Literary world shocked by abuse revelations

Late author knew husband sexually assaulted her daughter, family told Star

- ANDY TAKAGI AND GHADA ALSHARIF

Revelations that Nobel laureate Alice Munro was aware her husband had sexually abused her daughter but didn’t act on that knowledge have surprised the literary world and cast a devastating shadow over the Canadian author’s iconic work.

In a story and first-person essay for the Star over the weekend, Andrea Skinner revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had started sexually abusing her when she was nine years old.

Despite telling her mother and her father, Jim Munro, about the abuse, neither parent acted, Skinner wrote.

The news has drawn an anguished mix of reactions, with some struggling to hold their fondness for the writer’s stories in one hand, and the news of her daughter’s horrendous suffering in the other.

Munro herself died in May. Fellow Canadian writing icon Margaret Atwood was a close friend, and told the Star she was “shocked” when she learned about the abuse.

She said she hadn’t known about Skinner’s story until after Fremlin died and Munro was struggling with dementia. “I don’t know much about the details and haven’t read the court case. I heard that Alice was shocked when she found out. I was certainly shocked!” Atwood said. “I don’t know what her point of view was however, as by the time I found out she was beyond talking.

“The kids probably wondered why she stayed with him,” she said.

“All I can add is that she wasn’t very adept at real (practical) life. She wasn’t very interested in cooking or gardening or any of that. She found it an interruption, I expect, rather than a therapy, as some do.”

Joyce Carol Oates, the author of “Blonde” and five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was among those looking back Monday at Munro’s work in light of her daughter making public her journey as a survivor of sexual abuse.