What Alice Munro Knew – The New York Times

“My life has gone rosy, once more,” Alice Munro advised a pal in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then rising as considered one of her technology’s main writers, the previous couple of years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of twenty years; a retreat from British Columbia again to her native Ontario; a collection of transient however bruising amorous affairs, during which, it appears, Munro might by no means fairly make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s actual,” she wrote, talking of a brand new romantic companion, the emphasis acknowledging that her pal had heard these phrases earlier than. “He’s 50, free, a superb man if I ever noticed one, robust and mild like within the outdated tire adverts, and that is the large factor — grown-up.”

The man was Gerald Fremlin, a retired civil servant and geographer, who hailed from the identical nook of Ontario as Munro. They could be collectively for almost 40 years, till Fremlin’s dying in 2013. His data of Huron County, the place most of Munro’s fiction is about, grew to become an important useful resource for her work. Munro amassed a thicket of honors, together with the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater, with its “falling-down barns” and “burdensome outdated church buildings,” right into a stage for the entire human comedy, like Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Mississippi. Never one to take herself too severely, she housed her many awards in a revolving spice rack at her second dwelling, a rental on Vancouver Island.

“Luck exists, so does love, and I used to be proper to go after it,” Munro concluded in her letter about Fremlin. The judgment would show untimely. This July, two months after Munro’s dying on the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer time of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to go to Munro and Fremlin at their dwelling in Ontario. (According to her mother and father’ custody settlement, she spent the remainder of the yr in Victoria, British Columbia, along with her father, Jim Munro, and his new spouse.) One evening, whereas Munro was away, Andrea awoke to find that Fremlin had climbed into mattress subsequent to her. He was rubbing her genitals and urgent her hand over his penis. She was 9 years outdated.

Fremlin warned Andrea to not inform her mom: The information would kill her, he stated. Andrea obeyed, however when she returned to Victoria that fall, she confided in her stepbrother, Andrew. Andrew advised his mom, who then advised Jim Munro. Rather than alert his ex-wife, Jim instructed the household to remain quiet. He frightened that the disclosure would wreck Munro’s new relationship and that he would then be blamed. The subsequent summer time, Andrea returned to Ontario accompanied by her older sister Sheila, whom Jim charged with conserving Andrea secure.

For years, Andrea did her finest to guarantee that she was by no means alone with Fremlin, she advised me just lately, however she needed to steadiness her concern in opposition to a competing crucial: to protect her mom from the reality. Munro knew that Andrea liked to swim, so on the events when Fremlin supplied to drive her to a close-by river, it felt inconceivable to refuse with out arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for intercourse. Andrea turned shiny purple as she managed to stroll away. On the drive dwelling, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he discovered his intercourse life with Munro. The harassment ended solely when Andrea reached puberty.