Canadian writer Alice Munro’s daughter said that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and that her mother was told but stayed with him, in a damning account published after the Nobel laureate’s death. File
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Canadian writer Alice Munro’s daughter said July 7 that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and that her mother was told but stayed with him, in a damning account published after the Nobel laureate’s death.

Andrea Robin Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star that she was nine when, in 1976, “one night, while she (Munro) was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me.”

She wrote that when she was alone with Fremlin — who died in 2013 — he “exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs.”

Ms. Skinner said that, when she was 25, she shared everything that had happened with Munro — but the acclaimed author decided to stay with Fremlin, whom she wed in the 1970s after her first marriage ended.

“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Ms. Skinner wrote of Munro.

“We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. It was what we did,” she added.

At 38, Ms. Skinner said she took her allegations to the police after Munro complimented her husband in a New York Times interview. Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to indecent assault.

“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Ms. Skinner wrote.

“I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she added.

Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, died at 92 in May. Her death prompted glowing tributes, including from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Victoria-based Munro’s Books, founded by the author, said in a statement it “unequivocally supports” Ms. Skinner in sharing her story of sexual abuse as a child.

“Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated,” it wrote, adding the shop had been independently owned since 2014.

A separate statement from the Munro family, also published on the Munro’s Books website, praised the shop’s owners for being “part of our family’s healing.”

“We wholly support the owners and staff of Munro’s Books as they chart a new future, and respectfully request that they not be asked or expected to answer questions about the Munro family,” it added.

Montreal, Canada:

Canadian writer Alice Munro’s daughter said Sunday that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and that her mother was told but stayed with him, in a damning account published after the Nobel laureate’s death.

Andrea Robin Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star that she was nine when, in 1976, “one night, while she (Munro) was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me.”

She wrote that when she was alone with Fremlin — who died in 2013 — he “exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs.”

Skinner said that, when she was 25, she shared everything that had happened with Munro — but acclaimed author decided to stay with Fremlin, whom she wed in the 1970s after her first marriage ended.

“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Skinner wrote of Munro. 

“We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. It was what we did,” she added.

At 38, Skinner said she took her allegations to the police after Munro complimented her husband in a New York Times interview. Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to indecent assault.

“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote.

“I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she added.

Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, died at 92 in May. Her death prompted glowing tributes, including from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Paris:

Nobel-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro was best known as a master of the short story. Here are five from her celebrated trove:

– ‘Boys and Girls’ (1964) –

In one of her earliest stories, Munro delved into what would become a signature theme: the complex, often fraught transition to adulthood.

Set on a fox farm and told from the point of view of a young girl, “Boys and Girls” explores gender conventions in 1940s small-town Ontario — Munro’s birthplace and home, and the setting for much of her writing.

The story was included in her first book “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968).

– ‘Royal Beatings’ (1977) –

This story is about daily family violence in a rural Canadian town begins with stepmother Flo’s threat to administer a “royal beating” to her fiery teenaged stepdaughter, Rose. 

The girl’s imagination is sparked by the term, and she imagines chariots, horses and kings, but she discovers a far more brutal reality when her father beats her with his belt. 

Munro would delve deeper into the world of Flo and Rose in “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), a collection of interlinked stories about the two women that was nominated for the Booker Prize. 

– ‘The Progress of Love’ (1985) –

Reminiscing about growing up, the 30-something real-estate agent Euphemia ponders her parents’ dysfunctional marriage and her decision to run away from home and reject all they stood for. 

Love in the course of the story does not progress so much as it congeals and becomes intermingled with recrimination, and through Euphemia’s conflicted feelings, Munro’s explores how emotions evolve.

The characters “so resemble ourselves that reading about them, at times, is emotionally risky,” wrote Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times in 1986.

– ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ (1999) –

Sadness pervades this story about a man who loses his wife to Alzheimer’s, with Munro unflinching observation of the devastating details of the disease as it erodes memory, language and personality.

It was adapted for the screen in 2006 as “Away from Her” by Canadian compatriot Sarah Polley and with Julie Christie as the ill-fated wife, earning two Oscar nominations including best actress.

– ‘Corrie’ (2010) –

An expertly rendered central deception in this story dupes reader and protagonist alike, showcasing Munro’s careful and intricate weaving of storylines in deceptively banal settings.

Corrie, a young wealthy woman who seems destined for spinsterhood, embarks on a years-long affair with an architect, Howard.

When he tells her a mutual acquaintance has discovered their secret and is blackmailing them, Corrie agrees to pay a monthly stipend to keep the potential snitch quiet. 

But, years later, she discovers this was a lie and Howard had been pocketing the money all along.

Munro, who liked to revisit and tweak her stories even years later, changed the ending for the version of “Corrie” that appeared in her collection “Dear Life” published in 2012.

For Munro, her stories “cause second thoughts,” said Margaret Atwood on The New Yorker Fiction podcast in 2019, “she liked rethinking things and wondering whether she got it right the first time”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Ottawa:

Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose exquisitely crafted tales of the loves, ambitions and travails of small-town women in her native land made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, died on Monday at the age of 92, the Globe and Mail newspaper said on Tuesday.

The Globe, citing family members, said Munro had been suffering from dementia for at least a decade.

Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Her stories explored sex, yearning, discontent, aging, moral conflict and other themes in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar – villages and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario where she lived. She was adept at fully developing complex characters within the limited pages of a short story.

Munro, who wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realism, was often likened to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian known for his brilliant short stories – a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in honoring her with the Nobel Prize.

Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Academy also said: “Her texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.”

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after winning the Nobel, Munro said, “I think my stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something that you played around with until you’d got a novel written.”

Her works included: “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), “Runaway” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” (2009) and “Dear Life” (2012).

The characters in her stories were often girls and women who lead seemingly unexceptional lives but struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging.

Her story of a woman who starts losing her memory and agrees to enter a nursing home titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” from “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” was adapted into the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “Away From Her,” directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley.

‘SHAME AND EMBARRASSMENT’

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, writing in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel, summarized her work by saying: “Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built in.”

American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in 2005, “Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death.”

The short story, a style more popular in the 19th and early 20th century, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular tastes – and in attracting awards. But Munro was able to infuse her short stories with a richness of plot and depth of detail usually more characteristic of full-length novels.

“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, ’til I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation,” Munro told the New Yorker magazine in 2012.

She was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel literature prize but the first with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but raised in Chicago and was widely seen as an American writer.

Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize – Canada’s most high-profile literary award – twice.

Alice Laidlaw was born to a hard-pressed family of farmers on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, a small town in the region of southwestern Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, and started writing in her teens.

Munro originally began writing short stories while a stay-at-home mother. She intended to someday write a novel, but said that with three children she was never able to find the time necessary. Munro began building a reputation when her stories started getting published in the New Yorker in the 1970s.

She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. They had four daughters – one died just hours after being born – before divorcing in 1972. Afterward, Munro moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013.

Munro in 2009 revealed she had undergone heart bypass surgery and had been treated for cancer.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)