Nobel laureate and feminist champion Alice Munro betrayed her daughter. It should have launched another #MeToo moment
What a terrible missed opportunity. Andrea Skinner, Alice Munro’s youngest daughter, has revealed an ugly secret about Canada’s literary icon. Munro’s husband, Skinner’s stepfather, sexually abused her. Her mother, the world famous Nobel laureate Alice Munro, defended him and rejected her. Munro stood by her pedophile husband for decades, even after he was convicted in his old age.
Skinner’s brave disclosure should have triggered another wave of #MeToo. It could have smashed open secrets festering in the family. What a travesty that it didn’t.
The Toronto Star exposed the Munro family secret in July 2024 and the newspaper led the way with a number of excellent follow up stories. The Star also found another woman who says that the stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, exposed himself to her when she was nine years old. It happened before Fremlin married Alice Munro. This woman’s experience corroborates what happened to Skinner and underscores a dangerous reality about sexual predators: they seldom settle with one victim. They need to be confronted and stopped.
Alice Munro’s mistreatment of her daughter created an initial shock and a burst of news stories. There were a few official statements: Indigo said it was removing enlarged photos of Munro from their stores; the family-connected Munro's Books in Victoria said it supported Andrea Skinner and Western University paused its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity. The news came out in early summer, when most people are busy savouring a few precious weeks of sunshine. By August, the coverage had fizzled away. Put all together, it is next to nothing compared to the oceans of praise Munro received over the decades.
Alice Munro is too famous. Even in death. Munro is in a league of her own -- she is the only Canadian woman to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Becoming a Nobel laureate was the crown on top of a huge collection of honours: three Governor General awards, the Man Booker International Prize, and two Giller Prizes. To avoid winning any more Gillers, Munro pulled herself out of the running. She said she wanted to give other authors a chance.
The limited media focus, the almost-nothing coverage reinforces what I came to conclude as a working journalist: people are uncomfortable criticizing a beloved icon and too comfortable minimizing the sexual assault of children.
When people say “but she didn’t abuse her daughter”, they’re wrong. Instead of helping her heal, Munro compounded her daughter's hurt, making her daughter feel more alone and ashamed. That is a betrayal.
Some argue that it’s not fair to judge Munro when she isn’t alive to speak for herself. Munro had plenty of time during her life. She escaped scrutiny, scorn and humiliation. Her daughter didn’t have that privilege. If only someone had believed that Andrea Skinner’s life was more important than protecting her celebrity mother’s stardom.
The silence deprives Skinner of validation, most importantly from her mother’s famous friends, the literary and academic elite who were crucial to keeping her mother on a pedestal.
The media, Munro’s fans, and so many others could have amplified this story in the public consciousness. Sadly, it has been treated as almost untouchable. Whether it’s shying away from or a desire to preserve Munro’s legacy, the consequence is the same. Skinner’s disclosure should have been permission to open the floodgates and expose the secrets hidden behind closed doors. It didn't happen.
Everything about Andrea Skinner’s story is epic in the worst ways. But the least remarkable part of the Munro family secret is the most devastating. It is so common and ordinary.
Children are in most danger of being molested by someone they know. They are desperate to be rescued. If they do ever manage to speak up, they risk so much. Sadly, telling the truth can blow families apart with mothers, fathers, siblings, turning against the victim. Instead of comfort, the victims are demeaned, accused of being liars, troublemakers, and traitors.
This October marks a year since Skinner posted a gut wrenching essay on the website of The Gatehouse, a non-profit group that helps survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It was online half a year before Munro died, even longer by the time The Toronto Star broke the story.
On The Gatehouse website, there’s a documentary called Illuminating Silence. Almost every sexual assault survivor in it tells a similar story of rejection, of the adults who look away.
Canadian experts estimate that 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused, and 1 in 10 boys. Take a walk down your street and do the math. It’s overwhelming to consider how much is concealed inside those houses.
By her own account, Skinner suffered with her physical and mental health. In her 20s, she worked up the courage to write a letter to her mother. It didn't go well. didn't comfort her daughter or dump the reprehensible man who abused her child. Instead, she retaliated, treating her daughter like a sexual rival. Her daughter says Munro reacted just as she had feared - "as if she had learned of an infidelity".
Her husband, Gerald Fremlin, lashed out too, writing defiant letters to the family in which he didn't deny the sexual interference, but rather tried to cast it as something Skinner had desired: "Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure", he wrote. He denigrated Skinner, calling her a sexually adventurous nine year old, a Lolita, a home wrecker. Decades later, when police arrested Fremlin, Munro told police that her daughter was lying. Skinner had kept those heinous letters and at 80 years old, Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault. There is no dispute. He assaulted Skinner.
The stature and popularity of Munro is immense. That she is revered for being a compassionate and courageous champion of women creates an irreconcilable dissonance. Her daughter has revealed how the real Alice Munro lived her feminism. It is a crippling hypocrisy.
To be sure, Skinner was let down by many people, most of whom had something to gain by protecting Munro’s celebrity status, including her biological father. Divorced from Alice, Jim Munro didn’t tell his ex about the sexual abuse, and continued to send his daughter to spend summers with her mother and stepfather. He owned Munro Books in Victoria B.C., a store so magnificent, National Geographic has ranked it as one of the ten most beautiful in the world.
Skinner was let down by Canada’s publishing elite. Apparently some key people knew of her estrangement from the family. By 2005, they knew why.
Munro was living in two worlds. In one, her husband pleaded guilty to molesting her daughter. In the other, Munro’s star kept rising.
In 2005, the same year as Fremlin's criminal conviction, Munro’s authorized biography Writing Her Lives came out. Skinner contacted her mother's biographer with details about the court case. He chose not to include anything of what he has reportedly called a ‘private family matter’.
Also around the time of Fremlin's conviction, Canadian director Sarah Polley was polishing her first feature-length movie inspired by a Munro short story. Away From Her premiered in 2006. Polley belongs to a younger generation of women champions. She knows all too well the dangers of silence and sexual abuse. In her own memoir, in an essay entitled “The Woman Who Stayed Silent”, Polley writes about a violent sexual encounter when she was 16. Polley's more recent film, the Oscar-winning Women Talking, tells a stark story of women and girls in an isolated Mennonite colony who make a brutal discovery: their men have been using livestock tranquilizer to subdue and rape them. The film is so excellent, so sensitive and so powerful, it makes clear Polley's devotion to justice for women. One can only imagine how someone as thoughtful as Polley could transform Munro’s moral failings into a greater good.
The same is true for another literary powerhouse, Margaret Atwood. She and Munro were contemporaries, and friends. In 2006, again within a year of Fremlin's guilty plea, Penguin Random House published a special collector’s edition of Munro’s works, Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories.
Atwood wrote a lavishing 20 page introduction, expressing her admiration in every word. She rhapsodized over Munro’s "incomparable empathy...the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative.” And, then, to really make the point that Munro had risen so high, was so special, Atwood put her friend on a pedestal: Munro had achieved “international literary sainthood.”
Saint Alice. That had to hurt. Out there, trapped in her own private hell, Skinner was screaming out to be heard: Saint Alice is a fake.
Atwood toasted her friend when she received the Nobel literary prize. She wrote touching tributes when Munro died. But Atwood has made only a few public statements about the sexual abuse scandal in Munro's family. Whatever she knew, when she knew -- Atwood is keeping that out of the public sphere. What has to be true is that Atwood must certainly feel sick over it all, a big mess of feelings -- anger, confusion, maybe some level of guilt. If only Atwood could open up about her own soul searching. How she is weighing the brutality of Skinner's truth. Margaret Atwood happens to be famous, but she, like countless people, is facing a common moral quandary. Do you make excuses for someone you love? Can you love someone and hate them at the same time? Does caring for them make you complicit to their moral failings? No one is dying to talk about this stuff even though everyone knows that the repercussions of sexual abuse are so deep and damaging. Our society will only ever take a few baby steps forward on this ugly side of life if people are willing to confront complicated and deeply uncomfortable feelings. By taking a lead, Atwood could make her bravest contributions yet.
The secrecy in the Munro family is about so much more than the author’s professional legacy. How professors will teach her stories. If bookstores and libraries should display her books. Or, whether Munro's friends are feeling shocked or implicated.
Skinner’s story could have been the moment, another wave of #MeToo, giving people the permission to shout out: this happened to me too. This is the malignancy my family has covered up. What if they, us, everyone could talk about the most unspeakable things. Maybe the victims could breathe a little better. Maybe they could feel a little bit of hope.
Munro's behaviour has left so much unresolved. Why she stayed with a man who sexually abused her daughter. How she maintained an intimate relationship with him. How did one of the best writers in the world get past the odious letters her husband used to threaten her daughter?
Munro isn't the only mother to defy the warm and cuddly archetypes of mothers as mamma bears. Mothers do turn against their abused children. In this way too, Munro was dismally ordinary. “My mother slapped me”, one woman said on the air back when I hosted a radio show. “My mother hasn’t spoken to me since the court case,” revealed another. Experts speculate that mothers who protect the predators have themselves been traumatized by sexual violence. But who really knows. There are secrets wrapped in secrets drowning in secrets. If only we could dare to ask.
Andrea Skinner could be Canada’s Dylan Farrow, but in reverse. Dylan, the child of warring film legends Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, accused her father of sexually abusing her. Unlike Alice Munro, Mia Farrow believed her daughter from day one and protects her to this day. Unlike Munro, Farrow boldly told the family that Dylan was a victim. This, in his own words, influenced Dylan's brother, Ronan Farrow. He has always stood by his sister and has publicly given credit to his mother for being a role model. The arc of his life shows how much his mother's example has guided him. Farrow had nerves of steel and the guts to overcome so much in order to expose the entertainment industry's long history of harbouring sexual abusers. Farrow published ground-breaking first-hand accounts from several Hollywood actresses who had been sexually harassed and abused by powerful film producer Harvey Weinstein. Ronan Farrow's investigative reporting helped launch the #MeToo movement. How discouraging that here in Canada, another true story about an acclaimed Nobel laureate, a story of celebrity, sexual abuse and secrecy, has not made any difference for victims of childhood sexual abuse.
*Since writing this post, the New York Times and the New Yorker have published features examining the fall out of Andrea Skinner's public revelations about her mother.
*Part 2: Famous or not, examining why stigma about childhood sexual abuse persists. "You have to get past the 'ick' factor," an editor once said to me. What I learned from inside a large media organization.
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