Literary world shocked by Alice Munro’s decision to support her daughter’s attacker

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The Canadian literary world has been shocked by the revelation that Alice Munro, one of Canada’s most revered writers, stayed with her second husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter.

This has reignited the debate about the extent to which an artist can, or should, be separated from his work. Fans and admirers of various media have grappled with this debate, from those who worship predatory rock stars, comedians or indie musicians, to those who still find an escape in the writings of pedophiles.

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In an essay for the Toronto Star, Andrea Robin Skinner writes that in 1976, she was visiting her mother and stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, when he first sexually assaulted her. She was nine and he was 14.continued to harass and abuse her until she was a teenager, she wrote. Skinner is Munro’s daughter and her first husband, James Munro.

When Skinner told her mother about the abuse 16 years later, Munro left Fremlin and flew to Comox, B.C., to stay with Skinner’s sister, Sheila Munro, who is now a writer herself.

“I visited her and was overwhelmed by the feeling of having been hurt,” Skinner writes. “Did she realize she was talking to a victim and that I was her child? If so, I didn’t feel it. When I tried to tell her how much her husband’s violence had hurt me, she was incredulous. ‘But you were such a happy child,’ she told me.”

Munro eventually returned to Fremlin and stayed with him until his death in 2013. “She was adamant that what happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner writes.

The owners of Munro’s Books, a leading independent bookstore in Victoria, released a statement Monday expressing their support for Skinner and calling her story “heartbreaking.” The author co-founded the bookstore in 1963 with her first husband and Skinner’s father, who continued to run the bookstore after their divorce in 1971. Two years before his death in 2016, he handed the bookstore over to four staff members.

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Skinner’s revelation stunned Munro’s legions of fans and admirers. His work, mostly short stories, has received literature’s highest honors. A Nobel Prize in 2013. The Man Booker in 2009. When he died in May, praise for Munro and his work was glowing.

Today, this legacy has been darkened.

In 2004, The New York Times magazine published an article in which Munro raved about Fremlin, and Skinner decided to contact the Ontario Provincial Police and provide them with letters in which Fremlin admitted to abusing her, the Toronto Star reported.

At age 80, Fremlin pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence — a sentence that went unreported for nearly two decades.

“I still think she’s a great writer – she deserved the Nobel,” Sheila Munro told the Star. “She dedicated her life to it and she showed incredible talent and imagination. And that’s all she wanted to do with her life. Write these stories and publish them.”

She wrote about her mother in the book Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro, published in 2002, a project suggested by her mother. The book makes no reference to her sister’s alleged abuse, but notes that her mother often appealed to her private life and that she had difficulty separating Munro’s fiction “from the reality of what actually happened.”

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Jiayang Fan, a staff writer at The New Yorker — where many of Munro’s stories first appeared — wrote on X that she would be teaching a class on Munro in a week and had to rethink how to approach it. “I chose to write Vandals, a meditation on complicity, involvement, and what it means to deprive the most powerless among us of the ability to construct a self,” she wrote.

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Robert Thacker, who wrote a biography of Munro, told The Associated Press that her stories, such as Silence and Runaway, focus on estranged children. In Vandals, a woman mourns the loss of a former boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who, we learn, molested his young neighbor, Liza.

“As Ladner grabbed Liza and crashed into her, she felt a deep danger in him, a mechanical splutter,” Munro writes, “as if he would burn out in a single burst of light, leaving nothing but black smoke, burning smells, and worn electrical wires.”

Some have discussed the possibility of separating an artist from his art.

“Many people are mourning the news of Alice Munro’s death, not out of sympathy for her abused daughter, but because it puts the art they love into context,” former USA Today editor Barbara VanDenburgh wrote on X. “Art is not and should not be fandom. Great art is very often uncomfortable, very often the product of bad and broken people.”

“We want to believe that beauty and talent stem from some kind of essential moral quality, but in reality, being good and having talent are two opposites,” wrote Michelle Cyca, editor-in-chief of The Narwhal, on X.

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Thacker, whose book Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives was published in 2005, the same year Fremlin was convicted, said he had long known about Fremlin’s abuse but omitted it from his book because it was a “scientific analysis of her career.”

“I expected there to be repercussions at some point,” said Thacker, who added that he even spoke to the author about it. “I don’t want to get into the details, but it destroyed the family. It was devastating in so many ways. And that’s something she talked about in depth.”

With additional reporting from the Associated Press

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