The writer and Nobel laureate Alice Munro at her home in Clinton, Ont. on June 23, 2013.IAN WILLMS/The New York Times News Service
The daughter of acclaimed Canadian author Alice Munro, who died in May, has written about the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her stepfather and the pain it caused when her mother remained with him.
Andrea Robin Skinner, Ms. Munro’s daughter, said that in the summer of 1976, when she was nine years old, her stepfather Gerald Fremlin “climbed into my bed and sexually assaulted me.”
She relayed her experience in an undated blog post for The Gatehouse in which she wrote that, later that summer, Mr. Fremlin “made me tell him about my ‘sex life’ – the usual innocent explorations with other children – and he told me about his sex life.”
Ms. Munro is one of the most celebrated writers in Canadian history, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize alongside numerous domestic literary accolades. She was considered a master of the short story, and her work was heralded for its nuanced, complex portrayals of the lives of girls and women.
But Ms. Skinner wrote that she feared her mother’s reaction to her abuse by Mr. Fremlin, who was convicted for it in 2005, and who remained married to Ms. Munro until his death in 2013. In the post, she wrote that she soon told other family members about what happened, but not Ms. Munro: “I was terrified she would blame me anyway, as she seemed jealous of the attention I got.”
Later, Ms. Skinner wrote, Mr. Fremlin exposed himself to her during car rides, discussed “little girls in the neighbourhood he liked,” and described her mother’s sexual desires to her.
Ms. Skinner, now an artist and a meditation facilitator, said that she suffered from bulimia, insomnia and migraines after the assault. “By the age of 25, I was so sick and empty, I couldn’t properly start my adult life,” she wrote. She eventually decided to write a letter to her mother describing what happened.
“My mother reacted as if she had learned of an infidelity. I had a sense that she was working hard to forgive me,” she said in the blog post. Ms. Munro remained with Mr. Fremlin, which her daughter said cast a dark cloud over the family in the decades to come.
Mr. Fremlin, she wrote, responded with letters of his own to the family, accusing Ms. Skinner of being a “homewrecker,” suggesting that the family had sided with him, and threatening to leak photographs of Ms. Skinner “posing as a Lolita-like character” in retribution.
“My siblings and parents carried on with their busy lives,” Ms. Skinner wrote. “I was left alone with this thing, this ugliness. Me.”
After reading a magazine interview in the early 2000s in which her mother described Mr. Fremlin as “a gallant figure,” Ms. Skinner wrote that she decided to turn to police. “What I wanted was some record of the truth, in a context that asserted I had not deserved it,” she wrote.
Ms. Skinner said that she spent years estranged from her family, until one of her sisters reached out to say she had gone to a support centre for childhood sexual-abuse victims “to heal from our family’s trauma. Until she wrote, I had thought my disappearance was a relief to my sisters and step-brother. But I was wrong. They were hurting and needed help too.”
Court documents show Mr. Fremlin pleaded guilty to the charge of indecent assault in 2005, was convicted by an Ontario court and sentenced to two years’ probation. The filings show the incident happened in Clinton, Ont., where Ms. Munro and Mr. Fremlin lived near Lake Huron.
Mr. Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer, married Ms. Munro in the 1970s after her previous marriage to Ms. Skinner’s father, the Victoria bookseller Jim Munro, ended.
Ms. Skinner did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday, though she published an essay about what happened in The Toronto Star on Sunday.
Robert Thacker, who authored an acclaimed biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, said he was aware of the allegations, with Ms. Skinner having written to him as the book went to press in 2005.
He said he decided then that he would not act on the information, for reasons including that the biography focused primarily on Ms. Munro’s upbringing and experiences, that he did not have all of the information, and that he did not want to overstep in personal matters.
“I knew about the discord within the family and no, I wasn’t going to do anything to make a bad situation worse,” he told The Globe and Mail in an interview on Sunday.
Mr. Thacker said he only met Ms. Skinner once briefly, when she was visiting her mother in 2001, and learned years later that she became estranged from Ms. Munro and the family in general. He said he had spoken with the late author about the matter but declined to provide details of those conversations.
“It’s a sad situation when you see a family wrecked by something like this,” he said.
Munro’s Books, which Ms. Munro founded with her ex-husband Mr. Munro in Victoria in 1963 – but which has been independently owned since 2014 – released a statement supporting Ms. Skinner. “We will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated,” the statement said.
Ms. Skinner and her siblings thanked the store’s owners and staff in a related statement, writing that they “have become part of our family’s healing, and are modelling a truly positive response to disclosures like Andrea’s.”
On social media, there was an outpouring of support for Ms. Skinner on Sunday, with members of the literary community commending her for her courage to speak publicly.
The Washington-based author Amber Sparks called the news “utterly devastating as a mother and reader who admired her so much as a mother and writer of mothers.”
The TV writer and novelist Zoe Whittall, who lives in Ontario’s Prince Edward County, wrote in a post to X that she was gutted to learn the news about Ms. Munro and lauded Ms. Skinner for her bravery. “I can’t say that I’m surprised when I hear this about any mother,” she wrote.
Author Joyce Maynard wrote in a lengthy Facebook post that she admires the Canadian writer above all others, and that reading the news on Sunday left her heart pounding. While she said she will not cease to admire and study the work of Ms. Munro, Ms. Maynard said she believes Ms. Skinner, whose words carry “the unmistakable ring of truth.”
“I am reminding myself today, one more time, what I have learned not only from the study of history, and the lives of artists in particular, but from my own hard story of abuse in my youth,” Ms. Maynard wrote.
“There is art. And then there is the artist. Let’s not confuse the two, or suppose that because a person makes great art, he or she deserves exemption from ethical, moral, humane behavior.”