Alice Munro and What Shouldn’t Stay in Writing

What is the ultimate betrayal of confidence that a writer can commit? It’s hard to think of anything worse than what Alice Munro did. The Nobel-prize winner ignored that her long-time partner had sexually abused her own daughter. She then created a version of it in a story for The New Yorker. Munro died in 2024, but she is really coming under fire now.

In 1976, Munro’s daughter, Andrea, visited her in Ontario. One night Andrea woke up to find Gerald Fremlin, her mother’s partner, sexually abusing her. She was 9 years old. Fremlin told her that if she told her mother the news would kill her. Andrea’s father was divorced from Munro and lived in British Columbia. When Andrea returned there and told him what had happened, he advised her to keep quiet. The news would ruin Munro’s writing career. The next summer he sent Andrea back to her mother in Ontario. But this time her older sister went along to protect her. Fremlin still managed to proposition her.

Evidently the fallout contributed to Andrea’s bulimia, insomnia, and migraines. When she was 25, she told Munro what Fremlin had done to her. According to Andrea, Munro felt sorry for herself rather than expressing sympathy for her daughter or outrage at Fremlin. Her mother also hinted that Fremlin had sexually abused other children. As a result, Munro left Fremlin for a few weeks and then took him back as if nothing had happened. In 2002 Andrea blew up about it with Munro and that was the end of their relationship. There was no denying that it had happened In 2005, when Fremlin quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault. He was sentenced to two years of probation.

Margaret Atwood seems to partly excuse her friend by saying that Munro was probably sexually abused as a child. Gropers and peeping Toms were common where Munro grew up. She also said that Munro needed Fremlin because she was unable to function on a practical level without him. What else can you say when your friend is accused of ignoring how her child was abused?

All this happened while Munro was receiving accolades for her masterly short stories. Those stories are full of violated children, negligent mothers, and dysfunctional marriages. One of them, “Vandals,” dealt directly with child abuse. In the story, Munro, the writer, seemed to try to understand the confusion and dependency of two children when one of them was abused by their caretaker. She had great sympathy for these characters. But she apparently repressed any sympathy for what her own child had gone through. Or maybe she was trying to heal herself by writing the story.

It doesn’t surprise me that Munro used aspects of the experience in her stories. All the writers I know use their lives in fiction. Writing a real experience into a story and then changing it allows us to both emotionally feel it and to distance ourselves from it. I certainly take my lived experiences and re-mold them into my novels. This makes the emotions more genuine. It is a way for me to more fully comprehend what happened. And to engineer a different outcome from the one that occurred.

The mother of the great short story writer, Raymond Carver, once said that she’d have an argument with him and then find it printed in a story in the New Yorker a few months later. Carver wrote a wonderful story called “Cathedral.” His partner, Tess Gallagher, later said it was her friend the story was based on. She should have been the one who wrote about it. All the great writers steal from life. Still, I don’t think Alice Munro ignored the sexual abuse of her own child because it would one day make great material. I think she walled it off and immersed herself in her writing cocoon. She felt the emotion while excising it from reality.

She was with Fremlin for nearly 40 years until he died n 2013. Was she so dependent on him that she couldn’t stand being alone? Perhaps he understood and accepted her more than anyone else. Munro must have felt that he’d abused her child a long time ago and had changed. In any case, at one point she pretty much told Andrea that Fremlin came first and her children second.

A mother’s rejection of her husband’s sexual abuse of her child is more common than we think. The author The New York Times Magazine article cites a conclusion from a study done by Judith Lewis Herman. Daughters who told their mothers of the abuse were almost always disappointed in their mothers’ responses. The mothers were too frightened or dependent on their partners to confront their husbands.

Many years ago I talked to a young woman who was raped twice by her father when she was a child. She was so traumatized then that she tried to cut her wrists with scissors. Her family were Christian Scientists, and when she told her mother what had happened, her mother said. “God’s children don’t cut themselves with scissors.”

It’s hard to believe that authors who write such luminous and affecting stories can be just as flawed in their own lives as we are. But some of those weaknesses are more forgivable than others.

For a deeper dive into this unsettling family read Giles Harvey’s essay in The New York Times Magazine of December 15, 2024.