Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who won the Nobel Prize for her short stories, packed into their slender boundaries all the heft of a novel. She was a writer who inspired enormous loyalty in her readers, but that devotion will be tested by the revelation made this weekend by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerard Fremlin, Munro’s second husband, and that Munro, when told, did nothing about it. As Andrea wrote in a coruscating op-ed in the Toronto Star this weekend, her mother “chose to stay with and protect my abuser.”
Munro’s stories have been revered for their quiet wisdom and epiphanic grace. Her calm and smiling face in photographs reinforce the idea of a secular saint. Munro. who died in May aged 92, had even written a short story in which a young woman commits suicide because she has been sexually abused by her stepfather. And yet, when her youngest daughter told her what Fremlin had done to her, the Nobel Prize winner’s reaction was not to grieve for her child, but to complain of Fremlin’s infidelity to her.
Fremlin reacted to the accusations by insisting that the 9-year-old Andrea had been the sexual predator who had forced herself on him. He even called the little girl a “homewrecker.” The situation is creepily reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, where the pedophile Humbert Humbert marries Charlotte Haze so that he can be closer to her 12-year-old daughter Dolores, aka Lolita.
