A literary legend’s shocking silence

The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro – winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 – died in May at the age of 92. Her work was about “the damage people inflict on one another in the name of love”, Deborah Treisman wrote in the New Yorker. This month we learned that the same was true of Munro’s life.

Her long-estranged youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star revealing that she had suffered years of sexual abuse in childhood. Her abuser was Gerald Fremlin – Munro’s second husband, Andrea’s stepfather.

It started in the summer of 1976, when Andrea was nine. At some point everyone in the family knew – Andrea’s father, his wife, Andrea’s siblings. But no one told Munro herself. She was a writer, an artist; her first story collection had won the prestigious Governor-General’s Award. The sensitive artist had to be protected, the child did not. Those were different times.

“I don’t know how I would feel if one of my daughters wrote about me,” Munro said in a Paris Review interview published in 2004. At that point one of them already had: Sheila, the eldest, wrote – at her mother’s request – Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro. For the book’s epigram, Sheila quoted Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Indeed. Sheila did not mention that her father had asked her to stay with Andrea at Munro’s house, to make sure she was “never alone with Gerry”.

In the 1990s, when I lived in New York, I became an avid reader of the New Yorker and, in particular, the stories it published by William Trevor, James Salter, and Alice Munro. I taught their work to my students in the US, the UK, and at the University of Auckland.

Munro wrote stories of great clarity and psychological depth, exploring the lives of flawed, complex characters who often make terrible decisions. Her gift with setting, character and scene makes her work particularly useful for teaching the art and craft of fiction: “The Children Stay”, “Train”, “Runaway”, “Passion”, “Chance”, “Silence”, “Spaceships Have Landed”.

When I first read her work, like most other Munro admirers, I had no idea of the hell breaking loose in her life. In 1992 Andrea had written her mother a letter to reveal Gerry’s sexual abuse. “I have been afraid all my life,” she wrote, “that you would blame me for what had happened.”

Munro was distraught and left Fremlin. He wrote letters to Andrea’s father and stepmother, accusing Andrea of ‘asking for it’: the child wanted, he said, “sexual adventure”. As Andrea had feared, Munro seemed to blame her, to see her as a rival and to view the real crime as infidelity.

In 1993, a year after she received Andrea’s letter, Munro published “Vandals” in the New Yorker. In the story, a young woman takes revenge for childhood sexual assault by an older man. In fiction, Munro could write about the long reach of trauma and the hypocritical complicity of the abuser’s wife. In real life, she took back Fremlin: they remained married until his death more than 20 years later. The price was estrangement from her daughter.

My first full-time teaching job began in 2004 at Tulane University in New Orleans. Maybe the first Munro story I taught was “The Children Stay”, about a young woman who leaves her husband –and two young daughters – for another man. As adults, the children “don’t hate her” for leaving but they “don’t forgive her, either”. Late that year I read a long interview with Munro in The New York Times Magazine, in which she gushed about Fremlin and their happy marriage. Andrea read it too: incensed, she turned Fremlin’s confession letters over to the police. In 2005 he pled guilty to indecent assault. The matter was heard by an Ontario judge. There was no media coverage. Still, many people in the Canadian literary world knew. Robert Thacker, who chose to ignore the abuse in his biography of Munro, was contacted this month by the Washington Post. He said, “I knew this day was going to come.”

On social media, some people declared they would never teach Munro’s work again. I don’t know what I’ll do. Last week I sat down with the six collections I own and re-read them all. The singular worlds of the stories I’ve taught now seem contaminated by unhappy, sordid implications. In “Train” both the main characters have lives polluted by sexual abuse perpetrated by a family member. In “Silence”, the main character is estranged from her adult daughter. She “keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort”.

Munro often uses letters as a device, and one of the most devastating is at the end of “Runaway”. A woman named Carla has tried to leave her bullying husband but has returned to him, cowed and remorseful. In a letter from a female friend, she learns that he has almost certainly, in spiteful revenge, killed her pet goat. Carla burns the letter in the sink and says nothing. But it was “as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there”.