Alice Munro’s daughter reveals dark family secret: her stepfather abused her and her mother hid it

Andrea Robin Skinner, one of the daughters of the late Canadian writer Alice Munro said that his father-in-law abuse sexually with her during her childhood and that even though her mother found out, she decided to stay with him.

The fact was revealed two months after Munro, the 2013 Nobel Prize winner for Literature and one of the most prominent contemporary writers, died at the age of 92.

In an essay he published in the journal The Toronto Star Last Sunday, Skinner said the abuse began when she was 9 and her stepfather was in his 50s.

The so-called “Canadian Chekhov” married the bookseller in the 1950s James Munro with whom he had three daughters. In 1976 she remarried, but to the geographer Gerald Fremlin .

According to Skinner’s account, that summer he visited his mother at her home in Clinton, Ontario. It was the first time his stepfather had sexually abused him.

Skinner told her stepmother, Carole, about the episode, and her father also found out. However, he decided not to tell the writer about the situation. Although at first this had relieved the young girl at the time, that soon changed: she felt completely alone because of what was happening.

The episodes of abuse continued at least until Munro’s daughter reached adolescence. In her essay published in the Toronto Star, the woman describes how Gremlin would make sexual jokes, flash his genitals at her in the middle of car rides, show her which other “girls in the neighbourhood he liked” and even talk to her about his mother’s sexuality.

For many years he kept this situation a secret, which left him with multiple health problems. Until 1992, he decided to talk to his mother about it, for which he wrote her a letter.

The Nobel Prize winner for Literature reacted in the same way that Andrea expected, for example “as if she had discovered an infidelity.”

“She said she had told him too late, that she loved him too much, and that he had our misogynistic culture to blame if he expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s failings. “She insisted that what happened was between my stepfather and me.” he described. Because of this response, he decided to distance himself from his mother permanently.

Fremlin also wrote letters to the family in which he acknowledged the sexual assaults he had committed, but at the same time he blamed Skinner for these events, making sure she went to his room.

Although Munro abandoned the geographer for a time and went to live in an apartment in British Columbia, a few months later she returned to him.

In 2005, after reading a note from The New York Times In which Munro praised his relationship with Fremlin, Skinner contacted Ontario police and handed over the letters in which the man acknowledged the abuse. He pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

The Canadian writer remained with her husband until his death in 2013.

“What I wanted was a testimony of the truth, public proof that I did not deserve what had happened to me. “I also wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell about my mother, who, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him,” Skinner described in her essay.

The revelation shocked the literary world because of the prestige surrounding Munro. On her X account (formerly Twitter), the American writer Joyce Carol Oates noted that “it’s good that Andrea finally told her story and it’s tragic that it was denied/suppressed for so long.”

From Munro Books a bookstore founded by the Munro family and which has had another owner since 2013, publicly expressed its support for Skinner and also stressed that it needed “time to absorb this news.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian writer’s biographer, Robert Thacker he confessed to the agency PA that he had known for years about the mistreatment of Skinner’s stepfather. However, he decided not to include it in his book because it was an “academic analysis of his career.”