Meghan Daum in Substack: Alice Munro, considered one of the greatest short-story writers of modern times, was a monster.
The world learned this on Sunday, within moments of the Toronto Star hitting “publish” on an essay by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner. The title of the essay, in full SEO bloom, tells you everything you need to know: “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.”
In stark yet elegant prose, Skinner describes years of abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, who assaulted her when she was 9 and went on to spend years committing lewd behavior against her and other children. Shortly after the first assault, Skinner told her stepmother about it, who told her father, who decided not to tell Munro. A few years later, when family friends told Munro that Fremlin had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter, Fremlin denied it and Munro took no action. When Munro asked Fremlin if he had done the same to her own daughter, his answer was along the lines of “She’s not my type.”
If Fremlin’s behavior is nauseating in its cruelty and arrogance, Munro’s denials and narcissism are a shock to the conscience. Years later, when in her 20s, Skinner wrote her mother a letter telling her what happened. (Notably, this was prompted by Munro remarking that she didn’t understand why the character in a story she’d read committed suicide rather than telling her mother about abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her stepfather.) Munro responded to Skinner’s letter not as a protective mother but as a forsaken wife, as if her daughter had seduced her husband and become the other woman in a love triangle.
“She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her,” Skinner writes. “She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.”
It gets even worse from there. Fremlin called Skinner a “homewrecker” and threatened to kill her if she went to the police. Munro returned to Fremlin, and Skinner’s father maintained a friendly relationship with Munro. When, decades later, Skinner finally reported the abuse to the police, Fremlin pleaded guilty to assault, blithely comparing himself to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and was sentenced to two years’ probation, which included an order that he stay away from children under 14. Fremlin was now an admitted pedophile, but Munro stayed with him until his death in 2013, claiming, as Skinner writes, “that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice her children, and make up for the failings of men.”
More here.
