It was my Canadian friend Eileen who first put me on to Canadian writer Alice Munro. In 1998, she gave me a copy of Munro’s Selected Stories; a book which still stands on my shelves.
I read the 23 stories in the book, and admired Munro’s ability to create universal truths from the smallest of scales. These were stories about work and workers in Ontario; about small towns and seemingly small lives; about the wide open land; about the escape that trains offered; about the claustrophobia of unhappy families, and the wrong people married to each other; about farm work, and making do, and lives uncompleted in so many different ways, particularly focusing on the interior lives of girls and women.
I went on to read many other stories by Munro. They were tight and thought-provoking and carried a wisdom within them. When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, part of her citation read “Master of the contemporary short story”. The media called her “The Canadian Chekhov.”
[ From the archive: Canadian writer Munro wins Nobel literature prizeOpens in new window ]
In March of 2016, I visited my friend of old, Eileen, who lives in Ontario. The two of us went on a road trip. We wanted to pay homage to Alice Munro. Eileen drove us to Wingham, where Munro had been born, and then to Clinton, where she later lived for much of her life, many of those years with her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, whom she married in 1976.
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At Wingham, there was a road sign welcoming us to the birthplace of Munro, and a reading garden outside the library in honour of her. At Clinton, we had coffees in an old-fashioned drugstore that was unchanged from the 1960s, with its vinyl swivel stools and Formica tabletops with a swirling starburst pattern. We wondered if Munro patronised the drugstore, and asked the same thing of the old-fashioned boutique next door. “She used to come in here,” the woman at the boutique told us.
Both Wingham and Clinton were small towns with many shuttered shops. They both felt a little like pioneer towns of old; small places bisected by dusty Main Streets, stranded among vast expanses of empty fields, tumbledown red barns and abandoned outbuildings. The roads ran straight for miles. Railroad tracks arrowed steadfastly through everything we saw as we drove, although we saw no trains. I told Eileen that one of my strongest recollections of reading Alice Munro’s stories were of railways; of people coming and going. This was all Huron County; the real place within which most of Munro’s fiction is set.
At Bayfield, where we stayed in The Little Inn of Bayfield, we visited the Village Bookshop, the only bookshop in the town. There was a photograph of Munro on a shelf, and a few signed copies of her books. We engaged the bookshop person in conversation about Munro, and told her we had gone to Wingham and Clinton earlier that day.
“They didn’t care for her in Wingham,” she told us, meaning the local people. The dated sentence structure delighted us. Eileen and I felt as if we were characters in an Alice Munro story. It became our catchphrase for the rest of our trip. We quoted it, and versions of it, constantly to each other for the next couple of days. Did we care for this or that? What would they think of this or that in Wingham; would they care for it?
Writing in my diary at the time, I wondered if the phrase had come out of a kind of begrudgery that is sometimes innate in small towns towards people who have been born there and gone on to achieve great success. Those also from that small town who don’t shine anything as brightly can feel left behind, or jealous, or indignant.
Alice Munro died in May of 2024. Her second husband had died, aged 88, some 11 years previously, in Clinton. I reread some of Munro’s stories after she died, along with the many obituaries, and felt sad to know that there would never be any more new stories from her.
It’s a myth to think that people who have achieved more in their lives, attained international recognition and success, will behave better in dreadful circumstances than so-called ‘ordinary people’
But two months after Munro’s death there was in fact a sensational new story connected to her, except this one was fact, not fiction. In July, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, wrote a piece that was published in the Toronto Star. In it, Skinner revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her at the age of nine, on a night when she was visiting and her mother was away.
When she went home, Skinner told her stepmother and stepbrother, who in turn told her father, Jim Munro, Alice Munro’s first husband. He chose not to tell his ex-wife. Instead, when Skinner returned to her mother and stepfather the following summer, Jim Munro sent another daughter with her to ensure she was never alone with Fremlin.
Despite this, the abuse continued in various ways. Fremlin exposed himself to her, and propositioned her for sex over the years. Skinner says in her piece that as a teenager, she developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines, which forced her to drop out of college.
When Andrea Skinner was 25, she finally told her mother what her stepfather had done to her. Alice Munro temporarily left Fremlin, and went to stay alone in their holiday apartment on Vancouver Island. Her youngest daughter felt relief that she had finally confided the truth. And then everything went very wrong.
Alice Munro was not the first woman to ever hear that sexual abuse had been perpetrated on a child of hers by the man she was married to. It’s a myth to think that people who have achieved more in their lives, attained international recognition and success, will behave better in dreadful circumstances than so-called “ordinary people”. Munro not only went back to live with Fremlin shortly afterwards, she minimised what had happened to her daughter, then chose to ignore it completely. It was too late, Munro said, to leave her beloved husband now: Skinner had told her too late.
As for Fremlin, he described Skinner as a “homewrecker” in a bizarre letter to the whole family. “I think Andrea has recognised herself to be a Lolita but refused to admit it ... Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure.”
[ ‘My family treated me like a liar when I told them I was sexually abused’Opens in new window ]
The dysfunctionality within the family continued. Andrea Skinner continued to visit her mother and stepfather for several more years. Everyone knew, but nobody said anything. It was only when Skinner had twins in 2002, and she forbade her mother to visit them with Fremlin, that something happened. The something was that Munro told Skinner this would be very inconvenient to her, as Fremlin was the driver in the couple. All contact then ceased between mother and daughter.
Two years later, when Munro gave an interview to the New York Times, lauding Fremlin as a husband, and saying how close she was to her three daughters, an enraged Skinner took action. She went to the police with the letter that Fremlin had sent to the family, and reported the historic abuse. When police arrived at the Munro-Fremlin home to arrest Fremlin, Munro told them that her daughter was a liar.
In March 2005 Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault following an unpublicised court case and was sentenced to two years probation. When I read about that fact when Andrea Skinner’s story broke in July, I thought back to what to the woman in the Village Bookshop in Bayside had told myself and Eileen of Alice Munro when we had visited: “They didn’t care for her in Wingham.” In a town of just one Main Street, it is very likely that local people would have heard about the case in the nearby town of Clinton where famous Alice Munro and her second husband now resided, and of the Munro family rift.
Is it possible to separate the artist from their work? Does, or should, artistic work – Nobel Prize-winning work – exist outside a place of posthumous scrutiny? Yeats asked in his poem, Among School Children: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Alice Munro was capable of writing fiction with great insight, power and empathy about familial dilemmas, and the lives of women, but as a mother she could not summon empathy or support for her own daughter. How can you reconcile these two facts, especially knowing some of these stories were written after Skinner had revealed the abuse? I don’t know.
The literary legacy of the Chekhov of Canada is tainted forever now, in ways both small and large. The Huron County local papers are discussing whether or not to remove the Munro tribute reading garden Eileen and I saw outside the library in Wingham. The Western University in Ontario has since “paused” its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity.
The fact is that everything written about Munro from now on will also record her failure as a parent and as a human being: how she chose to protect her abuser husband over her daughter. Nobel Prize in Literature notwithstanding, Alice Munro leaves behind an ugly legacy.
