The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.”The judgment would prove premature. In July 2024, two months after Munro’s death at age 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hi, my name is Giles Harvey and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine, where I often cover literature and the literary world. For many years, one of my favorite authors has been Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer. Like a lot of people, I came to think of Monroe as perhaps the greatest English language writer of her time. She won just about every award a writer could win, including the Nobel Prize. And when she died last May, at the age of 92, there was a huge outpouring from admirers. People not only celebrating her work but also saying

what a decent person she seemed to have been. She had an almost saintly reputation, in fact in Canada she was widely known as Saint Alice, so what we learned about her after her death was incredibly shocking. Two months after she died, an essay came out in the Toronto Star. It was written by Monroe's youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, and in the essay, Andrea revealed that she was sexually abused as a child by Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin. Andrea kept the abuse secret from her mother for many years because she believed it would devastate her.

But when she finally did tell her mother, Monroe responded coldly, as though Andrea had somehow betrayed her. Monroe ultimately chose to remain with her husband. Like everyone else, I was shocked and enraged when I read these revelations. They were particularly stunning because so many of Monroe's stories deal with themes of child sexual abuse. Her characters are often abused children who largely remain silent and women whose husbands keep damning secrets from them. What Andrea wrote in her essay, it sounded like something from an Alice Monroe story.

I wanted to take Andrea up on something she wrote, that she hoped her own story would become a part of the stories people tell about her mother and her work. So I wrote to Andrea and asked if she'd be willing to talk to me. I spent hours talking with her and her siblings for this article, and I also read or re-read much of Alice Monroe's fiction. The story I ended up writing, which you'll hear in this week's Sunday Read, examines the question of whether and to what extent it's possible to separate the art from the artist. I was interested in what Monroe's stories

might have to tell us about what happened to Andrea, but also in how Andrea's revelations might allow us to see something new about the stories themselves. And I came away with the sense that Monroe seems to have been saying in fiction the things that she was unable to say in real life. Many of the stories now feel almost like admissions of guilt or coded apologies. like admissions of guilt or hoedid apologies. But at the same time, I was struck by just how masterfully and how quickly she was able to transform her grief and anger and her failings

as a mother into fiction of the highest order. There's one short story called Vandals, which was published in the New Yorker in 1993, about a year after Andrea finally revealed to Monroe what had happened to her as a child. In the story, a middle-aged Army veteran is revealed to have sexually abused a young girl and possibly her brother as well, and the female protagonist who's fallen for this man remains willfully blind to what's going on. It's only years later that it seems to become clear to her what her partner was doing to these children. And it's very hard not to see a story like that now, as in some way about Andrea's abuse and Monroe's relationship with Fremlin. I talked about this with Andrea as I made my way through her mother's work.

And I remember saying to her at one point, you know, it feels like in the later part of her career, when your mother wrote again and again about these terrible marriages in which the women feel trapped or helplessly dependent on their husbands, it feels almost as though she was painting the bars of her own cage. And Andrea responded by hearing that she was able to be more understanding of her mother, which was not something she normally felt. She also made it very clear that she doesn't forgive her mother, and she certainly doesn't forgive her stepfather.

But what happened to Andrea, as much as it might resemble her mother's fiction, is different from an Alice Monroe story and at least one important respect. In the end, the survivor spoke out. So here's my article, read by Simon Vance. Our audio producer is Adrian Hirst, and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Thanks for listening.

My life has gone rosy again, Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation's leading writers, the previous few years were blighted by heartbreak and upheaval. A painful separation from her husband of two decades. A retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario. A series of brief but bruising love affairs in which it seems Monroe could never quite make out the writing on the wall. war. This time it's real," she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. He's fifty, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing, grown up. The man was Gerald Framlin, a retired civil servant and geographer who hailed from the same corner of Ontario as Monroe.

They would be together for nearly 40 years, until Framlin's death in 2013. His knowledge of Huron County, where most of Monroe's fiction is set, became a vital resource for her work. Monroe amassed a thicket of honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater with its falling-down barns and burdensome old churches into a stage for the whole human comedy, like Joyce's Dublin or Faulkner's Mississippi. Never one to take herself too seriously, she housed her many awards in a revolving spice rack at her second home, a condo on Vancouver Island. Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it,

Monroe concluded in her letter about Framlin. The judgment would prove premature. This July, two months after Monroe's death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in the Toronto Star that Framlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Monroe and Fremlin at their home in Ontario. According to her parents' custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria,

British Columbia with her father, Jim Munro, and his new wife. One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was nine years old. Framelin warned Andrea not to tell her mother. The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed.

But when she returned to Victoria that fall, she confided in her stepbrother Andrew. Andrew told his mother, who then told Jim Munro. Rather than alert his ex-wife, Jim instructed the family to stay quiet. He worried that the disclosure would wreck Munro's new relationship, and that he would then be blamed. The next summer, Andrea returned to Ontario, accompanied by her older sister Sheila, whom Jim charged with keeping Andrea safe.

For years, Andrea did her best to make sure that she was never alone, with Fremlin, she told me recently, but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative to shield her mother from the truth. Monroe knew that Andrea loved to swim. So on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex.

Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremling complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Monroe. The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty. For Andrea, the silence was internally corrosive. She developed her sweet availments, bulimia, insomnia, debilitating migraines, which later forced her to drop out of college. It wasn't until 1992, when she was 25, that she finally confided in Monroe about what had happened. One day, when Andrea was visiting, Monroe told her about a short story from a recently published book, Marine Life by Linda Svensson, in which a girl commits suicide after being abused by

her father. Why didn't she tell her mother, asked Monroe, the wrote in a blurb for the book, that the story left her shaking. A month later, Andrea sent her a letter. When you told me about that story, she wrote, I wanted to cry and hold you and thank you and tell you. I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened. Munro's response made it clear that she was right to be afraid.

It was as if she had learned of an infidelity, Andrea recalled in her essay for the star. Monroe left Fremlin and fled to their condo on Vancouver Island. When Andrea visited her there, she was amazed by Monroe's self-pity. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her, Andrea wrote. She then told me about other children Fremlin had friendships with, emphasizing her own sense that she personally had been betrayed.

Fremlin meanwhile sent a series of unhinged letters to the family in which he acknowledged the abuse, but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him. The family did what families often do, after an episode of abuse, they carried on as if nothing happened. Munro took Fremlin back after just a few weeks, and for years Andrea continued to visit them. It was the arrival of her own children, twins born in 2002, that brought clarity to her emotional haze. Andrea told her mother she didn't want Fremelin anywhere near them.

Munro objected that visiting without Fremelin would be inconvenient because she couldn't drive. I blew my top, Andrea told a reporter for The Star. I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who'd done that to her daughter. The next day Monroe called her back, not to apologize but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end

of their relationship. In 2004 this magazine ran a profile of Monroe, who was about to publish her eleventh book, the widely celebrated Runaway. Throughout the article, Monroe speaks lovingly of Framlin, whom she says she was enormously lucky to have met. She is also described as being close today to her three daughters. Flawed by her mother's dishonesty, Andrea felt as if she was being erased. She gathered the letters that Framlin sent in 1992 and took them to the police. When an officer arrived at their house to arrest him, he reported that Monroe was apoplectic,

denouncing her daughter as a liar. In March 2005, Framlin, then 80, quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years' probation. For years, Andrea tried to make her story public with no success. In 2005, she approached the Canadian academic Robert Thacker, who was putting the final touches on a biography of Monroe and asked him to include the abuse in his book. After stewing on it for a day or two, he declined. I'm an archival scholar, he told me, explaining his decision. That's not the kind of book I was writing.

What he was writing, he said, was a biography of Alice Munro's texts. The distinction is hard to sustain. Munro's stories, particularly those from the years after she learned of the abuse, are full of violated children, negligent mothers, and marriages founded on secrets and lies. That Munro apparently derived these themes from a real-life episode has made her work feel suddenly transparent as though it has been injected with a contrast by revealing zones of private meaning. Monroe seems to have spent much of her career absorbed by the same questions that readers have asked since Andrea published her essay. Why did she not protect her daughter?

What led her to take Fremlin back? How could a writer who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life? In the months since the revelations, I revisited Munro's stories, spoke with members of her family and tracked down a number of her unpublished letters. Monroe's appalling failures as a mother seem to have been an imaginative incitement, instrumental to her artistic project, something that Andrea may have grasped before anyone else.

When Thacker wrote back to Andrea in 2005, he offered to remove from his book any passages that mentioned her and Framlin together. No, you do not understand, Andrea said to me last month describing her response. This is intimately linked to the work my mother does. In Canada, Monroe was known as Saint Alice, a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else, maternal dereliction.

In the days after news of the abuse broke, social media filled up with photos of Monroe's books discarded in recycling bins. The University of Western Ontario, her alma mater, announced that it was pausing its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity so as to carefully consider Munro's legacy and her ties to Western. Writers who once celebrated her work and openly acknowledged its influence on their own began to reconsider their allegiance.

These revelations not only crush Munro's legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were in retrospect so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions. The author, Rebecca Mackay, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, reacted in the Times. To me, that makes them unreadable at all. Before the recent news emerged, my own opinion of Monroe's fiction could hardly have been higher. She seemed to have a more direct access to reality than any of her contemporaries, whose work, by comparison, could feel contrived and paper-thin.

It had been several years since I last picked up her books, but my memory was of paragraphs as thick with life, with fleeting earthly data as the background of a broigle. In one story, set in the 1930s, a poor family has a bathroom installed in the corner of their kitchen, the only place it will fit. The walls are made of beaver board so that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen.

This leads to an unspoken agreement whereby no one ever seemed to hear or be listening and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out. It's a shorter side, but it contains, in miniature, so many of Munro's great themes. Family, shame, strategic silences, the open secret of the body and its needs. When I went back to the stories this summer, full of the same anger I saw coursing around the Internet, I was afraid I would find them, as Mackay described, like half realized confessions,

misshapen, off balance, chaotic with grief. Instead, I was struck by their utter composure. In the work Munro produced after learning what happened to her daughter, she seems to bear down on her horror and disgust with an implacable resolve. The struggle is made clear in an unpublished letter to her agent and close friend, Virginia Barber, dated May 1993, which was among her papers at the University of Calgary. I thought I'd write and tell you the fate of the latest story because it's usually hard to talk, frankly, on the phone. I've been working on it, the story, since March, and it's about the subject,

though thoroughly disguised and all pretty effectively constructed. I could do all the parts, but the central thing, and when I approached that, and I tried from various angles, I got sick, I mean really throwing up, and felt very bleak. This has happened three or four times, and I realized finally I might sort of break apart. So I burned it, not to be tempted to go on. That's where matters stand now, So I burned it, not to be tempted to go on. That's where matters stand now, and I'm just gingerly, no pun, trying to start something

else and regain my equilibrium, which I can do. But Monroe, it appears, did go on with a story about the subject. Vandals, which appeared in the New Yorker five months later, is a clear-eyed meditation on willful blindness and the tragedies it can precipitate. B. Dowd, an aging divorcee, has fallen for a man named Ladner, an army veteran with a mile-wide misanthropic streak. There is something in B, some hidden primal wound, that responds to Ladner's harshness. Certain women, she muses, thinking of herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them.

Ladner lives in Gothic isolation on a remote tract of land which he has transformed into a nature preserve full of taxidermied animals. Most people are shooed away, but he makes an exception for two young children, Liza and Kenny, a neglected sister and brother, who live across the road and often come to play on his property. The pair have lost their mother, and when Bea, who is childless, starts to live there, she becomes a highly welcome stand-in. At moments, the four of them seem almost like a family. The reality is otherwise.

With tremendous subtlety, Monroe reveals to us that Ladner has been sexually abusing Liza for years. Me, whose perspective we inhabit for the first part of the story, seems not to notice what is happening. It is only when we shift to Liza's point of view that the truth starts coming into focus, though even then Munro inhabits the child's defenseless confusion. In a crucial scene, Ladna makes fun of Bea behind her back, imitating the clumsy way she plods into a lake.

It is a performance intended for Liza's eyes only, a way of signaling that it is her not Bea with whom he shares the greater intimacy. When Bea looks around and sees what he is doing, Liza is distraught. It seemed to her that Bea would have to go away. How could she stay after such an insult? How could she put up with any of them? But B goes nowhere. Her obsessive dependency keeps her tethered to Ladner. It also thwarts Liza's unvoiced hope that B will somehow rescue her, or at least find a way to keep Ladner in check. She could spread safety if she wanted to, the child desperately thinks.

Surely she could do it, if only she could turn herself into somebody firm and serious, a hard and fast, clean-sweeping sort of woman whose love was deep and sensible. It doesn't happen. Years later, in an act of vengeance, Liza comes by Bea and Ladna's house when the couple aren't at home and trashes the place. She goes about it methodically, pouring out liquor on the floor and trampling Ladna's taxidermied birds

as though composing her masterpiece. Liza's poise is emblematic of the story as a whole, which unflappably narrates a more intangible destruction, that of her childhood self. What makes Vandals so unbearably poignant, Liza's need and Bea's failure to protect her, is the same thing that now makes it so enraging. The empathy Monroe showers on her fictional child was apparently withheld from her real one, an operation that she seems to have considered fundamental to her work as a writer.

In an early story, Monroe describes a fiction writer ambivalently as someone who has figured out what to do about everything they run across in this world, what attitude to take, how to ignore or use things. It's clear from her letter to Barbara that Munro was just such a person, going quickly to work on a personal tragedy and extracting what was usable. Whatever else Vandals may reveal or conceal, it is clearly a product of authority and control, qualitiesities Monroe spent her whole life chasing. Monroe grew up as a hostage to circumstance in Wingham, Ontario, where the Victorian age, she once remarked, ended only with World War II. Her mother was a puritanical control freak, full of voguish ideas about child rearing.

One of them involved administering enemas to regulate her daughter's bowel movements. Monroe resented all forms of coercion and often acted out. In the early 1940s, when her mother started showing the first signs of Parkinson's disease, fatigue, tremors, and a triplois temper, their frequent quarrels grew explosive. Monroe's father, who raised foxes for their fur, will be summoned to adjudicate. Sheila Monroe, in her poignant and illuminating memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters, 2001, describes these parental courts-martial.

What my mother found most painful was her perception that a story was being told on me that wasn't true, and that she was never allowed to tell her side of the story. Monroe was sometimes violently beaten, an early lesson in the power of narrative and the danger of losing control of it. Writer was hardly a plausible career for someone raised in rural poverty in Depression-era Wingham, especially a girl. People never asked, am I happy, Munro later said of the place where she grew up. Self-fulfillment wasn't a concept.

She began writing anyway, cannibalizing her indecorous origins. Her early work, published while she was raising a family in Vancouver, was assured but undistinguished. The deaths of her parents, her mother in 1959 and her father in 1976, cleared the way for a new candour and artistic leaps forward. cleared the way for a new candour and artistic leaps forward. In Royal Beatings from 1977, her first story to appear in the New Yorker, she evokes the thrashings she received as a child and the wounded reveries that followed. She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she

will never forgive them, Rose, the protagonist, thinks of her parents. She will punish them. She will finish them. Encased in these finalities and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort beyond herself. Beyond responsibility. This fantasy of total retribution, Munro suggests with typical shrewdness, is how Rose consoles herself for what she has just been through.

The story is more compassionate than Rose's fantasy, but still it carries a retributive sting. Munro was finally telling her side. Many of her characters struggle to tell theirs. In Wild Swans, published the following year, a teenage Rose is on a train alone to Toronto when a minister climbs aboard and sits down beside her. Feigning sleep, he puts a hand on her leg. Rose is paralyzed, feeling both arousal and disgust as the man proceeds to sexually molest her. She was careful of her breathing, Munro writes.

She could not believe this. Victim and accomplice, she was born past Glasgow's jams and marmalades, past the big pulsating pipes of oil refineries. The story is acute about Rose's psychology. In the prudish atmosphere of her family home, she has learned to be ashamed of her desire, a subject that is taboo. It is this that has conditioned her to see herself like Liza in vandals as partly to blame for what is happening, both victim and accomplice. Her susceptibility to abuse is also a susceptibility to other people's narratives.

This wasn't the first time Monroe wrote about unwanted sexual contact. One of her first works of fiction, Story for Sunday, published in her college literary magazine, features a girl who is kissed on the lips by the superintendent of her Sunday school. She, too, is unexpectedly aroused. In the title of story from Monroe's second book, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, the sexually curious teenage heroine is groomed by the boyfriend of her family's border.

Whether these episodes are based on real-life experience, like the physical abuse at the heart of royal beatings, has become a subject of intense speculation. When an interviewer once asked Munro if her work was autobiographical, she replied, I guess I have a standard answer to this. In incident, no. In emotion, completely. In incident, no. In emotion, completely. In incident, up to a point, too. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who is one of Monroe's friends, told me she thought

it very, very likely that Monroe was sexually abused as a girl, if only because sexual abuse is so common. Peeping Toms and Gropers on Trains, Atwood wrote to me, were a dime a dozen in what she called the Dark Ages. In small towns like Wingham there was a social imperative to keep such things private. Everybody knew stuff about other people, Atwood said. What he most feared was being shamed and ridiculed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Monroe's stories themselves. Her abused young women invariably keep quiet. Monroe married her first husband, Jim, a classmate at the University of Western Ontario in 1951,

when she was 20. Jim was from a well-off family in Oakville near Toronto, and he promised his bride an escape from the social world she grew up in. They shared a passion for art and literature, but his undisguised disdain for her working-class origins— it was always correcting her Huron County accent— was an ongoing source of tension. Monroe chafed against the conventions of their suburban existence in Vancouver. Life was very tightly managed as a series of permitted recreations, permitted opinions,

and permitted ways of being a woman, she said in an interview decades after they were divorced. The only outlet, I thought, was flirting with other people's husbands at parties. flirting with other people's husbands at parties. Munro and Jim were both energetically unfaithful. When Andrea was born in 1967, the marriage was already on the rocks. Not enough jelly on the diaphragm was how Munro explained the timing to her two elder daughters. Writing was Munro's vocation. Mothering was not. I'm terribly grateful that I had them,

she once said of her daughters, yet I have to realize I probably wouldn't have had them if I had the choice. Sheila Monroe's memoir would appear to bear this out. The book is a portrait of unbending dedication to literature, a child's eye view of a stubbornly turned back. Monroe, we learn, often wrote in the laundry room, surrounded by domestic impedimenta,

washer, dryer, ironing board. She snatched time for her fiction between household chores, or while Sheila and her sisters were napping or at school. She had to write, not only to write, but to write a masterpiece. And how could she possibly write a masterpiece with me, dragging her fingers off the typewriter keys or pulling the pencil out of her hand, reads a starkly symbolic passage.

Come and see, I would command, come and see. And she would bend me off with one hand while keeping her other hand on the keys. Monroe had made a conscious decision to be the opposite kind of mother from her own, whom she saw, according to Sheila, as moralistic, demanding, smothering, and emotionally manipulative. And almost nothing was off limits for discussion, haircuts and face-lifts, friendships and love affairs. With her mother, Sheila felt, I could get places of insight and awareness and wonder that I could reach with no one else.

But as she said to me recently, she's come to feel she misread the intimacy they shared. Though her mother was deeply interested in the stories Sheila told her as she entered adulthood, she seemed to relate to the Moorish narratives than as events in the life of her eldest child. The point was to talk about everything and reveal everything, not to come up with a solution, Sheila said to me, describing her mother's attitude. You use up your childhood, Monroe told the Paris Review in 1994.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. use up your childhood, Monroe told the Paris Review in 1994, the deep personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. What is like to be used by your mother in this way is something we learned from Sheila's memoir in which she says she has troubled distinguishing personal memories from her mother's fiction. Sometimes I even feel as though I'm living inside an Alice Munro story. In the mid-1970s, around the time Munro was starting her relationship with Fremlin, she offered Sheila some candid advice about a boy she was dating, a brash undergraduate who had taken a creative writing class with Munro.

"'The point is you have to withdraw attention, either as a tactic or to save yourself, Munro wrote in a letter. As long as you're there, suffering and bitching, but there, hung up on him, the situation is not going to change. Being in love that way just isn't good. There must be a better, self-sufficient way to love. I'm preaching to myself as well as you. Get so you don't need him.

Work at it. Then of course he may come back all humbled and interested. Women like us have got to get away from emotional dependency or life is just one dreary man-made seesaw. For Monroe at least emotional dependency was not so easily shrugged off. Monroe and Fremlin first crossed paths in the late 1940s when they knew each other slightly at the University of Western Ontario, enough at least for Monroe to develop a crush. Fremlin, an Air Force veteran who flew bombing missions over Germany, was a few years older than the other students. With his outspoken atheism and moody good looks, Fremlin struck Monroe as a byronic

figure full of danger and allure. After graduating, he sent her a fan letter about a story she published in the campus literary magazine, though to Monroe's disappointment the message carried zero trace of romantic intent. By then she was already engaged to Jim. More than 20 years went by before she saw Framlin again. By that point in the aftermath of her marriage Munro had taken a short-term job as a writer in residence at her alma mater and was living near campus with Andrea, who was seven, and her middle daughter Jenny, who was sixteen. Sheila, then 21, was working at the bookstore that Monroe and Jim had opened in Victoria. After a national radio interview in which Monroe mentioned that she was back in Western Ontario,

she received a call from Framlin, who asked her if she wanted to meet up. During a three martini lunch, Monroe learned that Framlin had recently moved back to Clinton, his home town, a half hour drive from Wingham. He had never married or lived with a woman. We rapidly became very well acquainted, she later recalled. Probably a euphemism. I think we were talking about living together by the end of the afternoon.

Before long, she moved into Fremlin's childhood home, a white Victorian gingerbread cottage with a garden full of maple trees, where he was caring for his elderly mother. Like Monroe, Fremlin was from modest circumstances, a deep source of connection for the couple. He seems to have been something like the opposite of his precursor, brusque and eccentric, where Jim was staid and genteel. It was this stick it up your ass, let's cut through the bullshit kind of attitude,

Sheila said of Framlyn, whom she compared to Ladner from Vandals. When Bea first meets Ladner, she's in a relationship with a well-meaning high school teacher named Peter Parr, whose idea it is to drive out and take a look at Ladner's nature preserve. They are told to go away, in no uncertain terms. Peter, with his geniality and good intentions, is instantly eclipsed. Trying to explain the phenomenon in a letter to a friend, Bea writes that she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage, because wasn't that the way in all the dreary romances?

Some brute gets the woman tingling, and then it's goodbye to Mr. Fine and Decent. A few days later she is driving back to see Ladner on her own. She had to feel sorry for herself in her silk underwear, her teeth chattered. She pitted herself for being a victim of such wants. Munro referred to Fremlin as her second husband, but in fact they were never legally married. Instead the couple staged what Sheila called a mock wedding in their backyard, at which Monroe wore denim overalls and a white veil. It's unclear if anyone attended. The sardonic gesture seems typical of their relationship,

which might better be described as a cult of two. Monroe suffered from a deep shame at having grown up in poverty. The plaudits she received from the outside world did little to alleviate it, Andrea believes, because they were all conditioned on her talent as a writer. Only Fremlin, Monroe felt, accepted her untransfigured self, the working class girl with a country accent. The reverse side of acceptance was dependency. Sheila detected a power imbalance in her mother's relationship with Fremlin.

Though the couple shared a passion for literature and a caustic sense of humor, they were also prone to vicious arguments. She would be wearing sunglasses, just quietly weeping at things he had said to her, Sheila recalled. She got the sense that Fremelin often criticized Monroe's appearance. Sometimes I wondered if he harbored an aversion to the mature woman's body that he couldn't always conceal, Sheila told me. Once in the late 70s, she arrived for a visit only to be told by her mother that

the two of them, Alice and Sheila, were going to stay at a hotel. That night in their shared room, Sheila could hear her mother crying in bed. Jenny, who wrote her own essay for The Star, remembers that there was lots of banter and jokes, often sexual or scatological jokes, between Framlin and his youngest stepdaughter. Mom would feign shock, she wrote. I could feel the tension and darkness there. Her mom seemed helpless to ever draw the line. In a letter to Jenny in 1992,

Framlin gave his own account of the triangle. We had a sort of a pedagogical theory to the effect that Andrea was a person, not a child, i.e. not a child as we were children in a very repressive adult world. The general idea was that no subjects, questions or language were barred. Fremling's rhetoric echoes that of a countercultural movement in the 1970s that called for the sexual liberation of children and is now regarded as a bad faith effort to mainstream pedophilia. In front of my mother, Andrea wrote in the Star, he told me that many cultures in the past weren't as prudish as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex

by engaging in sex with adults. Freymillin acknowledged that his sexual preferences were not in accordance with the canons of public respectability, as he put it in one of the letters he sent to Monroe's family in 1992. It is my contention that Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure, he wrote. If she were in fact afraid, she could have left at any time. She was sexually receptive and mildly aggressive. While the scene is degenerate, this is indeed Lolita and Humbert. For Andrea to say she was scared is simply a lie or a latter-day invention.

Andrea was not the only child Fremlin targeted. This August an Ontario woman named Jane Morrie, whose parents were friends with Fremlin, told the Toronto Star that he exposed himself to her in 1969, when she was nine. The incident followed years of grooming, she said. Andrea believes there may have been others. Fremlin owned a cabin in the Ottawa Valley, and he and Monroe would sometimes take Andrea to stay there in the summers. One year she got to know a group of siblings who lived nearby, the youngest of whom a girl was around her age. Andrea suspects that these were the children with whom Fremlin had friendships, as Monroe put it in 1992. How much did Monroe know? Andrea remembers

another couple who were friends of Fremlin's, contacting Monroe around 1978 to inform her that he had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. Fremlin denied it, but it's unclear how reassured Munro really was. In 2008, a few years after Thacker's biography appeared, Munro confessed to him that she had sometimes entertained dark thoughts about her partner. According to Andrea, Munro confessed to him that she had sometimes entertained dark thoughts about her partner. According to Andrea, Munro came to suspect that Fremlin was responsible for the rape and murder of Lynne Harper, a twelve-year-old girl whose body was discovered in a woodlot near Clinton in 1959. Though Munro later learned that Fremlin had been elsewhere, the

fact remains. She thought he had it in him. Whatever thoughts she entertained, Munro never acted on them. Instead, they were sublimated in her fiction. Like Bee in Vandals, she was unable to become someone firm and serious, a hard and fast, clean sweeping sort of woman. When Andrea first read the story around the time that it came out, and later saw the title of the book it was collected in, Open Secrets, 1994,

she felt briefly hopeful that her mother had begun to reckon with what happened. I thought it was perhaps a route to more truth telling, a step, she told me. When this proved not to be the case, she came to feel her mother's fiction was something like the reverse. A way of sustaining a life built on lies. A way of sustaining a life built on lies. In a Substack essay this summer, the novelist and critic Mary Gaitskell, who has written of her own experience of sexual abuse, posited that Monroe composed Vandals as a kind of alternate reality healing, and not just for herself.

Sometimes the inability to deal with a real situation turbocharges the need to deal with it in some other way, which can drive the making of art that is gloriously transpersonal. Like so many of Monroe's stories, Vandals seems to give us back our lives more abundantly by naming the world and re-sensitizing our perceptions of it. Fiction is autonomous and irreducible. You can't judge it by how faithfully it sticks to what really happened. In fact, by granting us access to other minds, the best fiction tends to show that what really

happened is always an unstable compound of perspectives. This summer, when I began talking to Sheila Munro, she cautioned me that trying to understand her mother's experience through her work was a dubious project. Honestly, she wrote to me, I feel the only person who could answer those questions is my mother herself. And perhaps she couldn't have either. For me, the importance of the stories

is in what they say about human experience in general, specifically women's experience, rather than for what they say about my mother herself. The complexity of things, the things within things, just seems to be endless, Monroe once said. It is a fine artistic credo. In the context of the recent revelations, it also has the feeling of an alibi. By disguising herself as Bea, who is not Liza's real mother and therefore bears a lesser duty to protect her, Munro seems to perform what Gateskill calls a genteel illusion of reality. That's not to say the story would necessarily

have been better or even more truthful had Monroe stuck more closely to the facts. But it does sharpen our awareness of how often in her work she seems to massage or euphemize an intolerable reality. Labor Day Dinner from 1981 is a vivid case in point. Roberta, another of Monroe's embattled divorces, has recently moved in with George, a retired high school teacher who is busily renovating an old farmhouse. Roberta's two daughters,

Angela 17 and Eva 12, are visiting for the summer. They spend the rest of the year with their father up north. This domestic set-up is tense and provisional. George makes barbed remarks about Roberta's appearance, which leave her weeping behind sunglasses. She senses that he sees her daughters as spoiled freeloaders, refusing to help out around the house and garden. The girls, meanwhile, are wary of George, who is trigger happy with belittling jokes. They're also grieved by his effect on their mother. I have seen her change, Angela confides to her diary, which Roberta has read, from a person I deeply respected into a person on the verge of being a nervous rag.

If this is love, I want no part of it. He wants to enslave her and us all, and she walks a tightrope trying to keep him from getting mad. The story, you sense, walks its own tightrope between blindness and insight. It was written at a time when Monroe must have known she was married to a pedophile, but apparently still clung to the belief that he hadn't harmed her own daughters. It is remarkable to witness her at once planting and defusing this incendiary possibility. She has been afraid sometimes that George would hurt her children, not physically, but

by some turnabout, some revelation of dislike that they could never forget, Roberto thinks. Angela, the teenager who is tall and fair-haired and embarrassed by her recently acquired beauty, spars with George flirtatiously, but Roberto feels she is not the one in most danger. It is twelve-year-old Eva, with her claims of understanding, her hopes of all-round conciliation, who could be smashed and stranded. Understanding and conciliation are what the story ultimately deliver. When the narrative moves into George's consciousness, he is forgivenly humanized. We see that his frustration with Angela and Eva is really a frustration with their mother.

He dislikes what he sees as her parental absenteeism, the way that she permits them to laze around the house all day. His critique of Roberta's mothering is rooted in a kind of fatherly concern. For all their quarreling, they are essentially aligned. He wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure himself that no real damage has been done. The story ends with the couple reconciled, at least for the time being, and Roberta's daughter's unharmed. Like Vandal's, Labor Day Dinner is an autonomous work of art. Yet it also feels like a desperate piece of wish-fulfillment. How badly Monroe must have wanted to believe that her partner was basically normal and decent.

No, it wasn't a mistake, Roberta tells herself, musing on her divorce in a passage that echoes Monroe's words about Fremlin in 1975. Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it. In her fictional world, where she exercised total authority, it was possible to construct a version of events that supported this conviction. But Monroe, it seems, was wise to her escapist tendencies. The uses and abuses of narrative come in for special scrutiny in her work. In Material from 1974, the middle-aged narrator discovers a short story by her ex-husband Hugo,

a well-known writer. It describes an episode from the early years of their marriage, when Hugo vindictively flooded the apartment of their downstairs neighbour, a low-rent prostitute named Dottie. The narrator has every reason to dislike the story, and yet she can't help acknowledging its brilliance. There is Dottie, lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvellous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic. There is no getting around it.

It is an act, you might say, of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. She thinks about sending him an admiring letter, but when she sits down to write it, she suddenly sees the story differently, as somehow beside the point. suddenly sees the story differently, as somehow beside the point. Material, in other words, concerns an exquisite work of art that nonetheless feels hopelessly inadequate to the lived reality behind it. The story doesn't just expose how someone who makes beautiful things may also be capable of unfathomable cruelty, a platitude at this point. More subtly, it shows how an

artistic sensibility, a disposition to see other people as grist for transformation, can give rise to a frigid disengagement. The narrator, who isn't herself an artist, displays something of the artist's coldness when she uses Dottie, who has lost her husband and is just barely scraping by, as anecdote fodder, a way of getting laughs from her sophisticated friends. When she gets to know Dottie better, the narrator tellingly finds that she becomes less likely to store up and repeat what she said. The difference between this sort of storytelling and the more elaborate, socially valorised sort that her ex-husband goes in for,

Munro delicately implies, is not as profound as it seems. However, finally wrought, Hugo's story has done nothing to atone for his hurtful deed. This isn't enough, Hugo. The narrator finds herself writing in a fit of anger. You think it is, but it isn't. Perhaps the truly shocking thing about Munro's decision to remain with Framlin is that it wasn't shocking at all. In her pioneering study, Father-Daughter Incest, 1981, the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis-Herman spoke to 40 women who were sexually abused by their fathers or stepfathers.

Those daughters who did confide in their mothers were uniformly disappointed in their mothers' responses, Herman writes. Most of the mothers, even when made aware of the situation, were unwilling or unable to defend their daughters. They were too frightened or too dependent upon their husbands to risk a confrontation. Either they refused to believe their daughters or they believed them but took no action. They made it clear to their daughters that their fathers came first and that if necessary,

the daughters would have to be sacrificed. Only three of the mothers decided to leave their abusive husbands, though in each case the women soon returned. They found life without them too hard to bear. Margaret Atwood sees Monroe's decision to return to Fremling as a matter of dependency. She had a general inability to function on a practical level without him, Atwood said. Sheila Munro disagrees. It wasn't because she couldn't look after herself, she told me.

It was because she was so deeply entwined in this very volatile relationship. Stressing that she had no desire to make excuses for her mother, Sheila said she believed that Fremlin groomed Munro along with Andrea, citing the way Munro came to see her as a sexual rival. That's straight out of the Abuser's Playbook, Herman said recently when I described Sheila's theory to her. Seeing how even someone as gifted as Monroe was vulnerable to this kind of coercive control

is instructive. In a letter to Virginia Barber from June 1992, Monroe reports that, after she fled their home in Clinton, Fremlin joined her at their Vancouver Island condo. The two of them were in couples therapy, she said, and progress, as they called it, is being made. At the time of writing, Monroe was laid up with laryngitis. I've almost welcomed being sick because it dulls things, but the dips aren't so bad or so deep now," she wrote, expanding on her fragile state of mind. The very bad and surprising thing was how things you'd expect to be eternally comforting

— I mean the beauty of the world and poetry and stuff, hurt worst. And what a great boon tabloids turned out to be. Coffee held its own, but booze is another fair-weather friend. Jerry is doing really well when you consider what a reversal and loss this had to be. Andrew's okay, but doesn't want to be in touch with me now Gee is here. We'll see. It's still so raw. You never come out with a mended teapot looking like new, and I guess you're lucky if it holds the T. See how Ms. M clings to the comfy domestic images. I feel very weirdly free, in a way. For so long I've felt oddly apologetic or strange with people, and now I feel I know what the trouble was. Do I? Odd.

What kind of loss Munro is referring to is hard to discern, a loss of dignity or status. But the letter makes her priorities plain. Framlin came first, Andrea second. Fremlin came first, Andrea second. Munro said as much to Andrea. She said that she had been told too late, Andrea wrote in the star. She loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own need, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. Six months later Munro and Fremlin made another trip to their condo, where, she wrote to Barbara, they had lots of practical problems to take our mind off

large griefs. One day she visited Victoria, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, knowing I would not see Andrea. I cannot request this, though we are in touch by letter. It's up to her, and hoping I wouldn't do something awful and pathetic, like hanging around on her street. I didn't." By that point she and Fremlin had abandoned therapy, which Sheila recalls they struggled to take seriously. "'They made a joke out of it,' she told me.

"'Jerry could be so captivating and amusing that the therapist was brought into the joke as well. They remained a cult of two. She was not interested in therapy or self-improvement in making amends, Sheila said. She just used her experience in her art. This was as true at the end of her career as it was at the start. The stories Munro wrote after Andrea cut off contact in 2002 are rife with the pain of estrangement. In Runaway, published in the New Yorker in 2003,

the young protagonist Carla has broken all ties to her haute-bourgeois family after marrying an older man named Clark, whose rough charisma it had once seemed both proper and exquisite to submit to. Three years in, his charisma has evaporated, and he stands revealed as a sour domestic tyrant who rules her with his moods. To sustain their fraying sexual bond, she becomes a kind of Scheherazade, inventing stories about an elderly neighbour who she claims molested her in the months before his

death. The stories which Clark takes to be true do the trick of arousing them both, and their marriage is extended one evening at a time. The problem comes when Clark insists that she blackmail the man's widow with this fabricated dirt. Afraid to defy him, but unwilling to go through with it, Carla ends up confiding in the widow how unhappy she is with Clark. The older woman talks her into leaving him.

The same day, Carla boards a bus to Toronto, within touching distance of a new life, when she realizes that it would have no meaning without Clark infecting her with misery. She goes back to him only to discover a short while later that he has killed her pet goat, a kind of surrogate child in an apparent act of vengeance. Unable to accept this reality and what it means for their marriage, Carla wills herself into a state of denial, which is where the story leaves her. You wonder what Fremlin made of Runaway and of the other stories about trapped women that Monroe produced in her final years of creativity? Were her efforts to portray him as a kind of saviour figure in the interviews she gave around this time a form of compensation for the less flattering picture she was painting

in her fiction? Or was this double bookkeeping an expression of the same denial that the character Carla, a portrait of the artist as a desperate mythomaniac, embraces at the end of the story? Whatever the answer, Monroe's relationship with Framlin enabled her to do her greatest work. Though so much of that work now reads like an indictment of the relationship is a bit a paradox. Nabokov once said he felt the initial shiver of Lolita after reading a newspaper story

about an ape, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing of a charcoaled by an animal. This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. It appears that this was Monroe's subject too. Andrea has not read Runaway, But when I described the story to her and its depiction of a woman who fears that she would not exist without her stifling husband, she confessed to feeling a tremor of sympathy. I think she was so scared that she actually wouldn't exist without him, she said of her mother's relationship with Fremlin. At the same time, Andrea stressed that she does not forgive

her mother and is indifferent to her legacy. For years after Fremlin's conviction, Andrea was estranged from her siblings. They were ultimately reunited with the help of the Gate House, a Toronto-based organisation that supports survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In 2014, Jenny, Sheila and Andrew, their stepbrother, went there seeking guidance on how to reconcile with Andrea. So ingrained was the silence around the story of her abuse that this was the first time the three of us had spoken about it, Andrew wrote in his own essay for the star, also published this summer. Each of the siblings wrote Andrea a letter and their relationships were

slowly rekindled. Today, Andrea is a regular volunteer at the gatehouse where she leads self-care groups. Her essay has been widely celebrated for raising awareness about childhood sexual abuse which she now sees as her guiding mission. Many people have compared the episode to an Alice Munro story. But unlike the characters in her mother's work, Andrea spoke up. you