The Alice Munro Controversy

A ndrea Skinner, the daughter of acclaimed Canadian novelist and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, revealed this week in the Toronto Star that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her starting in 1976, when she was nine years old. In 1992, Munro learned of the abuse; she did nothing to address it and lived the life of an adored literary icon, alongside Fremlin, far away from her estranged adult daughter.

Twenty-five-year-old Skinner told Munro about the abuse after Munro shared with her a short story in which a girl commits suicide after her stepfather sexually abused her. Munro had asked her daughter why the girl in the story wouldn’t just tell her mother. Skinner took it as a sign and wrote her mother a letter doing just that. In return, Munro “said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men,” Skinner wrote in her Toronto Star essay. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Publishers and authors have since corroborated Skinner’s account. “Everybody knew,” Skinner’s stepmother said. Munro’s editor and publisher, Douglas Gibson, knew in 2005, when “it became clear what the issue was, with Gerry Fremlin’s full shameful role revealed.” Munro’s biographer, Robert Thacker, said, “I knew that it was going to come out.” When Thacker’s biography was going to press, in 2005, Skinner wrote to him about her experience, the Washington Post reported. Thacker did nothing.

“In a case like this, I wasn’t prepared to be probing,” Thacker told the Post of a conversation he and Munro had in 2008. “The term [Alice] used was, she was ‘devastated.’ And she was devastated. It wasn’t anything she did. It was something he did.”

Munro died in May. She can’t defend herself against Skinner’s story, but she wouldn’t be able to even if she were alive. In 2005, after Skinner went to the police, Fremlin, then 80, admitted to having sexually abused her and pled guilty to indecent assault. He received a suspended sentence and two-year probation. Skinner didn’t think Fremlin much of a threat then at his age — she just wanted the abuse on-record. Skinner’s latest piece reveals not the abuse itself (though it does go into details) but rather Munro’s awful, cold, manipulative way of handling the sexual assault of her daughter by the man she loved.

“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.

The Atlantic published a piece telling fans to keep reading Munro’s stories. Cancel culture at first, explains Atlantic staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez, offered the world an effective way to throw out bad actors:

We rip the artist from their pedestal and cast the films, music, novels, paintings, clothing that we formerly admired into the nearest cultural refuse bin. We do so with such great public ceremony that even engaging with the contents of the bin thereafter, even trepidatiously approaching it, becomes a violation. There are now scores of films we should not watch, albums we should not stream, and brands we should not wear.

At first, cancellations were “thrilling,” Gonzalez writes. They’ve since become “unsustainable.”

Skinner’s account has changed things, Gonzalez says. Now that a darling such as Munro has committed a cancelable act, the ideology is inconvenient: “In the gray and nauseating light of the Munro revelations, we can perhaps see a different answer to the question of how to separate the art from the artist: We can exalt the art without deifying the artist.”

Past Pulitzer finalist Rebecca Makkai posted about the scandal on X, saying, “I love her work so much that I don’t want to lose it, but am horrified to see the meanings of many favourite (foundational, to me) stories shift under us.” Acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates tried to contextualize Munro’s works, posting on X: “If you have read Munro’s fiction over years, you will see how often terrible men are valorized, forgiven, enabled. There seems to be a sense of resignation, almost ‘men will be men’ attitude — not in all the stories but in some.” Canadian academics are “grappling” — as a Globe and Mail headline put it — with how to teach Munro’s work.

Should people cease to love Munro’s art? A good thing to come out of Me Too was that women felt free to break their past silence on sexual assault; it was too late, for some, to matter, and some stories were too unreliable to believe. Me Too applied the freedom to accuse too liberally, and the movement allowed individuals to charge others with heinous deeds without proper evidence. That was the movement’s failure. In many cases, though, Me Too outed pedophiles and assaulters who deserved public shame.

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.