This is something I’d thought of writing about ever since in 2024, following the death of the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, it turned out, as her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed in the Toronto Star, one of the worst forms of tragedy and “family secrets” took place within her family years before, all at Skinner’s expense, as her stepfather sexually assaulted her, and one of the worst parts being that her mother chose to remain with the monster until the end of his worthless life.
First, I wish to offer my condolences to Mrs. Skinner, and it’s absolutely terrible this happened. And it’s vital to note that, if there’s any culprit in this whole mess who deserves scorn, condemnation and to be viewed in disgust first and foremost, it’s Fremlin himself, who, as strongly hinted in the essay, was bound to have had several victims years before, and at least one more spoke up shortly after Munro’s passing. Such sadists don’t even deserve a gravesite. But if there’s one more scumbag in this whole sad affair whom we should also be angry about, it’s Skinner’s father, James Munro, who shockingly never took any action against Fremlin, legal or otherwise. And yes, there’s also her other family members, who remained just as silent and passive.
Perhaps the most angering part about the father, who also founded Munro’s Books in the 1960s, could be found in this Air Mail News op-ed by author Daphne Merkin (archive link), who interviewed Alice Munro in 2004 for the NYT magazine, and it says:
She first encountered him and felt an immediate attraction when she was 18-year-old Alice Laidlaw, a scholarship student at the University of Western Ontario and newly engaged to James Munro, a bookstore owner, with whom she would go on to have a 20-year marriage and three daughters. (According to Sheila, the couple argued a lot, not about practical things but about different views of life. “In the arguments, my father was on the side of conformity, conventional values, and conservative politics, and my mother was on the side of individualism, left-wing politics, and rebellion against conventional values.”)
This James Munro was a “conservative”?!? Well, he sure gave the whole standing a very bad name. If anything, he certainly proved even conservatives can do terrible, unspeakably evil things (see also this Federalist article for another example that first occurred around the time of the Bush administration), and by keeping the sexual abuse secret, he, along with any and all other family members who knew about the abuse and concealed it, made themselves just as monstrous as Fremlin was. So of course, even James deserves serious condemnation for his jaw-dropping complicity in silence. I don’t know how adequate the Canadian legal system was at the time, but Mr. Munro should’ve been arrested himself, and charged with concealing a crime, failure to report/prevent a crime, and endangering a minor, which is tragically what he wound up doing by continuing to send his daughter to that hellhole in Ontario.
This article also gives a very eyebrow raising clue as to why Alice was otherwise so tolerant of Fremlin’s evils:
When I asked Munro about her feelings regarding her daughter’s book, she surprised me with her readiness to implicate herself and conceded that Sheila may not have received her best efforts: “She wasn’t the utter joy of my life she might have been.”
A bit earlier Munro admitted she “never had the longing to have children,” and in an interview with The London Free Press in 1974 that I dug up, she said she was glad to have had her children—she had three by the time she was 25—but added, with shocking candor, that “I probably wouldn’t have had them if I had the choice.”
This strongly suggests Munro didn’t give a damn because she never actually wanted children in the first place. Suggesting she was the kind of left-wing feminist who didn’t want children, recalling she was said to be a feminist supporter herself. In Skinner’s essay, it’s indicated the Munro/Fremlin couple had separate beds at one point, and for all we know, it’s probably because in a way, she saw him as an ideal husband based on that they weren’t going to produce any children of their own; none of the reports I’ve seen to date indicate he ever fathered any of his own. I’ve looked at photos of Munro, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some now will say she looks like a “crazy old lady”, who made a Faustian pact at the expense of her family. One more thing here that could be commented upon is:
I recently talked with Charles McGrath, the New Yorker editor who brought Munro to the magazine, despite William Shawn’s misgivings about the roughness and crudeness in her work. McGrath admitted to being “astonished” by the revelations and insisted that there were no clues in the writing, although he also said that “she’s very clear about the bad behavior of men, especially in the early stories.” He commented on how “powerfully under the pavement the sex drive is. In her books, people change their lives overnight because of sex.”
It sounds like somebody doesn’t have the courage to admit the clues were there, and a New Republic op-ed I recently came across gave hints that, even in some of her earlier stories, there were questionable moments (Joyce Carrol Oates also hinted this may be the case). I may have read a few of her stories years before, but after these horrific revelations, I have no interest in reading any more of Munro’s stuff. Besides, as this paragraph from an Atlantic article says:
It’s hardly news that great artists are not always nice people—in fact, quite often, they are very bad people. For me, however, the debate over Alice Munro was not How could a great artist do such a bad thing? It was, This bad thing at last enables me to articulate why I never thought Alice Munro was a great artist in the first place. In my native Canada, Munro was regarded as not only a great talent but also a kind of moral witness. Yet to me, her much-praised short stories always seemed insipid and tedious. Many of them concern unspoken secrets, but the secrets and their aftermath never add up to much: They just sort of hang in the air over some small Canadian town, going nowhere and meaning little. Suddenly, the inconsequentiality of her narratives makes sense; shrugging off big news is how she treated her own most important lifelong secret, after all.
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if much of her fiction, from A to Z, weren’t the big deal some leftist ideologues want everyone think it was. One of the most irritating puff pieces about her work that came out before the scandal was this item, which claims that because Munro’s stories were dark and violent, that somehow makes them great. No, it does not, and viewed now in the context of the sexual abuse scandal, that the writer of the puff piece would make such a claim is even more sickening. National Review also commented on the case, and here’s what their writer says:
“Cancel culture” often produces unwarranted cancellations; some authors, entertainers, or celebrities who have been accused of assault, rape, transphobia, or homophobia have been canceled without evidence to prove the alleged crimes. I had assumed that the literary world (a rather pro-cancel-culture world) would express horror at news that a female author had suppressed and ignored her daughter’s assault. It hasn’t. Not only were Munro and her inner circle complicit in Skinner’s silencing decades ago, but many of Munro’s fans are now excusing her behavior — encouraging one another to separate the art from the artist.
This may be over in the USA, but obviously and sadly, there are some very atrocious leftist sources who’re taking a double-standard when a woman is accused of something offensive as opposed to a man. One of the apologists includes a writer for the Atlantic. This does make clear that whatever effect some assumed the Me Too movement had sadly wasn’t bound to last or be applied consistently. Although the argument about whether to part art from artist is a valid one, the way these ideologues take such a contrasting position to their earlier ones is disturbing, and makes clear they were never altruistic to begin with.
Skinner’s sexual assault was proven. Fremlin was accused and charged; he pled guilty and was sentenced. Yet Skinner’s effort to break the silence on her mother’s complicity in hiding Fremlin’s dirty past hasn’t worked: Munro’s actions are excused by agents, fans, and authors because they supposedly informed her literary genius. Much like the Me Too champions who refused to acknowledge the mass rape of Israeli women on October 7, Me Too advocates seem to have abandoned Andrea Skinner — her story isn’t convenient.
Anyone who fails to prevent a child from being sexually assaulted, or who covers up a child’s sexual assault, deserves no post-mortem glory and no positive legacy. The questions now asked should be: Who knew, and when? The key question is not whether Munro’s work is good enough to withstand her legacy as a silencer. Readers should condemn Munro for defending a pedophile who assaulted her nine-year-old daughter. After Fremlin was charged, “my mother’s fame meant the silence continued,” Andrea wrote. “Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.” Fame continues to overshadow the truth about Alice Munro.
The columnist’s correct about the double-standards when it came to October 7, 2023. Similar double-standards also exist when it comes to Islamic rapists and France and also the terrorist attack on the Bataclan in 2015, and Emmanuel Macron’s done nothing to improve the situation on such matters any more than any previous premiers there.
Something that doesn’t seem to have been brought up in the reports I’ve found so far, as others may have also noticed, is that none of the parents whose children Fremlin preyed upon ever seemed to contact police or take any kind of legal action against him. Making matters additionally chilling, as Jane Morrey, the 2nd known victim of Fremlin, noted in her testimony, is that her mother did a bizarre 360 a number of years afterwards:
Morrey’s parents split up in 1976. Her mother moved to Fergus, Ont. At this point, Morrey recalls, Nellie rekindled her friendship with Fremlin and invited him and Alice Munro over to her house.
“Although I was astounded that she could reconnect with a pedophile, I never said anything,” Morrey says. “I knew instinctively that she would no longer support me. It would be impossible to be friends with them without denying that what he did, by his own admission, was indeed criminal and (had an) impact.”
That renewed friendship, Morrey recalls, was short-lived. “My mother told me that one day Gerry had phoned her from a pay phone as he didn’t want Alice to see her number on their long-distance phone bill.” He told her that when they socialized, especially if certain other women were present, “Alice was consumed with jealousy and made his life miserable.” Fremlin asked Morrey’s mother to end all contact with the couple.
This could explain why no legal complaint was ever filed against Fremlin. It’s as atrocious as it’s bewildering that here, when the parents had a chance to minimize the damage by taking action, legal or otherwise, that could’ve prevented Fremlin from continuing his evil deeds, and perhaps even prevented his marriage to Munro, yet one specific mother actually resumed her friendship with somebody who no doubt befriended her on the knowledge she had a daughter or even a son to prey upon. Fremlin must’ve realized that Jane could’ve done something about him if he continued the friendship, and that could explain why he cut it short.
Now, here’s the account given by Andrea’s sister Jenny:
Later when I heard Dad’s vague version of the abuse (You know little girls, how they flirt and jump around) I ran to the phone to call my mother. He grabbed the receiver from my hand. “Don’t you tell your mother! This would kill her!” — a familiar phrase throughout my childhood. Whenever we misbehaved it was, “You’re killing your mother!”
I let it go. It was a giant, sickening mistake that I still turn over in my mind.
In the next half-hour Dad explained he’d recovered from the emotional breakup with Mom. Now they both had new partners. He was afraid she would crack up and did not want to be blamed for wrecking her new relationship. He also thought Andrea might have made the story up or exaggerated. Last but not least, Mom was famous, and it would be a huge scandal.
And then, here’s the account given by Andrew Sabiston, Andrea’s stepbrother:
Entering our circle, I still believed my young boy’s version of events — that the abuse had been dealt with by the adults. I was shocked to learn the truth. Not only had Jim not contacted Alice, he’d forbidden (his word) my mother and Jenny from contacting her. They’d both argued with him, and been violently yelled at; he feared telling Alice would “kill her.” And, the next summer, the way he dealt with 10-year-old Andrea’s wish to see her mother was to send her older sister Sheila to Ontario with her as her chaperone. Lastly, I was disgusted to hear details about the letters Gerald Fremlin had written. I became profoundly upset at myself for having known about those letters, but never asking to see them. My reaction to seeing photos of excerpts of them printed in the Sunday Star was visceral. I averted my eyes and couldn’t read them. I didn’t want that man in my head, not for a second. But that’s protecting me, not Andrea. I needed to face this monster, and I have now.
This is even more chilling than what the sister told. What Mr. Munro did could be considered coercion, and the stepmother should’ve divorced him on the spot and lodged a complaint with authorities. Note that it sounds like the “dad” himself was also minimizing the issues, and sounds like a very pathetic man, to the point where one could wonder why he even ran a bookstore. He was surely terrified his own career and enterprise would suffer if word got out, and that’s why he didn’t deserve to run any kind of store. Also note that, as Andrea told in her essay, Fremlin was accused later on of another act of sexual intimidation, and Alice Munro didn’t go nuts or anything, though she most certainly did seem to take filthy Fremlin’s word at complete face value, and it sounds like she was just asking the monster to provide her with a statement as a cheap excuse for dropping the subject. What if it turns out one day that Alice Munro and Fremlin conspired to mislead, and deliberately say stuff that was meant to insult Andrea too?
I suppose it’s an interesting question whether Mrs. Munro’s career would’ve suffered permanent damage had the information come out earlier in the late 1970s. Presumably, she would’ve been forced to distance herself from Fremlin if it had regardless. For now, what’s atrocious is how an author’s career was valued far more than an innocent and defenseless girl’s dignity. This may have been the mentality at the time. But that still doesn’t make it excusable.
Now, in this article, it tells of an employee at Munro’s Books who quit after the scandal became widely known, and that:
Elias, who is also a writer, had considered Munro a feminist icon and deeply identified with her on a personal level.
She says it had been part of every employee’s job to tout the store’s connection with Munro and she was deeply troubled to learn she’d been kept in the dark about the truth.
She acknowledges that the store has taken steps since the truth came out, including a new display that features books about healing from sexual trauma, but she feels Munro’s has failed to adequately acknowledge its historical complicity.
Feeling “disgusted,” she quit her dream job after nearly a decade.
“I thought it was disingenuous to pretend that we didn’t have a deeper connection and investment in that lie, that legend,” she said.
She says several employees, also rattled by the story, worked together with her on an email reaching out to Skinner, and two employees confirmed to CBC News that the store’s handling of the situation influenced their decisions to quit.
While I appreciate that said employees let Skinner know they stand behind her, as does the store’s current ownership, I still think it would be best to change the store’s name entirely, and any upper echelons who knew about the details prior to the scandal’s official publication did not help matters at all. Seriously, this is enough to boycott the store altogether. All that aside, is feminism the answer to everything? Does it even make one a better person? Unfortunately, as Munro herself proved, the short answer is “no”.
Next, here’s what The Monthly of Australia had to say about Munro, and much like the aforementioned Atlantic contributor, even this guy may not be impressed with her stuff:
Having read and re-read Alice Munro’s stories for almost 30 years, I’ve often laughed at the laurel most frequently bestowed on her: the near obligatory claim that the late Canadian short-story writer was “our Chekhov”. If Chekhov, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, wrote “sad books for humorous people” – if he achieved beauty by “keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of grey, a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud” – Munro wrote shocking, vividly coloured books for grown-ups. Her favoured landscapes may have been Canadian and small-town rural, her brushstrokes calm and evenly applied, but her palette verged on lurid. What makes her stories so riveting is not, of course, limited to one quality – she is too good for that – but it is often her feeling for what is vulgar, macabre and disturbingly sexual. […]
In one of Munro’s most controversial early stories, “Wild Swans” (1977), her recurrent young protagonist, Rose, is caught between lurid warnings from her stepmother as to the dark agendas of men, her own erotic curiosity and her disgust at the animal mechanics of sex: “It was pitiful, infantile, this itching and shoving and squeezing. Spongy tissues, inflamed membranes, tormented nerve-ends, shameful smells, humiliation.” On a long train trip, Rose is seated next to a man who declares himself to be an off-duty Uniting Church minister. After some time, Rose feels something touch her. She wonders if it might be the man’s hand. The possibility is alarming. But the thought also (and who but Munro would even go here?) sends her into a meandering erotic reverie about men’s hands and “everything they could do”. And so it is that moments later Rose is imagining her French teacher “lapping and coiling his way through slow pleasures, a perfect autocrat of indulgences. She had a considerable longing to be somebody’s object. Pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted.”
I don’t remember passages like this in Chekhov. There are times, in fact, when you don’t know what to do with what Munro has just described. If you’re on a bus or train, you can only hope that someone isn’t reading over your shoulder. Munro’s sophisticated sense of structure and viewpoint will likely sustain college tutorials well into the 22nd century. But her raw power is this frank, unshockable approach to what is most furtive and disgusting in human relations. Her shamelessness, to put it plainly, about shame itself.
Undoubtably, there’s all sorts of books and other publications that’re too embarrassing to be read in public.
Next is what a Canadian police inspector had to say about Munro herself:
The Ontario Provincial Police detective was invited into the white cottage-style home in Clinton, Ont. Inside, he informed the couple that he intended to charge Fremlin with sexually abusing Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner.
Thirteen years earlier, Skinner had written a letter to her mother describing how Fremlin had molested her in an upstairs bedroom of the home where the author now stood alongside her 80-year-old husband, facing the detective.
Fremlin “didn’t say a word and just kind of stood there,” retired OPP detective Sam Lazarevich said.
Munro exploded.
She went “sideways, totally against her daughter, and all pro for him,” Lazarevich recalled this week. Munro was “yelling, she was mad,” accused her daughter of lying and called her names, he said.
[…] “I couldn’t wrap my head around her attitude,” he said. “If I would have had one of Alice’s books at home, I would have … in the trash can,” he said — demonstrating a gesture of tossing a book into a garbage can.
“From that point on, until she passed away, she’d be getting different awards and honours, and it always bugged me. It bugged me for years.”
And this is why the whole notion anybody would keep quiet about her is all the more sad. While her 1st husband has serious blame to shoulder, it’s understandable why the behavior of the mother has disturbed everyone – because she added insult to injury, all those years after the terrible incidents first began, and even then, she never seemed to care. Her biographer, Robert Thacker, made things worse with his own silence on the issues, and he even tried to make excuses in an interview with The Walrus:
And that was your only contact with Andrea?
Yes, until my book was just about finished. It was in production. So this is summer 2005. And out of the blue, I got an email from Jenny telling me about the abuse, as a confidential matter, and also that Andrea would be writing to me directly regarding it. I then received an email from Andrea on July 1, 2005—the same day, as it happened, that I received the book’s page proofs from the publisher for review. She told me about Fremlin’s abuse, something of the situation in the family during the years that followed, and of her bringing charges and the court’s action convicting him earlier that year. She wanted me to pull the book off the press and turn it into a very different kind of book in light of this information. She wanted her story to be told.
And that’s when you decided against including it?
Yes. But before I did, I explained that my book was focused on her mother’s experiences as a writer and drew on archival and published sources—that Alice’s personal life, while certainly a consideration, was secondary. I know people now think, well, why the hell didn’t he include it? Particularly when I updated the book in 2011. The reason was that I hadn’t written a traditional biography that focuses on the daily doings of its subject. Anybody who actually looks at the thing can see that—and since Andrea’s story first appeared in the Star, I’ve been questioned by lots of people who clearly haven’t looked at the book, let alone read it.
Wait a second. Is this a biography or an instruction manual? Whatever, I think he was resorting to all too convenient excuses for explaining why he wouldn’t at the very least note that the 2nd husband Munro seemed to worship like a master was in fact a monster. When I checked the Amazon sales page for the book, it noted Fremlin was a subject of the book, so what’s the point? And I wonder how Thacker feels now that the biography’s quite likely to have plummeted in sales, assuming it’s still in print at all. The real reason he didn’t say anything was because money mattered, not justice and morality.
Someday, it’s possible Munro will be viewed as one of the most overrated frauds of her time, the kind of charlatan who only got as far as she did based on the left-liberal visions she went by. One of the articles written about this whole flap stated it’s possible people’s views of her books might improve over time, and maybe they will, but it still won’t excuse that she herself was quite a monster, and totally contradicted whatever messages she was relaying in her short stories. Amazingly, in Canada there has been some responsibilities taken, as the Indigo bookstore removed her portraits, and a literary convention named after her decided to close down, now that her reputation’s been tarnished. See also this op-ed by author Linda Svendsen. If anything’s clear now, it’s that as of today, Munro’s “legacy” is gone, and will never fully recover. And seriously, what does it matter if it never does?
Occasional Books 