The closing line of Alice Munro’s short story 'Dear Life' in the eponymous collection published in 2012, runs: “We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.” Almost eight weeks after the Canadian Nobel laureate’s death on May 13, her youngest daughter has revealed how exoneration for the unforgivable that Munro granted to her protagonists extended to her personal life too — even if it came at the expense of her family. In an essay written for the Toronto Star, Andrea Robin Skinner, now 58, has said that even after being made aware that Munro’s second husband and Skinner’s stepfather, the cartographer Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her repeatedly, the writer chose to stand by her daughter’s abuser. A daughter’s plea, a mother's rejection “I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,” Skinner wrote in a letter to her mother in 1992 — parts of which she shared with the Canadian newspaper — telling her of the abuse. Skinner was 25 at the time, and had spent nearly two decades trying to come to terms with her trauma and worrying about her mother’s reaction should she reveal her ordeal to her. “In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont.,” Skinner wrote in the article. “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.” Over the course of Skinner's childhood, Fremlin would continue to abuse her sexually. “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,” Skinner wrote. It was Andrew, Skinner's stepbrother, and Carole, her stepmother, with whom she lived in Victoria, who first raised an alarm after she confided in them. But Jim Munro, Skinner's father and Alice Munro's first husband, refused to confront his former wife. It would be left to Skinner to stand up for herself. And when she finally mustered the courage, things panned out exactly how she had hoped they wouldn’t. “She (Alice) said that she had been ‘told too late’, she loved him (Fremlin) 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. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner wrote in the article. Fremlin blamed Skinner for the abuse, writing in letters that she was a “homewrecker” who had led him on. Many years later, some support Over the years, Skinner’s contact with her mother and her two sisters, Sheila and Jenny, petered out. In 2005, Munro made a declaration of devotion to Fremlin in an interview, which opened up old wounds. Skinner went to the police; Fremlin was charged, and he pleaded guilty on arraignment. But the news was never made public, in deference to Munro’s stratospheric fame. Fremlin died in 2013, the same year that Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Skinner remained estranged from her mother up until her death. In 2014, her sisters reached out to Skinner, hoping for a reconciliation and an understanding of their complicity in the silence that shrouded her ordeal. It was with their support that she finally decided to tell the story of Munro the mother, eclipsed forever by Munro the writer. Alice Munro, Nobel laureate Across collections of short stories such as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) to Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) to Too Much Happiness (2009) to Dear Life (2012) and others, Munro wrote of the course of chance through the lives of girls and women. She wrote of spinsters and divorcees, adulterers and coquettes, wives and working women, mothers and daughters, mapping their lives with empathy and a rare interiority. Shame and grief, desire and morality joust for space with loneliness and revenge, joy and redemption. Her short stories, finely crafted with what the 2009 Man Booker International Prize committee called “depth, wisdom and precision”, held their own against the dazzle of fully-formed novels, cementing her position as a literary great. Writers and their complicated legacies From Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz and Thirteen Reasons Why author Jay Asher, accused of sexual harassment, to the problematic politics of Ezra Pound, TS Eliot or VS Naipaul, from J K Rowling's controversial views on trans rights to Munro's feet of clay, what makes the realisation that the finest of literary idols are fallible so disconcerting? Perhaps it is the awareness that it is not merely their particular failure — sexual harassment, misogyny, bullying or racism — that is of the essence. It is the fact of the power that they command, that can reduce or silence others into submission, that makes the difference. As Skinner wrote in her essay, “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
