Elizabeth Evans
“But how can this be possible?” I asked after my daughter sent news of Andrea Skinner’s unburdening herself of the secret now generating sorrow, dismay, grief, confusion, and anger—no doubt, I’m not hitting all the emotions—among devoted readers of her mother, the stellar fiction writer Alice Munro. You are probably familiar with Skinner’s story by now and have, like me, even read a few responses to the news, but let me recap:
At the age of nine, while spending the summer with her mother and stepfather, Skinner was sexually assaulted by Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin—then warned by Fremlin that she must not let Munro know as it would “destroy” her.
Skinner, nevertheless, told her stepmother, who told Skinner’s father, who chose not to inform Munro. In fact, Skinner’s father never spoke of the abuse to Skinner and allowed her to return to Munro and Fremlin’s home the following summer in the company of an older sister, who was told never to allow Fremlin to be alone with Skinner. Over the years, Fremlin regularly propositioned Skinner and exposed himself to her—until she became a teenager and no longer of interest to him.
In 1992, at age twenty-five, after years of suffering from this painful secret, and with plenty of evidence to back up her story, Andrea Skinner told Munro of the assault. And what happened? According to Skinner, Munro treated the sexual assault as a humiliating betrayal of herself. She characterized the assault as an “infidelity” on the part of both Fremlin and her daughter. Briefly, Munro left Fremlin, who then wrote to the whole family, threatening to kill himself and Andrea and to publicize photos of the young Andrea that he said were “extremely eloquent.” He did not deny the abuse and, in a misreading of Nabokov’s Lolita, was pleased to compare himself to Humbert Humbert and to characterize nine-year old Andrea as a “Lolita” who had been looking for a “sexual adventure.”
Before long, Munro returned to Fremlin, telling Andrea it was too late for her to leave Fremlin, that she loved him too much, and—in a twisted attempt to make her remaining with Fremlin appear feminist—Munro added "that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I [Andrea Skinner] expected her [Munro] to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.”
In 2004, fourteen years after telling her mother of Fremlin’s abuse, Andrea Skinner—by then estranged from Munro—was so upset by a New York Times magazine profile in which Munro lovingly praised Fremlin, that she took the evidence of Fremlin’s abuse to the authorities. Fremlin pleaded guilty and was convicted, though nothing much came of it. He was eighty and received two years of probation, and there is speculation that a Canadian preference for sweeping unpleasant things under the rug might have kept the word from getting out.
Who knew about the sexual assault or even the later conviction? Close friends say they had no idea, but Skinner’s stepmother says otherwise. Whatever the case may be, in recent years, Skinner and her siblings have come to see that the secrecy surrounding the secret damaged the whole family, and it is essential that this aspect of Munro’s life be made public.
A bit of personal history: I fell in love with Munro’s stories when I was introduced to them at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Soon after, I began teaching her stories, viewing them as “as good as it gets.” Also, many years ago—this seems unimaginable to me now—I got up the nerve to send Munro a story, to which she responded enthusiastically, saying I could send her a story “any time” (I was so shocked—and certain that it would be presumptuous to take her up on her offer—that I never did send her another, but I always remembered her generosity).
What a shock it has been to learn that this wonderful writer could have treated her daughter in such a monstrous fashion! How can it be that a writer who seemed so clear-eyed and wrote with such sympathy for her characters could be so blinded and out of touch in her personal life that she would choose a pedophile over her daughter? Skinner suggests her mother was self-absorbed to an almost pathological degree. Could this have been a by-product of her celebrity? As soon as I read Skinner’s account, I thought of that other great genius, Charles Dickens, and his vanity. Dickens worked tirelessly to uphold his image as the ideal family man—yet when he yearned to be with his young mistress, he convinced his children that their mother was mad and had her put away.
I also have asked: Could Munro’s response to Skinner’s revelation have had anything to do with messages she received as a girl in rural Canada? Plenty of people continue to think of young victims of sexual assault as having “deserved it” or “asked for it.” I was born twenty years after Munro, but when I was thirteen, one of my big sisters—in a real pique—informed me that there was this revolting thing called incest, and if she ever discovered that her husband of the future was sexually involved with their daughter, she would kick that daughter out of the house immediately!
Wait, I thought, hold on! I felt real panic, trying to take in the news of something so awful being done to a daughter, yet here was my sister, saying that if this awful thing happened, she would punish the daughter?
Could Munro, who brilliantly explored the ways in which girls and women were punished and controlled, have had such an idea?
I am scrambling, here, looking for clues for why Munro stayed with Fremlin—not justifications, mind you. Not excuses.
In flipping through some of Munro’s stories after Skinner’s news broke—easy enough as I had The Selected Stories on my bedstand—I came across “Vandals,” published shortly after Skinner told Munro of Fremlin’s abuse. Over the course of the story, we learn that, in the past, the taxidermist Ladner had sexually abused two neighborhood children, Liza and Kenny. The story contains a curious passage that made me wonder: Could these lines reveal something of Munro’s mindset regarding Fremlin?
A woman named Bea—unaware of the sexual abuse and now living with Ladner—wanted to explain to her female friends why she wound-up with a man who appeared “rude and testy and slightly savage,” and she “actually sent letters” to these friends in which she wrote that though “she knew that this was very regressive and bad form” she believed…some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for [the italics in the paragraphs that follow are mine] an insanity that could contain them. For what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity? A man could have a very ordinary, a very unremarkable, insanity, such as his devotion to a ball team. But that might not be enough, not big enough—and an insanity that was not big enough simply made a woman mean and discontented. Peter Parr [a former boyfriend of Bea’s], for instance, displayed kindness and hopefulness to a fairly fanatical degree. But in the end, for me, Bea wrote, that was not a suitable insanity.
What did Ladner offer, then, that she could live inside? She didn’t mean just that she would be able to accept the importance of learning the habits of porcupines and writing fierce letters on the subject to journals that she, Bea, had never before heard of. She meant also that she would be able to live surrounded by implacability, by ready doses of indifference which at times might seem like scorn. (p. 528, Selected Stories)
When I read the above paragraphs, years ago, I did not think, oh, no one could want that! After all, I had known a number of bright, attractive women who had gone out of their way to wind up with truly awful men. I was stopped, however—not just stopped, but repelled—by the character’s bizarre choice of words. Bea wanted to be “contained” by a man’s “insanity”; to be “able to live” surrounded by “ready doses of indifference which at times might seem like scorn.”
At that time, I never considered that the sentiments of Bea might be shared by Munro. Fiction is not autobiography, after all. Still, in searching for some understanding of Munro’s horrible treatment of her daughter, I have wondered if what Munro articulated on behalf of Bea might have contained echoes of Munro’s own thoughts at that moment in her life. The story contains a scene in which Bea is humiliated by Ladner (he makes fun of her in front of the abused Liza); and we who are now aware of Skinner’s story know—so very disturbing!—that Munro felt “humiliated” by Fremlin’s abuse of Skinner. Also, the young Liza dearly loved Bea and hoped Bea would protect her from Ladner; by story’s end, when the adult Liza trashes the home of Bea and Ladner, it is clear to the reader that Bea never woke up (allowed herself to wake up?) to the abuse and so it continued.
“Vandals” suggests that Munro saw the damage Fremlin had done, and that she herself had compounded by choosing him over her daughter. Children’s bones are evoked in a dream of Bea’s at the outset of the story, and there is a glancing but telling mention of Kenny dying young (one of those alcohol-fueled, driving too fast on a gravel road kind of deaths).
If Munro could fully imagine and beautifully structure a sympathetic story in which terrible damage—and its attendant pain—arose from childhood sexual abuse, what stopped her from seeing the same in her life? What allowed this brilliant woman, who ought to have known how to read Lolita, to accept Fremlin’s misreading of the book as a justification for his monstrous behavior? Did she suffer from the sort of crazy thinking we find in Bea’s letters to her friends?
Questions without answers. I don’t foresee myself giving away my Munro books—in fact, in preparation for a trip, I put Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You on my Kindle the day before Skinner’s news broke—but I imagine I will bump up against passages in future re-readings that will rattle or sadden me in entirely new ways.
Elizabeth Evans is the author of six works of fiction: As Good As Dead, Rowing in Eden, Carter Clay, and The Blue Hour; and the short story collections Suicide’s Girlfriend and Locomotion. She is professor emerita in creative writing at The University of Arizona.