“My life has gone rosy, againfortunejack,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years were blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.”
Listen to this article, read by Simon VanceThe man was Gerald Fremlin, a retired civil servant and geographer, who hailed from the same corner of Ontario as Munro. They would be together for nearly 40 years, until Fremlin’s death in 2013. His knowledge of Huron County, where most of Munro’s fiction is set, became a vital resource for her work. Munro amassed a thicket of honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater, with its “falling-down barns” and “burdensome old churches,” into a stage for the whole human comedy, like Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Mississippi. Never one to take herself too seriously, she housed her many awards in a revolving spice rack at her second home, a condo on Vancouver Island.
“Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it,” Munro concluded in her letter about Fremlin. The judgment would prove premature. This July, two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Munro and Fremlin at their home in Ontario. (According to her parents’ custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria, British Columbia, with her father, Jim Munro, and his new wife.) One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was 9 years old.
Fremlin warned Andrea not to tell her mother: The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed, but when she returned to Victoria that fall, she confided in her stepbrother, Andrew. Andrew told his mother, who then told Jim Munro. Rather than alert his ex-wife, Jim instructed the family to stay quiet. He worried that the disclosure would wreck Munro’s new relationship and that he would then be blamed. The next summer, Andrea returned to Ontario accompanied by her older sister Sheila, whom Jim charged with keeping Andrea safe.
For years, Andrea did her best to make sure that she was never alone with Fremlin, she told me recently, but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative: to shield her mother from the truth. Munro knew that Andrea loved to swim, so on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex. Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Munro. The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty.
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