Two months after the death of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, her daughter has opened up about abuse in the family. In a new essay published in the Toronto Star alongside a new report about the case, Andrea Skinner says her mother knew about the sexual abuse she faced from her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, but chose to stay with him anyway. Fremlin, 80 at the time, was convicted of sexually abusing Skinner in 2005 and sentenced to two years’ probation. “What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Skinner writes about why she pursued a criminal charge. “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother … Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. My mother’s fame meant the silence continued.”
Skinner writes that the abuse occurred during her summer vacation in 1976, which she spent with Munro and Fremlin in Clinton, Ontario. When her mother was traveling in China, Skinner writes, Fremlin went into his stepdaughter’s bed and sexually abused her. During that same trip, Fremlin would ask her inappropriate questions about her “sex life,” behavior that would continue during her summer trips throughout the next several years. “When I was alone with Fremlin, he made lewd jokes, exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighbourhood he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs,” Skinner remembers. “At the time, I didn’t know this was abuse. I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories.” Back in Victoria, British Columbia, Skinner says she told her father, Jim Munro, about the abuse, but the family kept it a secret from Alice Munro.
When Skinner was 11, the mother of a 14-year-old said Fremlin exposed himself to the young girl. “He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he ‘reassured’ her that I was not his type,” Skinner writes. “In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as ‘prudish’ as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.”
The abuse left Skinner “at war with myself, suffering from bulimia, insomnia and migraines,” with the “private pain” taking a toll during her college years. At 25, Skinner worked up the courage to tell Munro about the abuse after they discussed a short story similar to Skinner’s own real-life experience. Munro briefly left Fremlin before eventually taking her husband’s side and remaining married until he died in 2013. The lauded writer treated her husband’s abuse like an “infidelity” that happened between Skinner and her stepfather. Munro felt it had “nothing to do with her,” her daughter writes. The revelation and the subsequent conviction left Skinner estranged from Munro until her death in May.
“In my case, my mother’s fame meant that the secrecy spread far beyond the family,” Skinner writes. “Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.” Following Munro’s death, Andrea and her sisters Jenny and Sheila Munro want her legacy to include the truth.
