The daughter of Alice Munro, who won the Canadian Nobel Prize for literature, says she was abused by her stepfather when she was a child.
She told her mother about it later, but she did nothing and stayed with her husband, wrote Andrea Robin Skinner yesterday (local time) in the daily newspaper Toronto Star. “We all acted like nothing had happened.”
Munro had been married to her second husband, Gerald Fremlin, since 1970. Skinner has now reported that her stepfather came to her bed in 1976 – when she was nine years old – and “sexually assaulted” her. Fremlin, who died in 2013, also later benefited when he was alone with his stepdaughter.
Skinner went to the police himself
At the age of 25, she finally told her mother about the attacks. At age 38, Skinner says she went to the police herself after her mother effectively praised Fremlin in an interview. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to violating sexual self-determination.
Munro died in May aged 92. She “wants this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell about my mother,” Skinner said. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.