“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years were blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.”
The man was Gerald Fremlin, a retired civil servant and geographer, who hailed from the same corner of Ontario as Munro. They would be together for nearly 40 years, until Fremlin’s death in 2013. His knowledge of Huron County, where most of Munro’s fiction is set, became a vital resource for her work. Munro amassed a thicket of honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater, with its “falling-down barns” and “burdensome old churches,” into a stage for the whole human comedy, like Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Mississippi. Never one to take herself too seriously, she housed her many awards in a revolving spice rack at her second home, a condo on Vancouver Island.
“Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it,” Munro concluded in her letter about Fremlin. The judgment would prove premature. This July, two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Munro and Fremlin at their home in Ontario. (According to her parents’ custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria, British Columbia, with her father, Jim Munro, and his new wife.) One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was 9 years old.
Fremlin warned Andrea not to tell her mother: The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed, but when she returned to Victoria that fall, she confided in her stepbrother, Andrew. Andrew told his mother, who then told Jim Munro. Rather than alert his ex-wife, Jim instructed the family to stay quiet. He worried that the disclosure would wreck Munro’s new relationship and that he would then be blamed. The next summer, Andrea returned to Ontario accompanied by her older sister Sheila, whom Jim charged with keeping Andrea safe.
For years, Andrea did her best to make sure that she was never alone with Fremlin, she told me recently, but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative: to shield her mother from the truth. Munro knew that Andrea loved to swim, so on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex. Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Munro. The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty.
For Andrea, the silence was internally corrosive. She developed a suite of ailments (bulimia, insomnia, debilitating migraines), which later forced her to drop out of college. It wasn’t until 1992, when she was 25, that she finally confided in Munro about what had happened. One day when Andrea was visiting, Munro told her about a short story from a recently published book, “Marine Life,” by Linda Svendsen, in which a girl commits suicide after being abused by her father. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” asked Munro, who wrote in a blurb for the book that the story left her “shaking.” A month later, Andrea sent her a letter. “When you told me about that story,” she wrote, “I wanted to cry and hold you and thank you and TELL YOU. I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened.”
Munro’s response made it clear that she was right to be afraid. It was “as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Andrea recalled in her essay for The Star. Munro left Fremlin and fled to their condo on Vancouver Island. When Andrea visited her there, she was amazed by Munro’s self-pity. “She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her,” Andrea wrote. “She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.” Fremlin, meanwhile, sent a series of unhinged letters to the family, in which he acknowledged the abuse but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him.
The family did what families often do after an episode of abuse: They carried on as if nothing happened. Munro took Fremlin back after just a few weeks, and for years Andrea continued to visit them. It was the arrival of her own children, twins born in 2002, that brought clarity to her emotional haze. Andrea told her mother she didn’t want Fremlin anywhere near them. Munro objected that visiting without Fremlin would be inconvenient, because she couldn’t drive. “I blew my top,” Andrea told a reporter for The Star. “I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter.” The next day, Munro called her back — not to apologize but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end of their relationship.
In 2004, this magazine ran a profile of Munro, who was about to publish her 11th book, the widely celebrated “Runaway.” Throughout the article, Munro speaks lovingly of Fremlin, whom she says she was “enormously lucky” to have met. She is also described as being “close today to her three daughters.” Floored by her mother’s dishonesty, Andrea felt as if she was being erased. She gathered the letters that Fremlin sent in 1992 and took them to the police. When an officer arrived at their house to arrest him, he reported that Munro was apoplectic, denouncing her daughter as a liar. In March 2005, Fremlin, then 80, quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years’ probation.
For years, Andrea tried to make her story public, with no success. In 2005, she approached the Canadian academic Robert Thacker, who was putting the final touches on a biography of Munro, and asked him to include the abuse in his book. After stewing on it for a day or two, he declined. “I’m an archival scholar,” he told me, explaining his decision. “That’s not the kind of book I was writing.” What he was writing, he said, was a “biography of Alice Munro’s texts.” The distinction is hard to sustain: Munro’s stories — particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse — are full of violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies. That Munro apparently derived these themes from a real-life episode has made her work feel suddenly transparent, as though it has been injected with a contrast dye, revealing zones of private meaning.
Munro seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay. Why did she not protect her daughter? What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life? In the months since the revelations, I revisited Munro’s stories, spoke with members of her family and tracked down a number of her unpublished letters. Munro’s appalling failures as a mother seem to have been an imaginative incitement, instrumental to her artistic project — something that Andrea may have grasped before anyone else. When Thacker wrote back to Andrea in 2005, he offered to remove from his book any passages that mentioned her and Fremlin together. “No, you do not understand,” Andrea said to me last month, describing her response. “This is intimately linked to the work my mother does.”
In Canada, Munro was known as “Saint Alice,” a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else: maternal dereliction. In the days after news of the abuse broke, social media filled up with photos of Munro’s books discarded in recycling bins. The University of Western Ontario, her alma mater, announced that it was “pausing” its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity so as to “carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western.” Writers who once celebrated her work and openly acknowledged its influence on their own began to reconsider their allegiance. “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” the author Rebecca Makkai, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, reacted in The Times. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”
Before the recent news emerged, my own opinion of Munro’s fiction could hardly have been higher. She seemed to have a more direct access to reality than any of her contemporaries, whose work, by comparison, could feel contrived and paper thin. It had been several years since I last picked up her books, but my memory was of paragraphs as thick with life — with fleeting earthly data — as the background of a Bruegel. In one story, set in the 1930s, a poor family has a bathroom installed in the corner of their kitchen, the only place it will fit. The walls are made of beaverboard, so that “even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen.” This leads to an unspoken agreement, whereby “no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.” It’s a short aside, but it contains, in miniature, so many of Munro’s great themes: family, shame, strategic silences, the open secret of the body and its needs.
When I went back to the stories this summer, full of the same anger I saw coursing around the internet, I was afraid I would find them, as Makkai described, “like half-realized confessions” — misshapen, off-balance, chaotic with grief. Instead, I was struck by their utter composure. In the work Munro produced after learning what happened to her daughter, she seems to bear down on her horror and disgust with an implacable resolve. The struggle is made clear in an unpublished letter to her agent and close friend, Virginia Barber, dated May 1993, which was among her papers at the University of Calgary:
“I thought I’d write and tell you the fate of the latest story, because it’s usually hard to talk frankly on the phone. I’ve been working on it — the story — since March, and it’s about The Subject, though thoroughly disguised and all pretty effectively constructed. I could do all the parts but the central thing, and when I approached that — and I tried from various angles — I got sick (I mean really throwing up) and felt very bleak. This has happened three or four times, and I realized finally I might sort of break apart. So I burned it (not to be tempted to go on). That’s where matters stand now, and I’m just gingerly (no pun) trying to start something else and regain my equilibrium. Which I can do.”
But Munro, it appears, did go on with the story about “The Subject”: “Vandals,” which appeared in The New Yorker five months later, is a cleareyed meditation on willful blindness and the tragedies it can precipitate. Bea Doud, an aging divorcée, has fallen for a man named Ladner, an Army veteran with a milewide misanthropic streak. There is something in Bea, some hidden primal wound, that responds to Ladner’s harshness. Certain women, she muses, thinking of herself, “might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them.”
Ladner lives in gothic isolation on a remote tract of land, which he has transformed into a nature preserve full of taxidermied animals. Most people are shooed away, but he makes an exception for two young children, Liza and Kenny, a neglected sister and brother, who live across the road and often come to play on his property. The pair have lost their mother, and when Bea, who is childless, starts to live there, she becomes a highly welcome stand-in. At moments, the four of them seem almost like a family.
The reality is otherwise. With tremendous subtlety, Munro reveals to us that Ladner has been sexually abusing Liza for years. Bea, whose perspective we inhabit for the first part of the story, seems not to notice what is happening. It is only when we shift to Liza’s point of view that the truth starts coming into focus, though even then Munro inhabits the child’s defenseless confusion. In a crucial scene, Ladner makes fun of Bea behind her back, imitating the clumsy way she plods into a lake. It is a performance intended for Liza’s eyes only, a way of signaling that it is her, not Bea, with whom he shares the greater intimacy. When Bea looks around and sees what he is doing, Liza is distraught. “It seemed to her that Bea would have to go away. How could she stay after such an insult — how could she put up with any of them?”
But Bea goes nowhere. Her obsessive dependency keeps her tethered to Ladner. It also thwarts Liza’s unvoiced hope that Bea will somehow rescue her, or at least find a way to keep Ladner in check. “She could spread safety if she wanted to,” the child desperately thinks. “Surely she could do it. If only she could turn herself into somebody firm and serious, a hard-and-fast, clean-sweeping sort of woman, whose love was deep and sensible.” It doesn’t happen. Years later, in an act of vengeance, Liza comes by Bea and Ladner’s house when the couple aren’t at home and trashes the place. She goes about it methodically, pouring out liquor on the floor and trampling Ladner’s taxidermied birds, as though composing her masterpiece. Liza’s poise is emblematic of the story as a whole, which unflappably narrates a more intangible destruction — that of her childhood self.
What makes “Vandals” so unbearably poignant — Liza’s need and Bea’s failure to protect her — is the same thing that now makes it so enraging. The empathy Munro showers on her fictional child was apparently withheld from her real one, an operation that she seems to have considered fundamental to her work as a writer. In an early story, Munro describes a fiction writer, ambivalently, as someone who has figured out “what to do about everything they run across in this world, what attitude to take, how to ignore or use things.” It’s clear from her letter to Barber that Munro was just such a person, going quickly to work on a personal tragedy and extracting what was usable. Whatever else “Vandals” may reveal or conceal, it is clearly a product of authority and control, qualities Munro spent her whole life chasing.
Munro grew up as a hostage to circumstance in Wingham, Ontario, where the Victorian age, she once remarked, ended only with World War II. Her mother was a puritanical control freak, full of voguish ideas about child-rearing. One of them involved administering enemas to regulate her daughter’s bowel movements. Munro resented all forms of coercion and often acted out. In the early 1940s, when her mother started showing the first signs of Parkinson’s disease (fatigue, tremors and a tripwire temper), their frequent quarrels grew explosive. Munro’s father, who raised foxes for their fur, would be summoned to adjudicate. Sheila Munro, in her poignant and illuminating memoir, “Lives of Mothers and Daughters” (2001), describes these parental courts-martial: “What my mother found most painful was her perception that ‘a story was being told on me that wasn’t true’ and that she was never allowed to tell her side of the story.” Munro was sometimes violently beaten — an early lesson in the power of narrative and the danger of losing control of it.
“Writer” was hardly a plausible career for someone raised in rural poverty in Depression-era Wingham, especially a girl. “People never asked, ‘Am I happy?’” Munro later said of the place where she grew up. “Self-fulfillment wasn’t a concept.” She began writing anyway, cannibalizing her indecorous origins. Her early work, published while she was raising a family in Vancouver, was assured but undistinguished. The deaths of her parents, her mother in 1959 and her father in 1976, cleared the way for a new candor and artistic leaps forward.
In “Royal Beatings,” from 1977, her first story to appear in The New Yorker, she evokes the thrashings she received as a child and the wounded reveries that followed. “She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them,” Rose, the protagonist, thinks of her parents. “She will punish them; she will finish them. Encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility.” This fantasy of total retribution, Munro suggests with typical shrewdness, is how Rose consoles herself for what she has just been through. The story is more compassionate than Rose’s fantasy, but still it carries a retributive sting. Munro was finally telling her side.
Many of her characters struggle to tell theirs. In “Wild Swans,” published the following year, a teenage Rose is on a train alone to Toronto when a minister climbs aboard and sits down beside her. Feigning sleep, he puts a hand on her leg. Rose is paralyzed, feeling both arousal and disgust, as the man proceeds to sexually molest her. “She was careful of her breathing,” Munro writes. “She could not believe this. Victim and accomplice she was borne past Glassco’s Jams and Marmalades, past the big pulsating pipes of oil refineries.” The story is acute about Rose’s psychology. In the prudish atmosphere of her family home, she has learned to be ashamed of her desire, a subject that is taboo. It is this that has conditioned her to see herself, like Liza in “Vandals,” as partly to blame for what is happening, both “victim and accomplice.” Her susceptibility to abuse is also a susceptibility to other people’s narratives.
In Munro’s stories, abused young women invariably keep quiet.
This wasn’t the first time Munro wrote about unwanted sexual contact. One of her first works of fiction, “Story for Sunday,” published in her college literary magazine, features a girl who is kissed on the lips by the superintendent of her Sunday school. She, too, is unexpectedly aroused. In the title story from Munro’s second book, “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), the sexually curious teenage heroine is groomed by the boyfriend of her family’s boarder. Whether these episodes are based on real-life experience, like the physical abuse at the heart of “Royal Beatings,” has become a subject of intense speculation.
When an interviewer once asked Munro if her work was autobiographical, she replied: “I guess I have a standard answer to this … in incident — no … in emotion — completely. In incident up to a point too.” The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who was one of Munro’s friends, told me she thought it “very, very likely” that Munro was sexually abused as a girl, if only because sexual abuse is so common. “Peeping Toms” and “gropers on trains,” Atwood wrote to me, were a “dime a dozen” in what she called “the Dark Ages.” In small towns like Wingham, there was a social imperative to keep such things private. “Everybody knew stuff about other people,” Atwood said. “What you most feared was being shamed and ridiculed.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in Munro’s stories themselves: Her abused young women invariably keep quiet.
Munro married her first husband, Jim, a classmate at the University of Western Ontario, in 1951, when she was 20. Jim was from a well-off family in Oakville, near Toronto, and he promised his bride an escape from the social world she grew up in. They shared a passion for art and literature, but his undisguised disdain for her working-class origins (he was always correcting her Huron County accent) was an ongoing source of tension. Munro chafed against the conventions of their suburban existence in Vancouver. “Life was very tightly managed as a series of permitted recreations, permitted opinions and permitted ways of being a woman,” she said in an interview decades after they were divorced. “The only outlet, I thought, was flirting with other people’s husbands at parties.” Munro and Jim were both energetically unfaithful. When Andrea was born in 1967, the marriage was already on the rocks. “Not enough jelly on the diaphragm” was how Munro explained the timing to her two elder daughters.
Writing was Munro’s vocation; mothering was not. “I’m terribly grateful that I had them,” she once said of her daughters. “Yet I have to realize, I probably wouldn’t have had them if I had the choice.” Sheila Munro’s memoir would appear to bear this out. The book is a portrait of unbending dedication to literature, a child’s-eye view of a stubbornly turned back. Munro, we learn, often wrote in the laundry room, surrounded by domestic impedimenta: washer, dryer, ironing board. She snatched time for her fiction between household chores or while Sheila and her sisters were napping or at school. “She had to write — not only to write, but to write a masterpiece — and how could she possibly write a masterpiece with me dragging her fingers off the typewriter keys or pulling the pencil out of her hand,” reads a starkly symbolic passage. “‘Come and see,’ I would command, ‘come and see,’ and she would fend me off with one hand while keeping her other hand on the keys.”
Munro had made a conscious decision to be the opposite kind of mother from her own (whom she saw, according to Sheila, as “moralistic, demanding, smothering and emotionally manipulative”), and almost nothing was off limits for discussion: haircuts and face lifts, friendships and love affairs. With her mother, Sheila felt, “I could get places — of insight, and awareness, and wonder — that I could reach with no one else.” But as she said to me recently, she has come to feel she misread the intimacy they shared. Though her mother was deeply interested in the stories Sheila told her as she entered adulthood, she seemed to relate to them more as narratives than as events in the life of her eldest child. “The point was to talk about everything and reveal everything, not to come up with a solution,” Sheila said to me, describing her mother’s attitude.
“You use up your childhood,” Munro told The Paris Review in 1994. “The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children.” What it’s like to be used by your mother in this way is something we learn from Sheila’s memoir, in which she says she has trouble distinguishing personal memories from her mother’s fiction: “Sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.”
In the mid-1970s, around the time Munro was starting her relationship with Fremlin, she offered Sheila some candid advice about a boy she was dating, a brash undergraduate who had taken a creative-writing class with Munro. “The point is you have to withdraw attention — either as a tactic or to save yourself,” Munro wrote in a letter.
“As long as you’re there, suffering and bitching, but there, hung up on him, the situation is not going to change. Being in love that way just isn’t good, there must be a better, self-sufficient way to love. (I am preaching to myself as well as you.) Get so you don’t need him. Work at it. Then of course he may come back all humbled and interested … Women like us have got to get away from emotional dependency or life is just one dreary man-made seesaw.”
For Munro, at least, emotional dependency was not so easily shrugged off.
Munro and Fremlin first crossed paths in the late 1940s, when they knew each other, slightly, at the University of Western Ontario — enough, at least, for Munro to develop a crush. Fremlin, an Air Force veteran who flew bombing missions over Germany, was a few years older than the other students. With his outspoken atheism and moody good looks, Fremlin struck Munro as a Byronic figure, full of danger and allure. After graduating, he sent her a fan letter about a story she published in the campus literary magazine, though to Munro’s disappointment, the message carried zero trace of romantic intent. By then, she was already engaged to Jim. More than 20 years went by before she saw Fremlin again.
By that point, in the aftermath of her marriage, Munro had taken a short-term job as a writer in residence at her alma mater and was living near campus with Andrea, who was 7, and her middle daughter, Jenny, who was 16. (Sheila, then 21, was working at the bookstore that Munro and Jim had opened in Victoria.) After a national radio interview, in which Munro mentioned that she was back in Western Ontario, she received a call from Fremlin, who asked her if she wanted to meet up. During a three-martini lunch, Munro learned that Fremlin had recently moved back to Clinton, his hometown, a half-hour drive from Wingham. He had never married or lived with a woman. “We rapidly became very well acquainted,” she later recalled — probably a euphemism. “I think we were talking about living together by the end of the afternoon.” Before long, she moved into Fremlin’s childhood home, a white Victorian gingerbread cottage with a garden full of maple trees, where he was caring for his elderly mother.
Like Munro, Fremlin was from modest circumstances, a deep source of connection for the couple. He seems to have been something like the opposite of his precursor: brusque and eccentric where Jim was staid and genteel. “It was this stick-it-up your-ass, let’s-cut-through-the-bullshit kind of attitude,” Sheila said of Fremlin, whom she compared to Ladner from “Vandals.”
When Bea first meets Ladner, she is in a relationship with a well-meaning high school teacher named Peter Parr, whose idea it is to drive out and take a look at Ladner’s nature preserve. They are told to go away in no uncertain terms. Peter, with “his geniality” and “good intentions,” is instantly eclipsed. Trying to explain the phenomenon in a letter to a friend, Bea writes that “she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage … because wasn’t that the way in all the dreary romances — some brute gets the woman tingling and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Fine and Decent?” A few days later, she is driving back to see Ladner on her own. “She had to feel sorry for herself, in her silk underwear. Her teeth chattered. She pitied herself for being a victim of such wants.”
Munro referred to Fremlin as her second husband, but in fact they were never legally married. Instead the couple staged what Sheila called a “mock wedding” in their backyard, at which Munro wore denim overalls and a white veil. (It’s unclear if anyone attended.) The sardonic gesture seems typical of their relationship, which might better be described as a cult of two. Munro suffered from a deep shame at having grown up in poverty. The plaudits she received from the outside world did little to alleviate it, Andrea believes, because they were all conditioned on her talent as a writer. Only Fremlin, Munro felt, accepted her untransfigured self, the working-class girl with a country accent.
The reverse side of acceptance was dependency. Sheila detected a power imbalance in her mother’s relationship with Fremlin. Though the couple shared a passion for literature and a caustic sense of humor, they were also prone to vicious arguments. “She would be wearing sunglasses, just quietly weeping at things he had said to her,” Sheila recalled. She got the sense that Fremlin often criticized Munro’s appearance. “Sometimes I wondered if he harbored an aversion to the mature woman’s body, that he couldn’t always conceal,” Sheila told me. Once, in the late ’70s, she arrived for a visit only to be told by her mother that the two of them — Alice and Sheila — were going to stay at a hotel. That night, in their shared room, Sheila could hear her mother crying in bed.
Jenny, who wrote her own essay for The Star, remembers that there was “lots of banter and jokes, often sexual or scatological jokes,” between Fremlin and his youngest stepdaughter. “Mom would feign shock,” she wrote. “I could feel the tension and darkness there, how Mom seemed helpless to ever draw the line.” In a letter to Jenny in 1992, Fremlin gave his own account of the triangle. “We had a sort of a pedagogical theory to the effect that Andrea was a person, not a child i.e. not a child as we were children in a very repressive adult world. The general idea was that no subjects, questions or language were barred.”
Fremlin’s rhetoric echoes that of a countercultural movement in the 1970s that called for the sexual liberation of children and is now regarded as a bad-faith effort to mainstream pedophilia. “In front of my mother,” Andrea wrote in The Star, “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.” Fremlin acknowledged that his sexual preferences were “not in accordance with the canons of public respectability,” as he put it in one of the letters he sent to Munro’s family in 1992. “It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure,” he wrote. “If she were in fact afraid, she could have left at any time. She was sexually receptive and mildly aggressive. While the scene is degenerate, this is indeed Lolita and Humbert. For Andrea to say she was ‘scared’ is simply a lie or a latter-day invention.”
Andrea was not the only child Fremlin targeted. This August, an Ontario woman named Jane Morrey, whose parents were friends with Fremlin, told The Toronto Star that he exposed himself to her in 1969, when she was 9. The incident followed years of grooming, she said. Andrea believes there may have been others. Fremlin owned a cabin in the Ottawa Valley, and he and Munro would sometimes take Andrea to stay there in the summers. One year she got to know a group of siblings who lived nearby, the youngest of whom, a girl, was around her age. Andrea suspects that these were the children with whom Fremlin had “friendships,” as Munro put it in 1992.
How much did Munro know? Andrea remembers another couple who were friends of Fremlin’s contacting Munro around 1978 to inform her that he had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. Fremlin denied it, but it’s unclear how reassured Munro really was. In 2008, a few years after Thacker’s biography appeared, Munro confessed to him that she had sometimes entertained dark thoughts about her partner. According to Andrea, Munro came to suspect that Fremlin was responsible for the rape and murder of Lynne Harper, a 12-year-old girl whose body was discovered in a woodlot near Clinton in 1959. Though Munro later learned that Fremlin had been elsewhere, the fact remains: She thought he had it in him.
Whatever thoughts she entertained, Munro never acted on them. Instead, they were sublimated in her fiction. Like Bea in “Vandals,” she was unable to become someone “firm and serious, a hard-and-fast, clean-sweeping sort of woman.” When Andrea first read the story, around the time that it came out, and later saw the title of the book it was collected in — “Open Secrets” (1994) — she felt briefly hopeful that her mother had begun to reckon with what happened. “I thought it was perhaps a route to more truth-telling, a step,” she told me. When this proved not to be the case, she came to feel her mother’s fiction was something like the reverse, a way of sustaining a life built on lies.
In a Substack essay this summer, the novelist and critic Mary Gaitskill, who has written of her own experience of sexual abuse, posited that Munro composed “Vandals” as a “kind of alternate-reality healing, and not just for herself. Sometimes the inability to deal with a real situation turbocharges the need to deal with it in some other way, which can drive the making of art that is gloriously transpersonal.”
Like so many of Munro’s stories, “Vandals” seems to give us back our lives more abundantly by naming the world and resensitizing our perceptions of it. Fiction is autonomous and irreducible; you can’t judge it by how faithfully it sticks to “what really happened.” In fact, by granting us access to other minds, the best fiction tends to show that “what really happened” is always an unstable compound of perspectives. This summer, when I began talking to Sheila Munro, she cautioned me that trying to understand her mother’s experience through her work was a dubious project. “Honestly,” she wrote to me, “I feel the only person who could answer those questions is my mother herself, and perhaps she couldn’t have, either. For me the importance of the stories is in what they say about human experience in general, specifically women’s experience, rather than for what they say about my mother herself.”
“The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless,” Munro once said. It is a fine artistic credo. In the context of the recent revelations, it also has the feeling of an alibi. By “disguising” herself as Bea, who is not Liza’s real mother and therefore bears a lesser duty to protect her, Munro seems to perform what Gaitskill calls “a genteel elision of reality.” That’s not to say the story would necessarily have been better, or even more “truthful,” had Munro stuck more closely to the facts, but it does sharpen our awareness of how often in her work she seems to massage or euphemize an intolerable reality.
“Labor Day Dinner,” from 1981, is a vivid case in point. Roberta, another of Munro’s embattled divorcées, has recently moved in with George, a retired high school teacher who is busily renovating an old farmhouse. Roberta’s two daughters — Angela, 17, and Eva, 12 — are visiting for the summer; they spend the rest of the year with their father up north. This domestic setup is tense and provisional. George makes barbed remarks about Roberta’s appearance, which leave her weeping behind sunglasses. She senses that he sees her daughters as spoiled freeloaders, refusing to help out around the house and garden. The girls, meanwhile, are wary of George, who is trigger-happy with belittling jokes. They are also grieved by his effect on their mother. “I have seen her change,” Angela confides to her diary (which Roberta has read), “from a person I deeply respected into a person on the verge of being a nervous wreck. If this is love I want no part of it. He wants to enslave her and us all and she walks a tightrope trying to keep him from getting mad.”
In her fictional world, Munro exercised total authority.
The story, you sense, walks its own tightrope between blindness and insight. It was written at a time when Munro must have known she was married to a pedophile but apparently still clung to the belief that he hadn’t harmed her own daughters. It is remarkable to witness her at once planting and defusing this incendiary possibility. “She has been afraid, sometimes, that George would hurt her children, not physically but by some turnabout, some revelation of dislike, that they could never forget,” Roberta thinks. Angela, the teenager, who is “tall and fair-haired, and embarrassed by her recently acquired beauty,” spars with George flirtatiously, but Roberta feels she is not the one in most danger. It is 12-year-old Eva, “with her claims of understanding, her hopes of all-round conciliation, who could be smashed and stranded.”
Understanding and conciliation are what the story ultimately deliver. When the narrative moves into George’s consciousness, he is forgivingly humanized. We see that his frustration with Angela and Eva is really a frustration with their mother. He dislikes what he sees as her parental absenteeism, the way that she permits them to laze around the house all day. His critique of Roberta’s mothering is rooted in a kind of fatherly concern. For all their quarreling, they are essentially aligned. “He wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her — assure himself — that no real damage has been done.” The story ends with the couple reconciled, at least for the time being, and Roberta’s daughters unharmed.
Like “Vandals,” “Labor Day Dinner” is an autonomous work of art. Yet it also feels like a desperate piece of wish fulfillment. How badly Munro must have wanted to believe that her partner was basically normal and decent. “No, it wasn’t a mistake,” Roberta tells herself, musing on her divorce, in a passage that echoes Munro’s words about Fremlin in 1975: “Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it.” In her fictional world, where she exercised total authority, it was possible to construct a version of events that supported this conviction.
But Munro, it seems, was wise to her escapist tendencies. The uses and abuses of narrative come in for special scrutiny in her work. In “Material,” from 1974, the middle-aged narrator discovers a short story by her ex-husband, Hugo, a well-known writer. It describes an episode from the early years of their marriage when Hugo vindictively flooded the apartment of their downstairs neighbor, a low-rent prostitute named Dotty. The narrator has every reason to dislike the story, and yet she can’t help acknowledging its brilliance. “There is Dotty, lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvelous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love.” She thinks about sending him an admiring letter, but when she sits down to write it, she suddenly sees the story differently, as somehow beside the point.
“Material,” in other words, concerns an exquisite work of art that nonetheless feels hopelessly inadequate to the lived reality behind it. The story doesn’t just expose how someone who makes beautiful things may also be capable of unfathomable cruelty — a platitude at this point. More subtly, it shows how an artistic sensibility, a disposition to see other people as grist for transformation, can give rise to a frigid disengagement. The narrator, who isn’t herself an artist, displays something of the artist’s coldness when she uses Dotty, who has lost her husband and is just barely scraping by, as anecdote fodder, a way of getting laughs from her sophisticated friends. (When she gets to know Dotty better, the narrator tellingly finds that she becomes “less likely to store up and repeat what she said.”) The difference between this sort of storytelling and the more elaborate, socially valorized sort that her ex-husband goes in for, Munro delicately implies, is not as profound as it seems. However finely wrought, Hugo’s story has done nothing to atone for his hurtful deed. “This isn’t enough, Hugo,” the narrator finds herself writing in a fit of anger. “You think it is, but it isn’t.”
Perhaps the truly shocking thing about Munro’s decision to remain with Fremlin is that it wasn’t shocking at all. In her pioneering study, “Father-Daughter Incest” (1981), the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman spoke to 40 women who were sexually abused by their fathers or stepfathers. “Those daughters who did confide in their mothers were uniformly disappointed in their mother’s responses,” Herman writes.
“Most of the mothers, even when made aware of the situation, were unwilling or unable to defend their daughters. They were too frightened or too dependent upon their husbands to risk a confrontation. Either they refused to believe their daughters, or they believed them but took no action. They made it clear to their daughters that their fathers came first and that, if necessary, the daughters would have to be sacrificed.”
Only three of the mothers decided to leave their abusive husbands, though in each case the women soon returned. They found life without them “too hard to bear.”
Margaret Atwood sees Munro’s decision to return to Fremlin as a matter of dependency. She had a “general inability to function on a practical level” without him, Atwood said. Sheila Munro disagrees. “It wasn’t because she couldn’t look after herself,” she told me. “It was because she was so deeply entwined in this very volatile relationship.” Stressing that she had no desire to make excuses for her mother, Sheila said she believes that Fremlin groomed Munro along with Andrea, citing the way Munro came to see her as a sexual rival. “That’s straight out of the abuser’s playbook,” Herman said recently when I described Sheila’s theory to her. “Seeing how even someone as gifted as Munro was vulnerable to this kind of coercive control is instructive.”
In a letter to Virginia Barber from June 1992, Munro reports that, after she fled their home in Clinton, Fremlin joined her at their Vancouver Island condo. The two of them were in couples therapy, she said, “and progress (as they call it) is being made.” At the time of writing, Munro was laid up with laryngitis. “I’ve almost welcomed being sick because it dulls things … but the dips aren’t so bad or so deep now,” she wrote, expanding on her fragile state of mind.
“The very bad and surprising thing was how things you’d expect to be eternally comforting — I mean the beauty of the world and poetry and stuff — hurt worst — and what a great boon tabloids turned out to be. Coffee held its own but booze is another fair-weather friend […]
Gerry is doing really well when you consider what a reversal and loss this had to be. Andrea’s okay, but doesn’t want to be in touch with me now G. is here. We’ll see — it’s still so raw. You never come out with the mended teapot looking like new and I guess you’re lucky if it holds the tea. (See how Ms. M. clings to the comfy domestic images.) […]
I feel very weirdly free in a way. For so long I’ve felt oddly apologetic or strange with people, and now I feel I know what the trouble was. Do I? Odd.”
What kind of “loss” Munro is referring to is hard to discern (a loss of dignity or status?), but the letter makes her priorities plain: Fremlin came first, Andrea second. Munro said as much to Andrea. “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’” Andrea wrote in The Star. “She loved him too much and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.”
Six months later, Munro and Fremlin made another trip to their condo, where, she wrote to Barber, they had “lots of practical problems to take our mind off large griefs.” One day, she visited Victoria, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, “knowing I would not see Andrea — I cannot request this, though we are in touch by letter; it’s up to her — and hoping I wouldn’t do something awful and pathetic, like hanging around on her street. I didn’t.” By that point, she and Fremlin had abandoned therapy, which Sheila recalls they struggled to take seriously. “They made a joke out of it,” she told me. “Gerry could be so captivating and amusing that the therapist was brought into the joke as well.” They remained a cult of two. “She was not interested in therapy or self-improvement, in making amends,” Sheila said. “She just used her experience in her art.”
This was as true at the end of her career as it was at the start. The stories Munro wrote after Andrea cut off contact, in 2002, are rife with the pain of estrangement. In “Runaway,” published in The New Yorker in 2003, the young protagonist, Carla, has broken all ties to her haute bourgeois family after marrying an older man named Clark, whose rough charisma it had once seemed “both proper and exquisite” to submit to. Three years in, his charisma has evaporated, and he stands revealed as a sour domestic tyrant, who rules her with his moods. To sustain their fraying sexual bond, she becomes a kind of Scheherazade, inventing stories about an elderly neighbor who she claims molested her in the months before his death. The stories, which Clark takes to be true, do the trick of arousing them both, and their marriage is extended one evening at a time.
The problem comes when Clark insists that she blackmail the man’s widow with this fabricated dirt. Afraid to defy him but unwilling to go through with it, Carla ends up confiding in the widow how unhappy she is with Clark. The older woman talks her into leaving him. The same day, Carla boards a bus to Toronto, within touching distance of a new life, when she realizes that it would have no meaning without Clark “infecting her with misery.” She goes back to him, only to discover, a short while later, that he has killed her pet goat, a kind of surrogate child, in an apparent act of vengeance. Unable to accept this reality and what it means for their marriage, Carla wills herself into a state of denial, which is where the story leaves her.
You wonder what Fremlin made of “Runaway” and of the other stories about trapped women that Munro produced in her final years of creativity. Were her efforts to portray him as a kind of savior figure in the interviews she gave around this time a form of compensation for the less flattering picture she was painting in her fiction? Or was this double bookkeeping an expression of the same denial that the character Carla — a portrait of the artist as a desperate mythomaniac — embraces at the end of the story? Whatever the answer, Munro’s relationship with Fremlin enabled her to do her greatest work — indeed, some of the greatest work ever done in the short story form. That so much of that work now reads like an indictment of the relationship is a bitter paradox. Nabokov said he felt the “initial shiver” of “Lolita” after reading a newspaper story about an ape “who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” It appears that this was Munro’s subject, too.
Andrea has not read “Runaway,” but when I described the story to her and its depiction of a woman who fears that she would “not exist” without her stifling husband, she confessed to feeling a tremor of sympathy. “I think she was so scared that she actually wouldn’t exist without him,” she said of her mother’s relationship with Fremlin. At the same time, Andrea stressed that she does not forgive her mother and is indifferent to her legacy.
For years after Fremlin’s conviction, Andrea was estranged from her siblings. They were ultimately reunited with the help of the Gatehouse, a Toronto-based organization that supports survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In 2014, Jenny, Sheila and Andrew, their stepbrother, went there seeking guidance on how to reconcile with Andrea. “So ingrained was the silence around the story of her abuse that this was the first time the three of us had spoken about it,” Andrew wrote in his own essay for The Star, also published this summer. Each of the siblings wrote Andrea a letter, and their relationships were slowly rekindled.
Today Andrea is a regular volunteer at the Gatehouse, where she leads self-care groups. Her essay has been widely celebrated for raising awareness about childhood sexual abuse, which she now sees as her guiding mission. Many people have compared the episode to an Alice Munro story, but unlike the characters in her mother’s work, Andrea spoke up.
Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine who often profiles novelists and film directors. Vanessa Saba is a Brooklyn-based artist known for her evocative collages, which distill complex cultural narratives into minimal visual statements.
The post What Alice Munro Knew appeared first on New York Times.
