This week, in a devastating story about Alice Munro’s complicity in the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter, we discovered how Munro, a Nobel Prize-winning author acclaimed for her uniquely Gothic interpretation of women’s lives, actually lived her feminism.
In a first-person essay in the Toronto Star, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner details the years-long sexual abuse by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, beginning when she was nine years old. In an earlier essay, Skinner wrote: “The sexual abuse of a child is a rape of the mind, in which any fledgling tools for healing are stolen.”
Although Skinner told her father, Jim Munro, he inexplicably chose to keep it a secret from his ex-wife. He somehow thought he could protect his daughter from a distance while still permitting her to visit her mother and stepfather. The abuse persisted in multiple ways and Skinner was left alone to cope.
