The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.” The judgment would prove premature. In July 2024, two months after Munro’s death at age 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name's Giles Harvey, and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine,
0:10.6	where I often cover literature and the literary world.
0:14.7	For many years, one of my favorite authors has been Alice Monroe, the Canadian short story writer. Like a lot of people, I came to think of
0:24.7	Monroe as perhaps the greatest English language writer of her time. She won just about every award
0:31.6	a writer could win, including the Nobel Prize. And when she died last May at the age of 92,
0:39.3	there was a huge outboring from admirers,
0:42.3	people not only celebrating her work,
0:45.3	but also saying what a decent person she seemed to have been.
0:50.3	She had an almost saintly reputation.
0:53.3	In fact, in Canada, she was widely known as St Alice.
0:58.1	So what we learned about her after her death was incredibly shocking.
1:05.0	Two months after she died, an essay came out in the Toronto Star.
1:10.3	It was written by Monroe's youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner,
1:14.3	and in the essay, Andrea revealed that she was sexually abused as a child
1:18.9	by Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin.
1:23.7	Andrea kept the abuse secret from her mother for many years
1:27.0	because she believed it would devastate her.
1:30.1	But when she finally did tell her mother,
1:32.7	Monroe responded coldly,
1:34.7	as though Andrea had somehow betrayed her.
1:38.3	Monroe ultimately chose to remain with her husband.
1:42.6	Like everyone else, I was shocked and enraged when I read these revelations.
	...

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