Daughter of writer Alice Munro details dark Huron County family secret

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Editor’s note: This story includes details of child sexual abuse

A daughter of Nobel laureate author Alice Munro has written a first-person essay in The Toronto Star detailing sexual abuse by her stepfather at their Huron County home and her mother’s decision to side with her husband over her child.

In the piece, published Sunday, Andrea Robin Skinner describes how her mother – a Wingham native who lived for years in nearby Clinton as she gained international prominence as a short-story writer – remained in her marriage to second husband Gerald Fremlin even after learning of the abuse.

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Skinner writes that she lived in British Columbia with her father most of the year but visited her mom and stepfather in Clinton during the summer. One night while her mother was away in 1976, Fremlin climbed into her bed and initiated sexual contact when she was nine years old, Skinner writes. She says Fremlin continued to expose himself to her and proposition her for sex until he lost interest when she reached her teens.

Skinner reported the incident to police in 2005, when Fremlin was 80, and The Star reports that in March 2005 he pleaded guilty in Goderich court to a charge of indecent assault. He was given a suspended sentence and two years of probation, The Star is reporting. Skinner writes that the incident remained an open secret in the Munro family for years and she was ultimately estranged from her mother, who Skinner says sided with her husband and treated the abuse as an injury to herself.

Munro is an icon in Huron County, where her former longtime Clinton house became something of a landmark and a monument in her honour was built outside the town’s library in 2018. There is also the Alice Munro Literary Garden in Wingham.

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Munro’s acclaimed works include Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Love of a Good Woman and Runaway.

Fremlin died in 2013 at age 88. In his obituary, he was remembered as a geographer who graduated from the University of Western Ontario. “He will be sorely missed by his wife Alice, and by family and friends too numerous to mention,” it read.

Munro moved to Port Hope to live with a daughter in 2019 and died in May at age 92.

Skinner writes in The Star that she and her siblings wanted to allow Canadians to have a more complete picture of her mother, who was long hailed as a Canadian literary icon. Skinner credits a Toronto-based organization for sexual-abuse survivors, the Gatehouse, with helping her and her three siblings, two sisters and a stepbrother, reunite as adults after the family secret drove them apart.

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