Margaret Atwood ‘shocked’ by abuse of Alice Munro’s daughter

Novelist Margaret Atwood has spoken of her shock when she learned that fellow Canadian Alice Munro knew her daughter had been sexually abused by her husband and had stayed with him after discovering the dark secret.

“It was a bombshell. I’m shocked. I’m still trying to come to terms with it,” said Atwood, an award-winning author of several books. The Handmaid’s Tale and many other novels, he told The Daily Beast.

The literary world, like Atwood, was also in shock after Andrea Robin Skinner published a stunning article in the Toronto Star revealing the abuse she suffered at the hands of Gerald Fremlin, and Munro’s failure to respond to the article.

Skinner’s play in the Star The author detailed the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of Munro’s second husband, Fremlin, who died in 2013. Skinner said the abuse began when she was 9 and he crept into her bed while she slept, and continued into her teens. She eventually told her mother, but the Nobel laureate chose to stay with her husband. The rift strained Skinner’s relationship with Munro until his death in May; the author had been suffering from dementia for more than a decade.

The revelation has sparked anxiety about Munro’s legacy months after his death at age 92, with writers, fans and contemporaries wondering how to honour a writer whose status as one of the world’s most lauded writers, and one of the supreme practitioners of short story writing in particular, was tarnished by his protection of an abuser.

Atwood told The Daily Beast: “It was a bombshell to me. I’m shocked. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I had heard a rumor about it but very few details, after Gerry died and Alice was put in an institution.”

“What’s remarkable to me is that Alice came from a small town in southwestern Ontario at a time when such things were routinely hushed up. Now that we know about this horrific episode, there are clues in the work—try her short story, “The Peace of Utrecht,” and the artist who sets out the facts in her novel. The lives of girls and womenand the new “Material”.

“There are dark secrets revealed in a lot of her work. I taught a course called Southern Ontario Gothic—this part of the world that Alice comes from was very Gothic. In Graeme Gibson’s interview with Alice in 11 Canadian Novelists—which was published in 1973, before all this happened—they both talk about the Gothic nature of the world that Alice grew up in. Gothic is very much about secrets. The basement murders. The confidant turned out to be a werewolf. That was Alice’s real life journey.

“I’ve heard of Alice Munro’s fairy tale world before, but the writer hadn’t read many fairy tales. The child abandoned in the woods. The daughter who runs away from home because of the threat of incense. The father who withdraws and lets evil take over the child. The sacrifice of children is the underlying motif: it makes the family happy, at least on the surface.”

Munro’s longtime publisher Alfred A. Knopf, his longtime Canadian publisher Douglas Gibson and his former representatives at WME did not respond to immediate requests for comment.

Award-winning novelist Barbara Gowdy told The Daily Beast she was “too shocked and shaken to know what she thought.”

Author, journalist, and professor Susan Swan told The Daily Beast: “I’m not going to throw away Munro’s books, even though I think she failed her daughter by not taking her emotional well-being to heart. It’s a tragic, horrible, and all too familiar story, especially for Munro’s generation of mothers who typically needed a husband to survive economically.”

“As a writer, Alice Munro made a good living, but it seems she continued to operate under this old way of thinking about women. I am shocked and saddened to hear what happened to her daughter, but I agree with critic Claire Dederer who said that excluding an unethical artist is an unnecessary consumerist gesture in the age of late capitalism.”

In an obituary published in May in the Daily Beast, Jessica Ferri wrote: “Perhaps no other writer can write so richly about human emotion with so little explanation of place, time, or people. Munro assumes that you understand, and you do. And just when you start to wonder, she provides a detail so nuanced that only someone who has made a career out of observing people would be able to capture: a moment that seems quiet but actually pulses with meaning for us, searing our memories until our brains stop pulsing.”

Author Joyce Carol Oates responded to X on Monday to question Munro’s reasoning, wondering why Munro would blame “our misogynistic culture” for her choice to stay with the man she loved — and who she admitted was an abuser. She pointed to the men in Munro’s stories, wondering if they were projections of the author’s apparent subservience to men.

“Why can’t we discuss ideas, cultural trends, psychological motivations?” wrote Oates, who admitted in another post that she had not read Skinner’s article. “Is there no room for anything other than condemnatory rhetoric? She seems to have behaved very selfishly, cruelly. It’s been said over and over again. It seems disconcerting, such behavior. So why not try to understand?”

Jiayang Fan, a permanent editor of The New Yorker One author who is scheduled to teach a class on Munro’s works wrote on X that the article made her think about how best to teach Munro’s stories, as well as whether her fictional narratives are personal projections. “Will this change the way I teach her stories? It will and it won’t change,” she wrote. “(Because) I don’t believe that writers — or what they write — are supposed to be put on a pedestal. At their best, stories invite investigation. What is the relationship between the writer, the one who is raped, and the one who does the raping?”

Some fans took matters into their own hands. One posted a photo on X of his copies of Munro’s book being thrown into a trash can.

“As a mother, I can’t even,” the poster wrote.