrote.

Skinner added that Gremlin lost interest in her when she entered teenagehood, but she continued to suffer consequences of the abuse and developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines.

It was after Munro reacted to a story about a character who dies by suicide after being sexually assaulted by her stepfather that Skinner decided to tell her mother the truth.

Skinner wrote a letter describing the abuse, and says Munro ‘reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.’

‘As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me,’ she wrote.

Skinner added of her mother: ‘She said that she had been “told too late”…  [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.’

Munro then reportedly left her marital home and went to stay at a condo she owned. Meanwhile Fremlin wrote letters to the family in which he admitted to the abuse but blamed it on Skinner, describing her as a ‘homewrecker’ and accusing her of going into his bedroom ‘for sexual adventure.’

Skinner says that Fremlin wrote in one letter: ‘If the worst comes to worst I intend to go public… I will make available for publication a number of photographs, notably some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely eloquent … one of Andrea in my underwear shorts.’

But Munro went back to Fremlin, and remained with him until his death. 

Skinner says she never reconciled with her mother, but now has a good relationship with her siblings  Andrew, Jenny, and Sheila.

Skinner’s essay has rocked the literary world, where Munro is praised for perfecting the contemporary short story and known for exploring themes such as sex and trauma. 

The characters in Munro’s stories were often girls and women who lead seemingly unexceptional lives but struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging. 

Canadian magazine writer and editor Michelle Cyca wrote on X: ‘Lots of people reflexively denying that Alice Munro could have knowingly spent her life with the pedophile who abused her daughter, or rushing to say they never liked her writing.

‘Harder to accept the truth that people who make transcendent art are capable of monstrous acts.’

American novelist and essayist Brandon Taylor, meanwhile, wrote:  I’m so in awe of her courage… [her account] is ‘personally devastating in that I recognize so much of my own story and history in her experience.’

Munro died in May after suffering from dementia for at least a decade.