Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner claims the author was complicit in her abuse

On Sunday, the daughter of Canadian Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro revealed a dark secret that has shocked the literary world. The tale is a reminder of the layers of complicity that develop when families protect abusers.

As a Toronto Star essay and accompanying article recount, in 1976, Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually assaulted her 9-year-old daughter Andrea Robin Skinner. Skinner eventually told her mother the truth when she became an adult, and Munro chose to side with her husband and protect him for decades.

Skinner’s story, as described in the essay and in the Toronto Star report to which her siblings contributed, is well-documented. It was investigated by police and corroborated by her family, by contemporary correspondence and by her attacker, who pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005.

In her essay, Skinner writes that she “wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories that people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t confront the reality of what happened to me and the fact that my mother, faced with the truth of what happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him.”

Today, the judgment Skinner demanded has begun. In light of his history, Munro’s work reads quite differently.

Munro, who died earlier this year, was famous for her short stories, which dealt primarily with the inner lives of women and girls. In her work, women are repressed, silenced and persecuted by sadistic men, but their secret thoughts and rebellions are slyly subversive. She often drew on her childhood in a small town in 1930s Canada, where, as she described it, girls were taught to shrink their minds to match the smallness of the life they were promised.

The fact that Munro helped silence her own daughter, by siding with her daughter’s abuser, feels like a betrayal to her readers. She was supposed to be on the side of women. How dare she lie to us?

Here’s what happened to Andrea Skinner and how Skinner’s revelations reshaped Munro’s work.

Skinner is the youngest of Munro’s three children, whom she had with her first husband, Jim Munro. In a 2004 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Munro described herself as ambivalent about her role as a mother, seeing it as a destiny imposed by the expectations of her time. “She was not the absolute joy of my life that she could have been,” Munro said of her eldest daughter, adding that she herself had “no moral qualms” about the sanctity of motherhood.

Munro and Jim separated in 1974. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer she had met at university 20 years earlier. In the same 2004 Times profile, Munro says she fell in love with Fremlin the first time she saw him, and agrees with the interviewer when she suggests that Fremlin is the love of Munro’s life.

After their divorce, Munro and Jim agreed to share custody of their youngest child. Andrea would stay with Jim and his new wife during the school year, and with her mother and Fremlin in rural Huron County, Ontario, during the summers.

In 1976, during Skinner’s first summer with Munro and Fremlin, while Munro was away, Skinner, then 9, asked Fremlin if she could spend the night in Munro’s bed, which was separate from Fremlin’s but adjacent. Later that night, according to the Star, Fremlin climbed into Skinner’s bed and began rubbing his genitals and pressing her hand on his penis while Skinner pretended to be asleep. The next morning, Skinner wrote that she woke up with a migraine and dreaded getting out of bed.

When Skinner returned to her father’s house after that first summer, she told her half-brother and stepmother what had happened. They in turn told Jim Munro. Jim, however, told neither Skinner nor Munro about the assault. Instead, when Skinner returned to Munro’s house the following summer, Jim asked Skinner’s older sisters to travel with her, watch over her, and make sure she was never alone with Fremlin.

Fremlin did not touch Skinner again, but he continued to harass her until she reached adolescence. He exposed himself to her and propositioned her for sex. He told her that if she told Munro what had happened, the shock would kill Munro. Skinner remained silent.

The trauma took its toll on her body. Her migraines continued and she developed bulimia. College was tough and she eventually dropped out.

In 1992, when she was 25, Skinner decided to finally tell her mother the truth. She wrote her a letter describing Fremlin’s abuse. “I’ve been afraid my whole life that you’re going to blame me for what happened,” she wrote.

Skinner’s fears proved well-founded. Munro viewed Fremlin’s abuse as infidelity and a betrayal by her and her daughter. She left Fremlin to fly to one of her other homes and brood over what she saw as a humiliation, according to Skinner’s essay. When Skinner told her that Fremlin’s abuse had hurt her, Munro dismissed the idea, saying, “But you were such a happy child.”

Meanwhile, in a letter to the entire family, Fremlin threatened to kill himself and Skinner and to make public the photographs he had taken of 11-year-old Skinner, which he described as “extremely telling.” He himself wrote a graphic account of the abuse, in which he described 9-year-old Skinner as a “homewrecker.”

“I maintain that Andrea invaded my room for a sexual adventure,” Fremlin writes. “Andrea’s claim that she was ‘afraid’ is simply a lie or a modern invention.” He then compares himself to Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert, casting Skinner as a seductive Lolita. “I think Andrea recognized herself as a Lolita but refused to admit it,” he writes.

The only apology Fremlin made in his threatening and explicit letter was not for assaulting Skinner, but rather for his infidelity to Munro.

After a few months of separation, Munro returned to Fremlin, with a faux-feminist defense of her actions. Skinner writes that Munro declared that “she had been told too late, that she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if she was expected … to forsake her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and compensate for the failings of men.”

Over the next decade, Fremlin’s abuse of Skinner became an unspoken secret, one that the family knew about but refused to talk about. Skinner continued to visit Munro and Fremlin regularly. When she and her husband became pregnant in 2002, she decided she could not allow Fremlin anywhere near her children, and she called Munro to tell him so.

“And then she coldly told me that it would be a terrible inconvenience for her (because she wasn’t driving),” Skinner told the Toronto Star. “I lost it. I started yelling down the phone that I was going to have to squeeze and squeeze that penis and at one point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who did that to her daughter?”

The next day, Munro called Skinner back to forgive him for speaking to his mother that way, and Skinner decided to cut off all contact.

In 2004, after reading Munro’s profile in the New York Times magazine in which she spoke so lovingly about her marriage to Fremlin, Skinner decided to go to the Ontario police. She brought them the 1992 letters she and Fremlin had written about the abuse.

In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years of probation. Skinner was satisfied with the sentence, believing that Fremlin, then 80, was so old that he was unlikely to harm anyone else.

“What I wanted was a trace of the truth, public proof that I had not deserved what had happened to me,” she writes.

That long-awaited judgment wouldn’t come until Fremlin and Munro died, Fremlin in 2013 and Munro in 2024. This year, with both Munro and Fremlin gone, Skinner and his siblings told their story to the Toronto Sun.

Skinner and the suffering she endured, and her safety and well-being, are more important, on a human scale, than Munro and his literary legacy. Yet it is because of Munro and his legacy that we know this story. They remind us that even people we love and admire can do terrible things, and that they can be complicit in covering up an abuser in order to maintain the comfortable status quo of their own lives. They must be confronted.

Much of Munro’s early work reads differently in light of what happened to Skinner. Sex, sexual coercion, and the way brutal men use their power to silence women are recurring themes in her work, which she explored with great sensitivity and intelligence. Knowing that she failed so conclusively to bring that sensitivity and intelligence out of her work and into her real life when it mattered most, these stories seem stranger and darker than they did before.

Just two years after Fremlin abused 9-year-old Skinner while she pretended to be asleep, Munro published a short story called “Wild Swans,” in which a man gropes a student on a train while the student, Rose, pretends to be asleep.

Rose is horrified to find her seatmate’s hand on her leg, but she finds herself unable to push it away, embarrassed by the thought. “It made her feel uneasy, resentful, slightly disgusted, trapped and suspicious,” Munro writes. Yet, “if she said Please don’t do it. She was sure he would ignore her, as if he had forgotten some stupidity or rudeness on her part. She knew that as soon as she said it, she would hope he hadn’t heard her.

It’s not just embarrassment…