Daughter of writer Alice Munro details dark Huron County family secret

Article content material

Editor’s observe: This story consists of particulars of kid sexual abuse

A daughter of Nobel laureate writer Alice Munro has written a first-person essay in The Toronto Star detailing sexual abuse by her stepfather at their Huron County house and her mom’s determination to aspect along with her husband over her baby.

Within the piece, revealed Sunday, Andrea Robin Skinner describes how her mom – a Wingham native who lived for years in close by Clinton as she gained worldwide prominence as a short-story author – remained in her marriage to second husband Gerald Fremlin even after studying of the abuse.

Article content material

Skinner writes that she lived in British Columbia along with her father many of the yr however visited her mother and stepfather in Clinton in the course of the summer season. One night time whereas her mom was away in 1976, Fremlin climbed into her mattress and initiated sexual contact when she was 9 years outdated, Skinner writes. She says Fremlin continued to reveal himself to her and proposition her for intercourse till he misplaced curiosity when she reached her teenagers.

Skinner reported the incident to police in 2005, when Fremlin was 80, and The Star stories that in March 2005 he pleaded responsible in Goderich court docket to a cost 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 within the Munro household for years and he or she was in the end estranged from her mom, who Skinner says sided along with her husband and handled the abuse as an harm to herself.

Munro is an icon in Huron County, the place her former longtime Clinton home turned one thing of a landmark and a monument in her honour was constructed exterior the city’s library in 2018. There’s additionally the Alice Munro Literary Backyard in Wingham.

Article content material

Munro’s acclaimed works embody Lives of Women and Girls, Who Do You Suppose You Are?, The Love of a Good Lady and Runaway.

Fremlin died in 2013 at age 88. In his obituary, he was remembered as a geographer who graduated from the College of Western Ontario. “He might be sorely missed by his spouse Alice, and by household and buddies too quite a few to say,” it learn.

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

Skinner writes in The Star that she and her siblings wished to permit Canadians to have a extra full image of her mom, who was lengthy hailed as a Canadian literary icon. Skinner credit a Toronto-based group for sexual-abuse survivors, the Gatehouse, with serving to her and her three siblings, two sisters and a stepbrother, reunite as adults after the household secret drove them aside.

Article content material