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Additional dismay reverberated through the literary world on Tuesday as it came to light that a biographer and others had known for years that Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, who died in May at 92, had long kept secret that her second husband sexually abused one of her daughters.
An extra shock was Skinner’s claim that some who knew Munro had been aware of the story for years.
Robert Thacker, a Canadian academic and author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, said that he expected this revelation and its fallout to happen.
“I knew this day was going to come,” Thacker told The Washington Post on Monday, later adding, “I knew that it was going to come out, and I knew that I would be having conversations like this.”
Thacker said that Skinner wrote to him about her experience in 2005, after she had contacted police about Fremlin and as Thacker’s book was going to press. He decided not to act on the information.
“Clearly she hoped – or she hoped at that time, anyway – that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”
“As Alice’s Canadian editor and publisher, I was aware that Alice and Andrea were estranged for a number of years,” Douglas Gibson wrote in an email responding to an interview request from The Post. “In 2005, it became clear what the issue was, with Gerry Fremlin’s full shameful role revealed, but I have nothing to add to this tragic family story and have no further comment to make.”
Others close to Munro expressed great surprise. “I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying,” Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a friend of the author’s, said in an email to The Post.
Thacker said that he and Munro spoke about the matter in 2008, when they met in a restaurant for an interview. Munro asked him to turn off his recorder. He declined to describe the conversation in detail, but said that Munro informed him that, in 1992, when Skinner was 25, she told Munro about the abuse. Munro said that she had left Fremlin for a time and that she ultimately decided to return.
“In a case like this, I wasn’t prepared to be probing,” Thacker said, later adding: “The term she used was, she was ‘devastated.’ And she was devastated. It wasn’t anything she did. It was something he did.” A story by two reporters at the Toronto Star described how Fremlin had written letters admitting to the abuse and pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2005.
According to Thacker, it was broadly understood that Munro drew from events in her life for her 1993 story “Vandals,” about a woman who represses the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children: “Those of us who (study) Alice, or have (studied) Alice, have always thought that this story directly connected to this whole issue.”
Skinner, who did not return The Post‘s request for comment, wrote in her essay that her mother’s fame meant that the silence about her abuse extended beyond her family: “Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.”
Others who worked closely with Munro knew about Skinner’s experience, Thacker said: “Certainly people knew there was a burden she was dealing with.” He declined to name specific individuals, but said that he had spoken with a colleague about their anticipation that Munro’s family secret would be shared with the world, and that both had resolved to confirm that they had known earlier.
Penguin Random House Canada did not return a request for comment. When contacted by The Post, Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at the New Yorker, which first published many of Munro’s stories, declined through a spokesman to comment.