Alice Munro

Alice Munro, short-story writer extraordinaire, died in May this year. I wrote a tribute. She was an excellent writer, with a precision and brevity that I love and admire.

Yesterday, I learned via Twitter and the Toronto Sun about a different side to Alice Munro.

This is what I learned.

In the summer of 1976, Gerald Fremlin, the second husband of Alice Munro, climbed into the bed of Andrea, his step-daughter, Munro’s nine-year old daughter and sexually assaulted her.

Fremlin was later accused of exposing himself to a 14 year old daughter of a friend. When challenged by Alice Munro about the incident, he denied it and denied that he would ever find Andrea attractive, in front of Andrea.

Andrea was 25 before she told her mother what had happened. Her mother responded with disbelief, with a sense of sexual competition with her young daughter and although she briefly left Fremlin, she returned to spend her life with him. As Andrea said:

She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.

And Fremlin, true to type, threatened Andrea with violence.

Ultimately, Alice Munro sided with the man who had attacked her daughter.

Andrea stopped contact with her mother when she became a mother herself. It was reading an article in which her mother described Fremlin in loving terms and her close relationship with all her daughters that Andrea decided to go to the police. She was not prepared to be invisible any longer.

In March 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and was sentenced to two years’ probation and banned from being with children under the age of 14. In 2005, Alice Munro won the Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. Her husband’s crimes were never discussed in the international press.

As Andrea says:

Children are still silenced far too often. In my case, my mother’s fame meant that the secrecy spread far beyond the family. Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.

It is hard when you love words, love a good story to know that someone who has reached such heights in crafting a sentence, putting the complexity of human life on the page, is also someone you would not want to meet. It is hard to reconcile that artists can produce spectacular, dizzying works and still be the rotten, mouldy apple.

I am in no mood for forgiveness. I am not going to withdraw my comments about Alice Munro as a writer, but I am going to side with her abused daughter. Unequivocally.

I write a great deal about how some stories are silenced through abuse, racism, sexism. But this is for the strength and courage of Andrea Robin Skinner who is now a meditation and mindfulness teacher specialising in supporting and healing childhood trauma. I salute you.

I remember being nine years old, very clearly. It was the year before my family moved from one city to another. I was happy at school. I was bright and creative. I was unequivocally a child. I liked Roald Dahl books, I watched Saturday morning cartoons, I learned to ride a bike. I was a giggler. I spent the summer wearing short shorts and running up and down the road with Lorraine Baker from a few doors down. I would lurch between being an absolute delight and a sulky pre-teen. I loved my cat, Sammy Smudge and would tell him everything.

I made mistakes. I lost my temper. There was sibling rivalry and arguments. I learned my catechism to prepare for Confirmation. I was beginning to understand the differences between right and wrong and was often confused by how doing the right thing meant being unbearably bored.

Nothing I did would have made it alright for a man to have sex with me. Nothing.

And if that awful, terrible thing had happened, I had the right to expect that my parents would do the right thing by me.

Mother/daughter relationships can be complicated. Believe me, I know. But when you are nine, your mother is the grown-up and you should be able to tell her things and to be supported and loved. Unequivocally.

I don’t expect anyone to be an angel.

I don’t know what to do with Alice Munro’s writing.

I don’t know what to do with any artist whose work I admire but whose lives are a shambolic moral vacuum.

But I do know that we need to talk about abuse, abusers and enablers. I do know we need to listen to victims/survivors and salute their bravery.