What do we do when learning that Alice Munro’s second husband, Gerry Fremlin, sexually assaulted her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner when she was a child? Also that Munro knew exactly what happened and did nothing about it, not even consoling her daughter, but taking the abuse as an affront to herself.

Yesterday’s Toronto Sunday Star ran two devastating articles about the assault. Both reveal that Andrea told Munro in 1992 that Fremlin had climbed into bed with her one night her when she was nine years old. Fremlin was her stepfather, and Munro had left Andrea in his care while she was away from their home in Clinton, Ontario. Fremlin later took advantage of other times he was left alone with Andrea over the next several years to expose himself, make lewd jokes and talk about her mother’s sexual needs. Andrea says the abuse stopped only when she became a teenager and he lost interest, as is the case with most pedophiles.

Andrea was 25 years old and struggling when she first told her mother what had happened. Years earlier, she’d talked to her father, Jim Munro, and his wife Carole Sabiston, who took steps to try to protect her. After Andrea told her mother about the abuse, Munro temporarily left Fremlin, retreating to a condo she owned in Comox, B.C. But in a piece Andrea wrote for the Star, she says that instead of supporting her daughter, Alice Munro blamed her for the rupture in her marriage to a man she greatly loved. “I visited her there and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself,” Andrea writes. “She then told me about other children Fremlin had ‘friendships’ with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.”

Munro went back to Fremlin and stayed married to him until he died in 2013. In fact, Munro stayed with him even after Andrea decided to pursue charges against Fremlin in 2005. He pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault, receiving a suspended sentence and two years’ probation, and with it an order to stay away from parks and playgrounds. Andrea was able to provide the court with graphic letters written by Fremlin—and read by her mother—in which he admitted exposing his penis to the nine-year-old and fondling her genitals, but tried to defend himself by claiming that she was a “Lolita” who had tempted him.

The conviction received no publicity, but in the Star, journalists Deborah Dundas and Betsy Powell write that the abuse was widely known. “Over the course of the nearly 50 years this secret has been kept, rumours of it emerged in various circles. ‘Everybody knew,’ recalls (Andrea’s stepmother) Carole. She recounts being at a dinner party with a journalist who asked her, ‘Is it true?’ Her answer: ‘Yes, it’s true.’” 

In today’s Globe & Mail, Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker reveals that Andrea wrote to him with the information in 2005, but he decided not to include it in his book, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. “I knew about the discord within the family and no, I wasn’t going to do anything to make a bad situation worse.”

Alice Munro died in May, aged 92, after suffering for several years from Alzheimer’s. The articles represent a decision by her family to come forward about the abuse, which for years estranged Andrea from not only her mother and Fremlin, but also from her sisters Sheila and Jenny and their stepbrother Andrew, son of their stepmother, Carole. The siblings are now reconciled, and say they want to publicize what happened. According to Andrea’s sister Sheila, the family hopes that if people hearing the story accept the “idea of talking about sexual violence as an epidemic toward women, then we’re heading toward an era where we’re going to start to tell the truth and it can’t hide anymore.”

I had no idea about the abuse, although I was good friends with a woman who was close to Andrea’s sister Jenny Munro, and I would see Jenny off and on before our mutual friend died six years ago. I had a general idea that as children, Alice Munro’s daughters felt they had to share her with her writing—or, at an early stage in her career, with her attempts to write and publish her stories. They would huddle outside the door of the laundry room where she pounded away on her typewriter, waiting for her to come out.

It made me question myself as a mother and writer, asking myself whether I sometimes neglected my son to do my writing; whether as a woman you’re it’s selfish–or not–to take time away from young children in order to write; whether it’s unfair to judge women trying to both do their work and take care of their kids when the fathers aren’t even in the house. These are questions that have to be asked, and we all have to find our own answers, and construct our own timetables. In any case, I knew that Jenny and her sister Sheila took meticulous care of their mother as Alzheimer’s descended, and believed that they were enormously proud of her work and accomplishments.  

I also met Alice Munro a few times, and admired her greatly. In fact, I wrote a tribute to her when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013, which I reran a couple of months ago when she died. You can only write so much in a short piece, and something I didn’t say was that she reminded me in one small way of my own mother. Once, when I was talking to Munro, I learned that she didn’t drive, not just in Toronto traffic, but even at home in small-town Clinton. Gerry handled the driving, she said. Her tone was so drenched in pride, entitlement and relief that I seemed to hear my mother’s twin sister say, “Your mother does like to be waited on.” My aunt had said this to me once when I’d visited her in Ottawa, and I remember very clearly the way it resurfaced as I spoke with Munro that evening. Of course, I had no idea if it was really true of Munro, and to what extent she felt she needed Fremlin’s help taking care not only of herself, but of her enormous talent. Yet the thought attached itself to my picture of her. Nothing too unflattering, just something I might have seen.

Reading the Star articles, my aunt’s tart words surfaced again much more loudly. Munro had gone back to live with a pedophile who had abused her daughter—and, as one of the articles says, quite possibly other children, including the daughter of two of Fremlin’s ex-friends. Was he that supportive of Munro and her career? Did Fremlin take such good care of her that she was unable to get along without his help? Do you need to be so out-of-the-ballpark selfish to succeed the way she did? There are too many examples of morally-repugnant genuises, and in reading these articles, I found it terribly sad to find that Alice Munro is among them.

My first impulse on reading this was to take down the tribute I wrote. Yet there’s also this. My uncle, the family genealogist, gave me some letters written by a cousin of my grandfather’s, a Scot who moved to the north coast of B.C. at the turn of the 20^th century. I’m slowly getting them organized, maybe for an archive, and I’ll write about them soon. For now, I’ll say that as I read them, I found my grandfather’s cousin so sad, homesick and sorry for himself that the letters soon felt repetitive. Nor was he any sort of a stylist as a writer. But sometimes he breaks open to tell a good story, and he sent his family detailed information about the life of early settlers up the coast that might prove useful to historians. He also wrote respectfully of the Indigenous people he knew, always as individuals, which wasn’t true of all white folks at the time. So, I thought, fine. Archive. 

Then I came to a letter about a Black man, one of the rare Black people up the coast, and the letter was a vile and racist piece of garbage. As I told a friend later, my first impulse was to destroy it. I wanted nothing to do with it, no connection to anyone who wrote it. Then I realized this would be literal whitewashing. “You’ve got to give it to the archives,” said my friend, who is Black. “These things need to be remembered.” It’s also true that people are multi-sided. My grandfather’s cousin was sad and lost, detail-oriented, respectful towards most people but horribly racist toward others. He was human and flawed. Archive that. 

So rather than erasing my tribute to Alice Munro, I’m going to keep it up. You’ll find it below. Everything I wrote there is true, and I felt it deeply at the time. It shows Munro’s good side, which of course existed, along with her breathtaking writing. But what I wrote turns out to be only part of the truth, and the rest needs to be attached to it. So consider it attached. And let’s reconsider something I told her about a childhood experience, which now seems drenched in irony, as do the thoughts it spawned.

In the end, there remains the human fact that Alice Munro was as flawed as an obscure Scot living up the B.C. coast in the early years of the 20th century. Maybe more so. She was also a great writer. I have no idea what it will feel like to read one of her books now; whether they, too, will feel drenched in irony.

Not that I’m yet ready to try.

***

When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature today, I felt part of a joyous yelp reverberating across Canada. I also remembered the times I’ve seen her onstage and at literary parties, and thought about the way it turned me into a hovering fan-girl, awed by her power and longing to talk.

On evenings like that, at book launches and fundraisers, she must feel constantly watched, so many fan-girls watching from behind bookcases and curtains, all of us noting her alert and attentive nods, the dark sparkle of her eyes, every explosion of her young and frequent laugh; so many of us trying to gather the courage to talk to her until we tell ourselves just do it and surge across the room like small pieces of inexorable fate, the kind you hope to avoid.

At which point we might find to our surprise that she wants to talk about getting your period in school, as she did once with me, making us rush home afterwards to record every word in our journals (which, as I write this, I wonder whether I ought to repeat). Maybe that’s why she doesn’t go to literary events very often. Besieged.

The first of Alice Munro’s books I read was Lives of Girls and Women. I was in my late teens when I gulped it down, identifying utterly with her literary teenager, Del Jordan. That was what I looked for in books at the time, a sense of identification. I thought of myself as an outsider, meaning there were rather a lot of literary characters I could identify with. But Del was Canadian and lived in an emotional landscape I recognized from my own Calvinist and Lutheran background. I knew the material Munro was dealing with, could enter it wholesale. I was Del Jordan. Alice Munro was writing about me.

Yet since I already wanted to be a writer, as well as being carried along by her stories, I was also subtly learning something that I would only be able to put into words much later. In reading Alice Munro, I learned that I wanted to make people say: This is what it’s like.

Doesn’t matter what “it” is. Jealousy, hope, compromise, betrayal. War and peace, for that matter. Being single or married, husband, wife or lover. Doesn’t matter where “it” is either, what time and place. I learned that I wanted to make people feel: This is exactly what it’s like. Being human. Imperfect. Alive.

A few years ago, I re-read Lives of Girls and Women, which I deliberately hadn’t done since I was in my twenties. I didn’t want to risk ruining the book for myself, afraid of finding it dusty and dated. Then I brought too few books to a rented cottage, and there was Lives on the bookshelves, and otherwise Tom Clancy, RIP.

So I opened the book and quickly felt relieved. The stories were still fresh. They reverberated, yet they were also different. I’d read them before as telling Del Jordan’s story, and of course they do. But this time I saw the enormous insight and sympathy Munro brings to the character of Del’s mother, Ada, whom I’d earlier read only as The Mother, a teenager’s mother, my own mother: an embarrassment, an impediment, a failure, a trap. This time, I followed Del fondly, remembering how it felt to be that age, but I principally appreciated the walk Munro took around Ada, a woman whose life had not turned out as she had hoped, but who was brave.

What a trick to pull off. To write a teenager who seems utterly true to girls of that age and a woman known to women, all in prose as neat as a stitch. I realized a little belatedly that the book was called Lives of Girls and Women. How could I not have noticed that before?

The first time I saw Alice Munro on stage, she read a brief passage from the book, and I noticed something else. The stories are very funny, unpredictably droll. I’d heard that she hated reading in public, loathed being on stage, but you wouldn’t have known it except from the brevity of her appearance. She read her passage with enormous wit and sparkle, and answered questions afterwards attentively.

Asked when she stopped rewriting her stories, Munro said she never did. She’d changed a couple of words just that night as she’d done her reading. I remembered her publisher, Douglas Gibson, saying once that he had to tear her manuscripts out of her hands or she’d never stop reworking them. Onstage, Munro laughed at her perfectionism. She seemed delighted by the oddity of the world, which included herself, even though her writing tells us she must sometimes find it excruciating, as well.

The second time I saw her onstage, Munro was just as witty. Both events were at Harbourfront in Toronto, and this time she was being interviewed along with another writer. The host was making a hash of it. Perhaps out of nerves, he was directing most of his questions at the other writer, who had written a couple of lovely books but wasn’t perhaps seminal.

People in the audience were restive. They’d come to see Alice Munro, who appeared in public so rarely, and all around me were loud mutterings of, Ask her. Talk to her. More than a few other writers would have grown touchy at being left aside, but there was no sign that Munro was bothered. She listened alertly to the windy conversation going on between the other two, her posture impeccable, and only when the long answer to a long question about the writer’s preference in music petered out did she put in brightly, “I like Mozart and bluegrass.” I can still hear her say that today.

In private, she proved just as open, friendly and unpretentious. Once, at a friend’s book launch, I asked her about the years she’d spent living in North Vancouver, where I’d grown up. I thought I’d recognized my neighbourhood in one of her stories, and we worked out that I’d gone to an elementary school only a few blocks from where she’d lived. I told her about how I’d got lost once on the way home and been found by a long-lost friend of my mother’s, neither of whom had realized the other had left Winnipeg.

She talked about how children used to be allowed to get a bit lost and nobody worried all that much. You were permitted to scare yourself, after which you were discouraged from dwelling on it morbidly. We agreed it probably wasn’t very dangerous to get lost when we were children, a generation apart, and how it probably isn’t that bad today, despite the hysteria. Also how she’d felt a little lost when she was living on the North Shore and was happy to leave.

I told her about a man who used to expose himself on a bridge over Mosquito Creek that I crossed on the way to high school. You walked to the end of my block and cut through the neighbours’ yard to head into the forest, clambered down a rough path beside the creek, turned left to go over the bridge, passed the man exposing himself, held your breath until you reached the end of the bridge, climbed up the other side of the ravine and made it safely to school, never telling the adults what was going on and never forgetting it.

She told me about writing Ontario high school exams while being locked in the schoolroom for hours. If you had your period, you spent the time terrified that you would soak through your skirt and have to stand up in front of the rest of the class. She said it probably affected on how well girls did on those exams, which determined whether they would go on to university, maybe get a scholarship, but that sort of thing was never mentioned, either.

As we spoke, Munro looked as if she was enjoying being naughty, talking about getting your period. It only occurred to me later that we were speaking about what was never spoken of, and that this is what she writes about with such genius. She writes what people don’t say, almost don’t have the vocabulary to say. That’s why I’ve always felt in reading her, This is what it’s like. She goes deep inside our communal silence. She spells it out.

The first time I met Alice Munro, in the hospitality suite at Harbourfront, I was so nervous that I couldn’t behave naturally. Instead, I laid a story at her feet the way a dog would a bone. It was about buying the first present I had ever bought my Scottish grandmother with my own money. My grandmother opened the present, which was a nightgown, and said, “I will put that aside to wear in my coffin.”

Alice Munro laughed. Judging from her penetrating look, she knew I was presenting her with an anecdote I thought she might use, but she didn’t answer, and someone else came up.

I’ve never met anyone I admire more.

***

To which I can only add a tweet yesterday from writer Waubgeshig Rice: “Tip: never idolize anyone.”