Ignored, erased, silenced: the cost of speaking up about abuse
The many losses surrounding Alice Munro, and her daughter's ongoing fight to be heard
Trigger Warning: this article discusses sexual abuse.
If you follow the news in the literary world you’ll already be aware of the shocking story about Canadian author Alice Munro which recently came to light. Munro is a revered Nobel Prize winning author and acknowledged master of the short story, who died in May 2024 aged 92. However, in the aftermath of Munro’s death, her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner came forward to reveal that Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin had abused her as a child. Skinner had not approached her mother with these revelations until she was in her early twenties, fearing her mother’s reaction. However, when Munro wrote a short story about a girl who committed suicide after being sexually abused by her stepfather, Skinner hoped Munro might understand. Nevertheless, she approached the subject tentatively. ‘I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,’ Skinner wrote in a letter to Munro in 1992.
Skinner’s concern was justified, because things didn’t go well. According to reports, Munro initially left her husband but then returned. Skinner recalls Munro’s reasoning in her recent essay: ‘she said she had been “told too late”, she loved him too much, and our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. … She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.’
Skinner and Munro became estranged after Skinner had children and wouldn’t let Fremlin near them. A few years later, after reading an article in which Munro heaped praise on her husband, Skinner went to the police with evidence of the abuse, including letters Fremlin had written blaming Skinner for seducing him. In 2005, Fremlin, then 80, pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence. Alice Munro stayed with him until he died in 2013.
Skinner explained that she had pursued the case through the courts because ‘I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.’
This has all been heavily reported over the past couple of weeks, so you might wonder why I writing about this too? It’s because I believe there are two critical cultural discussions that should be had in light of this revelation, and the less important reckoning is overshadowing the one that is vital.
The first widely debated topic concerns all of us, as we grapple with what Alice Munro’s work, which has meant so much to so many, can continue to mean in light of these revelations. Can the art still stand when the reputation of the artist shatters? Personally, I don’t think her work can ever be read in the same way, because the most magical authors don’t just spin pretty pictures with their words, they help readers feel understood and seen. And through this, they can even save lives. I don’t mind if the authors I admire are wrestling with the confusing paradoxes and contradictions in our culture, the frailty and failings of our common humanity, but I want to know that they care about pursuing deeper truths, and don’t run from them. So while the choices Munro made are one thing, her outward lack of reflection is hard too – giving us so little to go by as we look to understand her decisions. None of us can know what Munro went through in silence as a result of her stance, but it is crushing for her readers to be confronted with this dark dynamic behind Munro’s work, fracturing the transcendent impact of her art with the blunt force of awful, contrary reality.
In the last couple of weeks, many of the articles I’ve read, while quoting and empathising with Skinner, are essentially grappling with the personal and cultural disappointment and confusion following Munro’s sudden and shocking fall from grace. Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro’s, described herself as ‘blindsided’, writing, ‘Why did she stay? Search me. I think they were from an age and generation that shoveled things under the carpet. … You realise you didn’t know who you thought you did.’ These valid, important discussions are a place to start, but they leave us in danger of centring Munro, and others’ reactions to Munro, within such stories, rather than focusing on Skinner. Troubling questions also lurk behind this commentary. Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker admitted knowing about the case around the time he published his first book, but said, ‘In a case like this, I wasn’t prepared to be probing.’ About Munro he added, ‘The term she used was, she was “devastated.” And she was devastated. It wasn’t anything she did. It was something he did.’
It appears that the same justification used by Munro was taken up by many others to extend the silence around Skinner’s experiences, even though they expected the story to come out at some point. Skinner’s stepmother told the Star that ‘Everybody knew,’ and yet somehow the guilty plea didn’t reach much beyond the courthouse in Goderich Ontario. I am in no way condoning Munro’s choices when I ask if she should be shouldering the blame for this silencing alone? Is our myopic focus on Munro an easy way out of more difficult conversations around the lack of support for the voices of those abused, as well as those struggling to respond to such news? Is it too cynical to add that many others would have also lost money and status if these revelations were more generally known? Is it too much to suggest that ongoing silence becomes a lazy, easy choice, when to speak means siding with a victim whose voice will test many assumed truths? And what of the fact that, back in 2013, when Munro won the most esteemed literary prize on earth, Atwood observed that there was already a sense of her ‘slipping away’. This references the dementia that Munro is said to have suffered from for years. In other words, perhaps Munro hasn’t been in charge of her own narrative for a long time. If so, who has?
Which brings me to the underacknowledged but vital takeaway from this story: the many layers of heartbreak endured by Skinner, the victim at the centre of it all. First, there were all the horrific experiences she endured, from nine years old, initially staying silent to keep the peace for the family. Then there’s the ongoing pain of Skinner as a young woman, and the rifts with her loved ones because of what had happened to her. (She told her father as a child, but he did not stop it. She told her mother and they remained estranged until Munro died. Thankfully her siblings reached out in 2014 and have come out strongly in support of her.) There’s the outrage of Skinner’s abuser pushing back at her, claiming that it was her fault, because she was seducing him. All in all, when you truly consider the depth of the gaslighting she endured, it is a wonder she survived it. And after this there are more lost years where, instead of being free to build her own life and focus on her young children, she was instead pursuing the retraumatising rigours of a court case in the hope of getting a guilty verdict, to prove her story, no doubt as part of a life-saving battle to reclaim her self-worth. ‘I wanted to speak out. I wanted to tell the truth. That’s when I went to the police to report my abuse,’ Skinner recalls. ‘For so long I’d been telling myself that holding my pain alone had at least helped my family, that I had done the moral thing, contributing to the greatest good for the greatest number. Now, I was claiming my right to a full life, taking the burden of abuse and handing it back to Fremlin.’ And, she adds, ‘What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me.’
Even after all of Skinner’s efforts, for the past twenty years the record was never really corrected. Instead, her experiences remained mostly erased from the public story of Munro’s life, in part because of a much wider complicity of silence. As Skinner says in her essay: ‘Many influential people came to know of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.’ This is surely what we must focus on now, when we consider Munro’s art: Skinner trapped inside it, her pain enmeshed in each portrayal of an unseen woman or child, forgotten behind the glory of a perfect sentence, and lost within our culturally constructed narrative of an authorial genius beyond reproach. Surely the abused child that became such a brave woman must finally take centre stage in this convoluted, heartbreaking real-life story – not least because, after all that she’s endured, Skinner has still found the strength and courage to write about her ordeal not in terms of revenge, but through steadfastly pursuing truth, clarity and accountability.
It’s vital that those of us who write about the way language is used, particularly around women’s experiences, keep on highlighting this. Because even after all Skinner’s attempts at correcting the record – including the rigours of a court case, a guilty plea and a conviction - an insidious theme ran through some of the articles over the last few weeks. Small phrases like ‘Skinner alleged’ show that it is all too easy to re-insert the question marks, to suggest that perhaps we should still not fully believe her.
To this I say that no one should underestimate the courage it’s taken Skinner to reach this point, to write about her trauma, to relive her pain again and again in an attempt to correct the narrative and ensure that her own life and truth matters too. In doing so, she speaks up not just for herself but for all those going through similar ordeals. As a society we make it very easy to avoid difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths, leaving those like Skinner enduring their nightmares alone. If there is something to take away from this, perhaps the art we’ve just lost should matter much, much less than the voice we have finally heard.
A selection of media articles, including those referenced (some paywalled):
Alice Munro’s husband abused her daughter, family reveals (thestar.com)
Alice Munro: Literary World Rocked by Daughter’s Abuse Revelation | TIME
A Silence Is Shattered, and So Are Many Fans of Alice Munro - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Colleagues of writer Alice Munro say they knew of abuse in her family - The Washington Post
Gutwrenching. Thanks Sara.
This was such a sad read although it does sound like Skinner has been able to heal, speak her truth, reconcile with her siblings and create a good life for herself, even as (quite rightly) she became estranged from her mother to protect her children. What I find strange is how Alice Munro is being portrayed as a villain by many while in the same week or two Neil Gaiman's transgressions are swept neatly under the carpet, never to be spoken of again. It's almost as if there are two standards?!