**Trigger Warning - this post talks about childhood trauma and sexual abuse**
“That where there was silence, there will be speech. That where there were secrets, I will make way for the complicated truth.” Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body.
Oh Alice. What have you done?
A bomb went off in the literary world this week. Its reverberations are wider and deeper than one realizes and will be undulating through media, publishing, academia and beyond for years to come.
I am speaking of the revelations of literary giant and Nobel laureate, Alice Munro’s youngest daughter Andrea Robin Skinner, who in a first-person essay,1 documented her story about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her step-father Gerald Fremlin. She was 9-years-old and visiting her mother in Ontario for the summer. She describes how he molested her, spoke to her about his sex life with her mother and the other girls he liked in the neighbourhood. You have to imagine there were others.
For her, the sexual assault was the first in a string of abuse and neglect she would suffer at the hands of her family for decades to come.
She is telling her story, completing a narrative she’s desperately tried to tell for years, but no one was listening. She must have felt like a ghost, transparent and unimportant. Her life not worth the trouble of tainting an icon’s work and legacy. She was sacrificed at the altar of literature and the need for those in Alice’s orbit—her own family included, for Alice’s work, those inestimable short stories to continue unabated. Andrea’s experience became the one short story Alice couldn’t, didn’t or refused to write.
Shining the light in the shadows
Bringing the abuse to light, she not only shares the horrifying details of the abuse, but what happened after and the fallout in the enduring the silence.
When she returned home to Victoria, BC, she told her step-mother who told her father, businessman Jim Munro. He made a fateful decision all those decades ago, to stay silent and not to tell Alice what happened to their daughter at the hands of her husband.
My mind gets stuck on the fact that her father continued to send her to Ontario to visit her mother and abusive step-father, AFTER he knew what happened and didn’t bother to alert her mother.
Much has been made of Alice being told much later—16 years after the abuse first started, leaving Fremlin for a short time, but ultimately choosing to go back to him, staying with him until his death in 2013. But, what of Andrea’s father?
Andrea was failed by many people over the years. Despite her desperate efforts for someone to hear her, believe her, protect her—no one did.
In the days following her bombshell revelation, it’s shocking to realize it has been known by enough people outside the family—her biographer in particular, that it has taken 50 years for the secret to see the light of day.
It’s mind-boggling really.
As a young woman of 25, she finally told her mother, who took it as Andrea feared she would take it; “My mother reacted as if she had learned of an infidelity. I had a sense that she was working hard to forgive me.”
In the early 2000’s, prompted by a statement made by her mother in an interview describing her husband Gerry as “gallant,” Andrea went to the police and in 2005 Fremlin was charged with indecent assault and sentenced to two years’ probation. It’s a matter of public record.
And STILL we didn’t know.
How is this possible?
It’s applying today’s sensibilities and social consciousness to events from the 1970’s. Looking through the lens of the times, it’s easier to understand the initial silence, but not the silence that followed in the 2000’s.
Andrea has created a wave of memories and flashbacks from family secrets for a generation of women who grew up in her era. A generation of young girls who told of their abuse and their mothers, fathers, families, did nothing. She is not alone. The heartache she so bravely exposed to the world, has cracked open a crevice that many of us are tumbling down with her.
Her bravery has sparked conversations that have been decades in coming. Sisters, cousins, friends, sending each other the story in unspoken solidarity. Saying to each other, I see you. I see you Andrea. I see my fellow Andrea’s. I feel your pain, sorrow, confusion, shame, guilt, isolation, your attempts to breathe a full breath of clean air.
The weight of a family secret is a burden no one should carry.
A confluence of stories
At the same time, I’m reading The Fact of a Body, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. It was recommended by
during a hybrid memoir workshop she held.It is about a murder and it’s a memoir. The author is a newly minted lawyer who works on a case defending a pedophile who murders a young boy in Louisiana. She becomes consumed by the convicted murderer, his family history, the young victim and his mother. Her work opens her own deep and wide crevice which she falls into as she relives her own trauma of being molested by her grandfather.
She explores family histories—that of the murderer and her own. The silence that ensued during her life, even after she told her parents about the abuse. How life continued and the grandfather was never held to account. Not in any meaningful way.
Reading Andrea’s story, reading Alexandria’s story, reading Alice Munro’s short stories. Re-living my own story.
The victims, the enablers, the silent partners, the damage, the normalcy.
The silence.
My family’s secret is incest, going back at least three generations. I know bits and pieces that I learned as I became old enough to put the puzzle together. To ask the questions. To expose and bring to light what was a secret in our family. What people knew, but refused to acknowledge.
I couldn’t help but feel like a silent sister to Andrea and Alexandria. I am both a victim and an enabler. I am a sufferer of child sexual abuse and part of the cone of silence regarding the abusers.
Andrea’s revelations about her mother dropped while I am devouring all things, Alice Munro. Trying to make up for decades of avoiding her after early attempts in University made it clear, I had no idea what she was talking about and couldn’t possibly understand as an 18-year-old freshman2.
I blasted through Munro’s oldest daughter, Sheila Munro’s memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, I am in the middle of reading a second anthology of her stories from 1968-1994 and had just started reading Robert Thacker’s biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives.
Educating myself on “Canada’s Chekhov” now that she is dead.
How am I to continue to read her after this news?
Alice Munro’s esteemed biographer, Robert Thacker, says Andrea called him as his book was going to print in 2005 and he didn’t include the information. Let me tell you, this book is a TOME. It is 600 pages and the size of a brick. He has chronicled Alice’s history and family tree in intricate detail. I would argue we could have used less genealogy from Alice’s great- great-grandmothers and grandfather’s and more about present day family—including Andrea’s crucially important story about her mother.
The nuance this adds to Alice’s already complicated, subtle and layered short stories cannot be understated. I’m finding it difficult to continue with Thacker’s book and have put it aside. How can I trust what else is missing from this story when something as vital as her own daughter’s experience doesn’t make the cut?
He was quoted in a recent article saying he and Alice spoke of the abuse and the estrangement. It’s not in his book and he’s refusing to reveal what she said during their conversations. She’s dead now, he’s a biographer. A professor and expert on Canadian literature. I think to truly know and understand Alice and her work, it would be crucial to know her thoughts.
In absence, it’s safe to say, whatever she discussed, couldn’t have been very flattering to the author herself, or I believe Thacker would be speaking about it now.
Alice chose her husband over her child. She chose silence.
As did Alexandria’s mother.
As did mine.
A failure of many, a survivor of much
I feel for Andrea. I cheer for Andrea. I understand Andrea. I am a version of Andrea.
She was failed by so many. She was ignored by the people that mattered most to her. She made a life for herself and brought healing to her own trauma. She’s a survivor and she’s going to ensure that any story of her mother is the full picture. Not the saintly version we have been fed over the ensuing months since her mother’s passing, but the full version of a flawed and complicated woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a Nobel laureate.
I see you Andrea. You deserve to be known and seen in this narrative. I applaud you. I’m sorry this happened to you and you had to be alone and estranged from your family for decades as they chose silence and the protection of your mother over you.
When people are famous, the amount of protection and tippy towing around them that is done is ridiculous. People are afraid to offend, to hurt, to lose the light that shines their way when they are in proximity to the famous person. But, in the end, you lose yourself. You get subsumed by the other person and you get lost. Andrea got lost in the Alice Munro myth.
She’s brought the myth of her mother into the light of day and that’s OK. We may wish we didn’t know, but that would be to ignore the lives of the girls and women that Alice Munro was so desperately trying to demonstrate to us.
The article in the Toronto Star is paywalled. Here is another piece she wrote earlier in a blog post for The Gatehouse. https://thegatehouse.org/andrea-to-heal-is-truth-peace/
My post about re-visiting Alice Munro after her death.
I have very strong feelings about this.
Years ago, when Woody Allen hooked up with his step-daughter and was accused by another daughter of sexual abuse, it tainted his body of work for me. I was a huge fan, and he is far more celebrated and famous than Alice Munro.
People will argue that Alice Munro was not the abuser, but an enabler. I almost feel that is worse, or at least as bad. I'm not familiar with her work and I'm not interested. Like Woody Allen, she was able to work and be recognized because she let her own daughter be sexually abused by her husband.
I have no doubt she knew it was going on at the time in her own home. It's generous to say she wasn't told about it until years later, but that's bullsh*t. I was never sexually abused, but the thought of someone in my own home abusing my son fills me with a rage I cannot explain. Children are to be protected, period.
This has been very hard news to take. Abuse is awful enough, but it's intolerable that Andrea remained silent and isolated all that time, when her story should never have been separated from her mother's. The next biographer will start with this. The Thacker biography will be the one people go to for details about how Munro managed to make it to such a level of prominence from no knowledge or connections in publishing. (A month ago, those were interesting questions; right now, they are pushed to the side.) Someone else's biography will help us understand what happened in the family.
I'm sorry that your story has any overlap with Andrea's. That's a lot to unlearn. ❤️🩹