In July 2024, three months after Alice Munro died, her daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star, revealing that her mother’s husband and her own stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Sixteen years after the abuse occurred Alice Munro was told of it. She decided to remain with Fremlin, with whom she had been living for seventeen years at that stage. In her essay, Andrea writes:
I … wanted this 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.
What are the facts? My sources for this information are many of the articles pertaining to it which have appeared since July 2024, in particular the first, Andrea Munro Skinner’s essay in the Toronto Star (July 7th, 2024), and Rachel Aviv’s lengthy and well-researched ‘Alice Munro’s Passive Tense’ (The New Yorker, December 23rd, 2024) . For some contingent biographical details I have consulted Robert Thacker’s biography, Alice Munro: Her Writing Lives (2005), Sheila Munro’s memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters (2001 ), and Catherine Sheldrick Ross’s Alice Munro: A Double Life (1992).
In 2005 Munro’s husband, Gerry Fremlin (1924-2013) was accused of ‘indecent assault’ on his step-daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, during the summer of 1976. He pleaded guilty and was given a suspended sentence and two years’ probation (during which he was not allowed to be alone with children; the sentence also affected his freedom to travel outside Canada).
In 1976 Alice Munro had been separated from her husband, Jim, for about four years. In 1975 her relationship with Gerry Fremlin, whom she had known slightly and admired from a distance around 1950 when they were both students in the University of Western Ontario, began. Her daughters, Sheila and Jenny, were eighteen and twenty-one when their mother and Fremlin became partners. The youngest daughter, Andrea, was nine. Andrea and Jenny had been living with their mother after her separation from their father in various places, mostly in Ontario. But in 1975 Alice Munro moved in with Gerry Fremlin. At that point Andrea returned to the original family home in Victoria on Vancouver Island; the plan was that she would spend most of the year there with her father and his second wife, Carole, and the summers with her mother. Alice Munro’s main residence from 1976 was the house in Clinton, Ontario, where Gerry Fremlin had been living for a short time with his elderly mother, for whom he was caring – the couple believed their residence in that house would be temporary but Alice Munro continued to live there with her partner until he died in 2013, and for a few further years.
The first of Andrea’s summers in Clinton was in 1976. According to Robert Thacker’s account in his biography of Munro, Jenny Munro, the second daughter, also spent that summer there – she had a summer job as a waitress in the area.
The initial abuse occurred in July or August, when Alice Munro was away: from late July she was visiting her own father, Robert Laidlaw, in hospital in London, Ontario, where he died on August 2nd. Later in August she was away teaching in Banff. The abuse occurred during one of these absences. In Andrea Munro’s and Rachel Aviv’s articles, we learn in detail of the form it took, and I recommend those sources to those who wish to know the precise, sordid details. Abusive behaviour, from an adult in loco parentis, would be damaging to a child at any age, but Andrea was only nine or ten when the first incident occurred, and eleven or twelve when the later abuses took place. The interference, and the response she received when she eventually told adults about it, clearly affected her for life. (Aviv’s article doesn’t allude to a fact that I infer from Robert Thacker’s biography, that Fremlin’s mother and Jenny Munro were staying in the house at the time of the first abuse; that is, if Thacker is correct, Andrea was not left alone in the house with Fremlin while her mother was away, although they were alone in her mother’s bedroom when the event occurred.)
Gerald Fremlin and Andrea enjoyed a warm and friendly relationship from the start. In an interview with Rachel Aviv, Andrea said ‘I loved him. He took a lot of interest in me, and I thought that was a great thing. He loved to talk and I loved to listen.’ (New Yorker, ‘Alice Munro’s Passive Voice’) The word ‘grooming’ quickly occurs to us, with the benefit of our modern knowledge of paedophilia, but I don’t think the term, applied specifically to sexual predators’ practices, was in common parlance in the 1970s. Alice Munro had vague suspicions. She has said that she had thought there was something ‘off’ about some of Gerry Fremlin’s behaviour with her daughter – she alludes to a game they played in which he hosed Andrea with water while the child ducked and hid. (The hosing game, with its sexual connotation, comes up in the short story ‘Open Secrets’.) But she didn’t investigate. Another game Fremlin played with Andrea was called ‘Show Me’, which involved indecent exposure – Alice Munro was unaware of it.
Munro and Fremlin had a policy of treating children like adults and no conversational topics were off limits. Andrea Munro writes:
When I 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. 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. (Toronto Star 2024)
By any standard, Munro’s silence was wanting.
In her memoir about life with Munro, in a section describing the mood of the late 1960s, when traditional values regarding sexuality, women, parenting, were changing radically, when there a sense of exuberant liberation in society, Sheila Munro tells us that Munro treated her daughters like friends rather than her children – a practice which both she and her mother grew to regret in later life. She shared clothes with them, confided in them, gave them adult books and discussed them – when Sheila was thirteen, for instance, she gave her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita. This revision of traditional attitudes to parenting coloured the style practised in the Munro/Fremlin household. Boundaries had broken down. The context of the late sixties and early seventies is relevant, I think, to the background of Andrea’s life-changing abuse.
Although there is not much information about Gerry Fremlin in the public domain, and attention over the past year has focused on Alice Munro rather than on him (or Jim Munro), he obviously had paedophiliac tendencies. As far as I know he does not seem to have acted on them except in relation to Andrea and the other girl referred to above, whom he definitely seems to have ‘groomed’.
When Alice Munro returned home to Clinton in the summer of 1976, Andrea did not tell her about the abusive incident. At the end of the summer, however, when she went back to Vancouver Island, she mentioned it to her stepbrother, Andrew, in a joking way. He was just a little older than she but realised that what she told him was serious, and he informed his mother, Carole. She told her husband, Andrea’s father. Unfortunately, Jim Munro did very little in response. Clearly he did not take very seriously an incident which most parents today would immediately report to the police. Jim Munro didn’t even report it to his former wife, now living with the perpetrator.
In fact, Alice Munro was not told about the mistreatment of her daughter until sixteen years later, in 1992. When she was informed, she parted from Gerry Fremlin for some time – it seems to have been about a month– but returned to him. They remained together until his death in 2013. According to Alice Munro’s daughter, Sheila, she said she could not live without him, and it seems that he pressurised her to return, threatening suicide among other things. He also wrote a letter to Jim Munro, justifying his behaviour and more or less blaming it on Andrea, positioning her as a child seductress, a sort of Lolita. (Alice Munro claimed not to have read this letter.)
In 1992, Alice Munro was sixty and Fremlin sixty-five. Their partnership appears to have been successful, according to Robert Thacker, who points out that Munro and Fremlin had ‘much the same point of view, the same understanding’. They loved literature (so did Jim Munro). Above all, everything about the region where they lived, Huron County, which is the bedrock of Munro’s stories, fascinated both of them: its history, its people, its landscape. Fremlin, a geographer, introduced the writer to the area’s geomorphology, which colours many of her stories. The marriage worked, in a way which that to Jim Munro had not.
Rachel Aviv’s account, based on interviews with Alice Munro’s daughters and other sources, is somewhat at odds with the view of a happy relationship presented by Thacker. According to that account, the relationship appears to have been turbulent often enough, and sometimes made Alice Munro unhappy. Rows were not infrequent. When they moved in together 1975 Fremlin has stated that they both knew he was was not in love with her, but that she was the only woman he could live with. She, however, seems to have been in love with him. Munro’s daughters remember aspects of the relationship that were troubling. By Munro’s own account, Fremlin was a very strong personality (that was part of his attraction). During WW2 he had been a Canadian RCAF pilot and flew on several bombing missions. He was determined, self-assured and emotionally elusive. My impression is that he was what we call ‘entitled’. Sheila Munro has used the word ‘bully’. He could be critical of Munro’s middle-aged body, sometimes insulting her and holding her in contempt. Munro seems to have been in thrall to him, in a sense.(Perhaps ‘in love’ is the more positive phrase.) But she described him to a friend as a ‘really grown-up’ man. She also liked the stability of the connection. He looked after her in practical ways, and encouraged her writing (as had Jim Munro).
The story of the abuse damaged the entire Munro family, but its impact on the relationship of Alice and Andrea was devastating. In 2002, by which time Andrea herself was married and had two children, enraged by an interview Alice Munro gave in which she emphasised her deep love for Gerry Fremlin, she told her mother that she would not allow Fremlin to visit her or her children. Munro protested that she could not visit without Fremlin since he drove her everywhere – she couldn’t drive. Following this, mother and daughter were estranged. Gerry Fremlin died in 2013, and Munro in April 2024. She had suffered from dementia for at least ten years prior to her death – it seems her condition deteriorated soon after Fremlin’s death. Munro was looked after by another daughter, Jenny, and eventually was cared for in a home. While her mother was living with Jenny, Andrea became reconciled with her to the extent of helping with caring duties. At this stage Alice Munro’s memory was so defective that she was not in a position to discuss in any convincing way what she had always called ‘the Subject’ with anyone, although according to Jenny, who tried many times to draw her out on it, more than once she expressed regret at having stayed with Fremlin, ‘that pedo’.
That was too late for Andrea, who believes her mother put her personal happiness, in her relationship with Fremlin, above her loyalty to her. She failed as a mother. When Andrea finally told her about the abuse, in 1992, Alice Munro seemed more upset by Fremlin’s betrayal of her than by the damage caused to her daughter. Andrea Munro accuses her mother of protecting her abuser. She does not accuse her of having been complicit in the abuse, since she knew nothing about it until sixteen years after it occurred, by which time Andrea was an adult in her mid-twenties. (Fremlin ceased to have any sexual interest in her after she reached puberty.)
During the period of the violations, Andrea seemed determined not to confide in her mother. For instance, when her stepmother, Carole Munro, suggested that she stop going to stay in Clinton during the summers, she refused on the grounds that Alice would then suspect that something had happened.
I was relieved at first that my father didn’t tell her what had happened to me. She had told me that Fremlin liked me better than her, and I thought she would blame me if she ever found out. I thought she might die.
Children can have unfounded fears that their mother will die and one can speculate that Andrea could have held a deep fear of abandonment. Her childhood must have been stressful, although by all accounts she came across as a cheerful happy child. But it looks as if her parents’ marriage had been unhappy for most of her life; they parted when she was six or seven; by age ten she was spending the better part of every year living away from her mother. It seems likely that she would have been very careful to safeguard her summers in Clinton, with her mother, at whatever cost. Jim Munro probably understood her point of view. He allowed her to continue as before, but insisted that one of her sisters accompany her in Clinton. (In fact Jenny appears to have been there for the summer of 1976 anyway, unless Robert Thacker has made a mistake with the dates, which is of course possible.)
Andrea’s motive in telling the world about the abuse in July 2024, soon after her mother’s death, is that she wants the whole truth about her mother to be known. She had tried to tell her story several times before. In 2005 she asked Robert Thacker, about to publish the biography, to include a reference to the assault in it. He refused on the grounds that he was writing about Munro’s work, not her life – although his book connects life and work intimately, and actually refers directly to the summer of 1976, without mentioning what was going on in Clinton when Alice was away spending time with her dying father. Thacker pinpoints 1975-’76 as a watershed in Munro’s writing, emphasising that her move back to Huron County in Ontario, where much of her work is located, had a profound, positive, even groundbreaking, impact on its quality.
It was in 2005, after Thacker’s refusal to tell the truth, that Andrea reported the matter to the police. They acted on her allegation and arrested Fremlin. He pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault, and was duly sentenced.
It is surprising that the matter was not reported on in the media at that time, given Alice Munro’s fame. But according to Robert Morriss, former Crown attorney, in an interview reported in RD News Now, July 2024, Fremlin’s case started in provincial court, where he waived his right to a preliminary hearing on February 21st, 2005, and elected to have the matter heard by a judge alone in Superior Court. There was no trial and Fremlin entered his guilty plea in the higher court less than four weeks later, on March 11th, 2005. ‘So that’s, you know, a little unusual to have it done with so quickly,’ Morris said. ‘My kind of sense of it was that they wanted to get it in and out of the system. The least time it’s before the court, you know, the least opportunity there is for someone to report on it,’ he said, adding that it’s not uncommon for criminal cases to go through the Goderich courthouse without any media coverage.
So it seems that it was possible to keep the matter secret, even though information about it was in the public domain. Rachel Aviv tells us that many people knew about it, within and outside the family in the literary community, but there seems to have been an unspoken decision to keep it quiet.
We can understand Andrea’s anger. Even though she told her family about the abuse, told Robert Thacker, and told the police, and others, it has never been widely known – the secret, or ‘open secret’ to purloin the title of a Munro story, was covered up. Andrea was not listened to, or her story was regarded as insignificant, or both.
The immediate impact of the revelation in July 2024, following Munro’s death, is to damage the writer’s personal reputation – and, apparently for many, that is blended with her writing. Many of the newspaper articles which appeared soon after the story broke predicted that Munro’s literary reputation would suffer. There was an immediate negative response from institutions connected with Alice Munro – including universities, and Munro’s Bookshop in Victoria (no longer owned by the family – Jim Munro gave it to the staff on his retirement some years ago). Almost a year later an Irish Times journalist writes:
Her legacy transmogrified into a troubled and ugly one, with both loyal readers and cultural institutions publicly distancing themselves from her.
Alice Munro was generally reticent about her personal life. She was not a recluse by any means, and gave several long interviews about her writing and her life. But she wrote very little in the way of direct memoir – a few directly autobiographical pieces are included in her final collection, Dear Life, but apart from that, nothing (that survives). Her daughter Sheila published a memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, in 2001. Robert Thacker has written the substantial biographical study referred to earlier, which mainly focuses on Munro’s writing. Neither of these books mentions the molestation of Andrea; Sheila knew about it, but decided it was not her story to tell, and, as indicated above, Andrea asked Thacker to mention it – ‘the Subject’ certainly coloured Munro’s writing, inspired some of her stories, and so was far from irrelevant to an analysis of her work.
I would contend that her knowledge of ‘the Subject’, when she acquired it in 1992, instigated a turning point in Alice Munro’s writing – a watershed as significant as that noted by Thacker, her return to Huron County in Ontario in 1975. Her stories subsequent to 1992 were deeper, darker, and in some ways better than her earlier work. They are less lively and sparkling, though. Her humour continues to imbue them, but it is not as mischievous as previously. There is a shadow on the prose – occasionally, even, a flatness (as in, say, the story ‘Too Much Happiness’). This could be an effect of writerly ageing, a conscious paring back, an impatience with stylistic flamboyance. But there is perhaps more to it than that.
It is a rule of thumb of literary criticism in the liberal humanist tradition that it is invidious to read fiction as autobiographical. We know something of Munro’s sources, however. She invented some stories entirely. She also drew on stories which she heard, and she consciously and fairly consistently sourced stories in newspaper reports – Gerry Fremlin provided her with some, as did a librarian. But she never kept secret that she drew quite heavily on her family history and on personal experience. All of this was raw material, which she mined for meaning, and shaped and changed and embroidered into stories the details of which often bear little relation to the source. What remains – and it is one of the factors which makes Munro’s stories so powerful – is, I believe, the inspiring emotion, the heart of the tale. As Sheila Munro writes, she could turn the events of life to gold. That observation has something of the benign vagueness of a blurb on the back of a book, but there is something to it. Munro had an alchemist’s skill. Her stories of ‘ordinary people’ and fairly commonplace events are luminescent. Thanks to her impeccable selection and observation of the important details, the intimate tone, subtle reflection, and her rhythmical prose, they achieve artistic perfection.
But theme and storyline always matter too (everything matters!). And one can ponder why certain themes and subjects emerge at certain periods.
Some of her stories in the later, post-1992, period of her life concern children who are abused by adult males. There are in addition stories which concern girls who are prematurely sexualised, who are attracted to and flirt with older men. Finally, there is at least one story, among her most powerful, which concerns a daughter who estranges herself from her mother, due to a sin of omission, relating to her father, by the mother.
To the first category, stories about child abuse, belong ‘Vandals’ and ‘Open Secrets’, both in the collection Open Secrets, which was published in 1994 – two years after Munro found out about the abuse her daughter suffered in the late 1970s. To the second, stories concerning sexually precocious girls, belong ‘Wenlock Edge’, in the collection Too Much Happiness (2009), ‘Hired Girl’, in The View From Castle Rock (2008) ‘Leaving Maverley’ in her last collection, Dear Life (2012), and ‘Rich as Stink’ in Love of a Good Woman, 1996, and ‘Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage’ in the collection of that title (2001).
To the third – a story about a mother’s grief following estrangement from her daughter –‘Silence’.‘Silence’ is included in the collection Runaway, published in 2004 – two years after Andrea cut off contact with her mother.
The theme of childhood abuse is to the forefront in ‘Vandals’ , as a number of recent commentators have mentioned. It’s a story which struck me as strange in the Munro oeuvre when I first read it in 1994 – and it is remarkable, I think, that Robert Thacker, in the section of his book dealing with this collection, hardly mentions ‘Vandals’ and has little to say about the story ‘Open Secrets’, concentrating instead on the relatively lightweight ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’, and the relatively weak ‘Spaceships have Landed’. ‘Vandals’ was a departure from the Munro themes in previous collections, which are, roughly speaking, ancestors, childhood, love affairs, marriage, motherhood. But in the 1990s child abuse was much discussed in the media. In Ireland, for instance, a series of criminal investigations establishing that priests had abused thousands of children over the decades began in the 1990s (contributing to the secularisation of Ireland). The scandals continue, but the 1990s is when the secrets became open. The theme appeared in fiction, in Ireland, around that time: for instance in Lia Mills’s novel Another Alice (1996). It seemed to me that Alice Munro was simply influenced by the Zeitgeist. Still, ‘Vandals’, first published in The New Yorker in September 1993, could well have been written after 1992, when Munro had been informed of the abuse of Andrea by Gerry Fremlin. It can therefore be read through a new lens.
The story is told from the point of view of Bea, and concerns her partner, the suggestively named Ladner, an intriguing and attractive man, very self-contained, authoritative, and wry, who lived a hermit’s life in a country cottage until Bea fell in love with him and moved in. He is a taxidermist, who has created a nature reserve on the land around his cottage, a mysterious, magical and wild park – somewhat creepy. In it are woodlands, ponds, marshes. Stuffed animals – beavers, foxes, even a wolf and a small bear, are placed here and there in the reserve. Two neighbouring motherless children, Liza and Kenny, play in this wonderland on a regular basis. They swim with Ladner in the pond.
The description of the nature reserve is stunningly powerful, and it makes this story one of Alice Munro’s best. She manages to present it as a beautiful but menacing place, very sensuous, a homage to nature, and to sexuality. It’s like a painting by Rousseau. The swamp, the wood, the ponds which Ladner has created by damming streams, are fecund, sexualised places (DH Lawrence can do this too with landscape). The stuffed animals – an eagle, a bear, a fox, among others – are images of predation. In addition, there are overt references to inappropriate sexual behaviour by Ladner. On coming across a notice carved in a tree, PDP, the young Kenny jumps up and down and shouts ‘Pull down Pants!’ Ladner says firmly, ‘Proceed Down Path’. Bea rejects the clue, although she’s uneasy.
The story is shaped in a way we are familiar with in Munro’s work. It opens with a letter from Bea to Liza, many years after the events, about which Bea knows nothing, asking her the go and check on the cottage. Ladner is in hospital about to have a heart by-pass. One line makes it clear that Bea loves him deeply – on the last night they lay side by side in the bed, with everything touching – legs, haunches arms. The next day Ladner dies during surgery.
Liza goes to the cottage with her husband, Warren – she is now a born-again Christian. She trashes the cottage, emptying bottles onto the floor, breaking the stuffed animals, ripping books apart. After a while Warren joins in. Then Liza telephones Bea to tell her they found the cottage vandalised when they arrived.
In this story Munro both examines the abuse of two children (Liza has a brother, Kenny, who dies in a car crash) by a powerfully attractive and creative man. She also writes about the deep love which the woman – Bea, a one-time teacher of English – has for Ladner, even though, or perhaps partly because, he can be rude and contemptuous towards her. (She left Peter Parr, a ‘Mr Nice and Decent’, for Ladner – boring Peter introduced them.)
The emotional drive of the story is from Bea – like several of Munro’s stories, it presents us with a picture of passionate, helpless love for a character who is not one bit nice and decent, a strong, extremely independent, selfish man who does exactly what he wants. Liza’s anger and revenge are well-drawn but perhaps not as deeply felt as Bea’s love. Ladner is contextualised in the nature reserve and there is a possible suggestion here that he is a victim of his nature – predatory, like the wolves and the eagles.
If Alice Munro never openly talked about Gerry Fremlin’s character, his emotional abuse of her, and his sexual abuse of a child, she wrote about it in a veiled way in the story ‘Vandals’. ‘Vandals’ is not a confession or an accusation. Gerry Fremlin wasn’t a taxidermist, and he didn’t live in a nature reserve. Andrea was not the child of a dead mother and a careless father. Alice Munro was not a dilettante rich woman, with no career apart from love affairs. All the details are different from her own and Andrea’s story. But the central emotional truth of it is there. Is writing a short story Alice Munro’s way of expressing her feelings about the issue?
The character of a man who is independent, elusive, emotionally unavailable, and simultaneously behaving in a flirtatious way with a child, occurs again in ‘Amundsen’ (Dear Life, 2012), in the form of Dr Fox – again a suggestive name – in a TB sanatorium. One of his juvenile patients, the precocious Mary, is clearly attracted to him; he teases her and treats her cruelly. His abrupt rejection of Mary foreshadows his heartbreaking rejection of the narrator, a teacher in the sanatorium, hours before they are about to marry. In the same collection, the story ‘Corrie’ concerns a woman with a physical flaw, a limp, who has a long and happy affair with a married architect. When she discovers, by chance, that he has been defrauding her of money on a regular basis for years, she sends a brief ambiguous note to the lover, which may or may not reveal to him that she knows of the deception. By return she receives an equally brief message:
‘All well now, be glad. Soon.’
So that’s the way they’re going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse.
Corrie is rather like a woman who refuses to leave a husband who is violent. Bea, likewise, in ‘Vandals’, does not leave Ladner even when he insults her and when she ought to suspect that he has abused Liza and Kenny, the children in the story. The strength of attachment, the need these women have for their man, supersedes other moral considerations. Women who are hopelessly, desperately, in love with men who are not ‘Mr Nice and Decent’ recur in Munro’s work.
Is she asking us, the reader, to judge these women? Does she expect some of us to say they are stupid, wrong, absurd? Or is she saying, this is how life is, this is what love is like? Well, it is up to us. As they say, she allows space for the reader. A woman deeply in love will forgive a lot in her lover. The women in these stories are needy, so needy that they will put up with insults, with fraud, that they will turn a blind eye to criminal behaviour (child abuse). As Alice Munro is reported to have said, when going back to Gerry Fremlin, ‘I can’t live without him.’ The final line of ‘Amundsen’ is ‘Nothing changes really about love.’ This line, spoken in late life by the first person narrator whose heart was broken by Dr Fox decades earlier, seems to me to be Alice Munro’s statement about the real truth about romantic love – absurd and operatic – and persistent.
It is also possible, of course, that in a more pragmatic sense Munro could not live without a man in her life – she had always had one, with a brief interlude between her marriages, since she was eighteen or nineteen years of age. That need may have been created by the society into which she was born, in the 1930s. A woman had to have a man to complete her – Munro has written about this in some stories. The prospect of spinsterhood seemed disastrous to young women at her time and in her milieu. Possibly a single divorcee, or widow, was not much higher up the social ladder.
It is also possible that Alice Munro was needy in other ways which we don’t understand. She was physically abused as a child by her father, who beat her regularly in a humiliating way (maybe there is no other way). Alice Munro has written about this in the first of her stories to be published in The New Yorker, ‘Royal Beatings’. She did not blame her father for this abuse (now illegal in Ireland, say) and when telling her daughter about it, said it was what parents did in those days (the 1930s and ’40s). She was raped by a colleague at a college where she was teaching in the 1970s, after a party. Although she was surprised by how traumatised the rape left her, she made little of it. When the rapist apologised a few weeks later, she shrugged and laughed ‘It’ll make a good story.’ There is a suggestion in Rachel Aviv’s article that Munro’s experience of physical abuse by her father, whom she nevertheless adored, may have predisposed her to fall for unavailable, psychologically abusive men. (Jim Munro was closer to Mr Nice Guy, although Sheila Munro’s memoir reveals some unsavoury details about him. But Munro does not seem to have ever passionately loved him, if one risks extrapolating from early stories such as ‘The Beggar Maid’, or ‘Mischief’, or later ones like ‘The Ticket’.)
Margaret Attwood, in the only comment she has made publicly on the Andrea story, to my knowledge, says that Alice Munro may have been sexually abused herself as a child. (She also says that in the 1970s not many men would have wanted to marry or live with a middle-aged woman writer.) From Munro’s early stories about young people and children it is clear that inappropriate sexual behaviour was fairly commonplace when she was growing up, and not considered very serious. A number of stories in her oeuvre, written before she knew about Andrea’s abuse, concern flirtations between young girls and adult men, and inappropriate advances, amounting to abuse, by men to young girls.
There is another point to consider. What do we actually know about Alice Munro’s personality, apart from what we can glean from her writing and from a few interviews? I have met her a few times. She accepted an invitation from me, as then chairperson of the Irish Writers’ Union, and Peter Sirr, then director of the Irish Writers’ Centre, to come to Dublin and give a reading in March 1995. To a sizeable audience in Trinity College she read part of the story ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’, from her then latest collection, Open Secrets. ( ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’ concerns a woman whose partner abandons her for a young woman.) Munro refused to take questions or comments, which I assumed to have been her usual practice at readings. Since I was introducing the event I would have liked us to hear a little more from her than the simple reading from the story – after all she had come all the way from Canada. Later, though, after the reading, Peter Sirr, and I, and others, including Caroline Walsh, then literary editor of The Irish Times and a huge fan of Alice Munro, had dinner in Chapter One (a bit less expensive then, but excellent!) where she was charming, talkative, and answered questions. ‘I make it all up!’ she said, with a laugh, ironically, at one point. She also told how much more literature was revered in Ireland than in Canada, how much she admired Edna O’Brien – she mentioned her story ‘The Rug’ – and Clare Boylan. One of her daughters, who I am almost certain was Andrea, accompanied her on this visit and joined in this conversation – I remember that she agreed with her mother that literature was considered unimportant in Canada. When I asked what was important, Andrea said, ‘Sport. Ice hockey and things like that.’
I and my husband also joined them for dinner a few nights later in the residence of the Canadian ambassador in Killiney. Clare Boylan and her husband were there, and Professor Nicky Grene and his wife, a Canadian. It was a warm but more formal occasion. I had a chat with Andrea after dinner. As far as I remember we discussed her career plans, and I, as wise older woman (then aged forty) gave her advice. Andrea was in her late twenties. She and her mother remained in Ireland for a few weeks, travelling around – possibly by bus, or perhaps Andrea drove (Alice Munro visited Ireland on a number of occasions, privately).
Although Alice Munro presented a charming, confident image to the world when she appeared in public, there are hints from the family that she was emotionally vulnerable. The recent interviews about the abuse indicate this. When Andrea told him about the abuse by Gerry Fremlin, Jim Munro said you can’t tell your mother, it would kill her. Andrea says that throughout her childhood Alice was considered ‘fragile’. She had bouts of depression. There seems to have been a concerted effort by the family to protect her from disturbing news which would upset her equilibrium (and stop her writing.)
Her daughter Sheila says that she was exceptionally impractical. She was clumsy with her hands (as are some characters in her stories). She couldn’t drive (in her stories, there are some splendid accounts of bus and train journeys). As has been much reported in the recent articles, when Andrea had her first children she told Alice that Gerry Fremlin was not allowed to visit her or them any more (obviously he had visited before this). Alice objected because she could not get to Andrea without him, since he drove her everywhere. It was at this point that Andrea estranged herself completely from her mother, to the deep distress of the latter. The excuse re driving may seem facile – couldn’t Alice have found alternative means of transport? Perhaps that would not have been easy in rural Ontario – and she was getting older, in 1992. Gerry Fremlin drove her everywhere. In general, he seems to have looked after her and handled practical arrangements. Even when he himself was seriously ill with cancer, he kept that to himself and continued to look after Munro, then in the earlier stages of dementia. Munro was physically clumsy, quite shy, and deeply sensitive. She often cried. Intense emotional sensitivity is, of course, one of the sources of her greatness as a writer – in fact excessive sensitivity is an essential quality for any writer. As the secretary of the Swedish academy put it when announcing the Nobel prize in 2014, she knew the caprices of the human heart. But did she also need, more than most, a devoted carer, who would take care of practical issues and give her time to write?
With Fremlin, in Clinton, Ontario, she had found a comfortable writing life. One key to Alice Munro’s development as a writer and her eventual brilliance is that she always put her writing first. She said in an interview: ‘You have to think that your work is more important than almost anything else, and you have to start thinking this when you’re very young.’ (Gibson, Alice Munro. Quoted by Catherine Sheldrick Ross)
It seems to me that anything which would disturb her writing life she tried to avoid – although the ordinary domestic and parental obstacles were many during the twenty-year marriage to Jim Munro, not through any great fault of his. Still, in her life with Fremlin, in Clinton, she seems to have found the right environment. Leaving him, starting again on her own at the age of sixty, would have presented a huge challenge.
What happened, of course, also presented huge challenges – the estrangement from Andrea and her grandchildren, the guilt. But she was able to write. She was able to reflect on these experiences, hers and Andrea’s; she was able to turn life events into great literature – which we appreciate for its deep honesty and its acknowledgment of the complexity of human emotion and psychology, as well as for its style and beauty.
When a writer is turning her life to fiction, she feels detached from life – it will be re-arranged in the fiction. James Joyce – with whom Munro has quite a lot in common artistically, although you mightn’t notice it – found this when he was writing Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Richard Ellmann notes in his classic biography. Alice Munro experienced this detachment – she has said in interviews that she regarded herself more as an observer rather than a participant in life. (Well, most writers do, I suspect.)
What do I feel now about Andrea Munro Skinner’s revelation, about the scandal?
It is terrible that Gerry Fremlin indecently assaulted Andrea Munro when she was a child. I understand Andrea’s anger at her mother, for continuing the relationship with Fremlin after she learned of the crime. I understand too that the adulation her mother received during her lifetime and just after her death must be irksome, and inspire anger. That the story of the abuse was ignored or covered up, and never mentioned in any of the obituaries and memorial articles must have been a bitter pill.
As well as sympathising with Andrea, I sympathise, if somewhat obliquely and critically, with Alice Munro. I understand that she needed Gerry Fremlin. I understand that at the age of sixty, she made a decision not to live alone without her partner. As she told Sheila Munro, she could not live without him – her personal experience of various forms of abuse (physical violence at the hands of her father, rape by a colleague, who knows what else?) taught her to understand human weakness, and sometimes to forgive.
Several of the stories which seem to have been inspired by the complex feelings she experienced following the disclosure of the assault are among her richest, deepest – I include ‘Vandals’ and ‘Silence’ among those. Outstanding fiction, with a basis in real, complicated, life. Andrea’s revelation, apart from its essential truthful purpose, shines a light on many of the stories written after 1992. Some, which were intriguing, like ‘Silence’, are easier to understand, since we have some idea about what inspired them. There are many episodes, themes and details in other stories which are illuminated by Andrea’s story. As Peter Engelund said in the Nobel speech in 2013: ‘Of key importance are all the things her characters could not or did not wish to understand there and then, but that, only long afterward, stand revealed.’
We are indebted to Andrea Skinner Munro for telling her story, chiefly because she was able to shed her crushing secret but also because it has allowed us to understand better her mother’s writing.
Initially I found it very upsetting that this scandal had erupted after Munro’s death, when, I thought, she had no opportunity of defending herself. I admit that I felt angry at Andrea Skinner, for publishing her story in the Toronto Star in July 2024, just a few months after her mother died. Cui bono? I wondered.
My attitude to ‘the Subject’ has changed, however, over the months since that revelation. I am increasingly sympathetic to Andrea Skinner, and more questioning of Alice Munro’s behaviour.
But perhaps this case, the case of the selfish mother, the case of Alice Munro, is too complex for trial by jury, by essay, by public opinion, by journalistic or even scholarly essay. I do not think it is facetious to suggest that the only form adequate to dealing with the issue in its layered complexity is a story, a story written by a writer of the calibre of Alice Munro.
She is not alive to tell her version of ‘the Subject’. Gerry Fremlin has told his, in his admission of guilt. Andrea Munro has told hers, in the Toronto Star piece. Her sisters, Jenny and Sheila, have told their versions to Rachel Aviv and others. Alice Munro hasn’t told her version in a courtroom or in a newspaper article. But perhaps she has told it in the only way it can be told.
She wrote some stories which she wished to be published after her death. These may have dealt with ‘the Subject’. We will never know, because they can’t be found. Sheila Munro suspects that Gerry Fremlin destroyed them.
But among Munro’s published stories there are many which tell part of her version. Stories centred on child abuse and child murder. Stories about women hopelessly attached to men who are ‘not good for them’, as the agony aunts express it. Stories about mothers estranged from daughters.
Anyone seeking an explanation of Munro’s behaviour in this case need only read her stories.
‘All well now, be glad. Soon.’
So that’s the way they’re going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse.’
1/7/2025
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is the Laureate for Irish Fiction. She is a writer of short stories, novels and non-fiction. She is also a literary critic, President of the Folklore of Ireland Society, and a member of Aosdana.
