The literary legacy of Alice Munro threatens to be overshadowed by claims that she stood by her husband after learning he sexually abused one of her daughters.
The Nobel laureate’s estranged youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, made the allegations in an article published in the Toronto Star on Sunday, weeks after Munro’s death at the age of 92.
The “long-held secret” has been met with “horror” by readers, said The Washington Post, “with some saying that it would be difficult for them to return to reading Munro’s work”.
‘Threatened retribution’
Following her death in May, “tributes flowed in from across the literary world” for Munro, who was “credited with perfecting the contemporary short story”, said Time. But now her “many admirers” must “grapple with a darker aspect of her legacy” following her daughter’s revelations.
In her “heart-wrenching” essay, Skinner claims her late stepfather, geographer Gerald Fremlin, subjected her to years of abuse from the age of nine, after marrying Munro in 1976. Skinner, now 58, details how she went from being a “happy child” who was “active and curious” to suffering with “bulimia, insomnia and migraines”.
She finally told her mother when she was in her 20s, she wrote, after Munro expressed sympathy for a girl in a short story who “dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her”. But “in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me” and was instead “overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself”. After Fremlin denied the abuse and “threatened retribution”, the family went “back to acting as if nothing had happened”.
According to a separate article in the Toronto Star, Skinner cut off contact but finally decided to report Fremlin to the police after reading an interview in which her mother described having a “close relationship” with her daughters. After pleading guilty to indecent assault, Fremlin, then 80, received a suspended sentence and two years’ probation. Munro stayed with him until his death, in 2013.
‘Patterns of silence’
The claims have “rocked” fans and colleagues of Munro, whose writing often “explored themes of women’s lives, complex familial dynamics, sex, trauma, and secrecy”, said Time. With Skinner’s story “sending shockwaves through the literary world, the narrative surrounding her mother is beginning to change”.
Skinner reportedly decided to publish her essay after reconnecting with her three siblings, Andrew, Jenny and Sheila. They “supported her coming out publicly with what is sure to put their mother’s reputation in a much different light”. But Skinner “made clear” that going public was not about revenge.
This “story isn’t about celebrities behaving badly”, she told the Star, but rather about the “patterns of silencing, the tendency to do that in families and societies”.