David Remnick: Welcome to the The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alice Munro was a master of the short story in our time, the Chekhov of her era. She published more than 50 stories in The New Yorker, and then in 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But shortly before her death, her legacy darkened when her youngest daughter, Andrea, revealed that she'd been sexually abused by Munro's longtime partner. This began when Andrea was just nine years old and it was kept secret in the family even after the man confessed to it in letters. Now, Munro's ardent readers, and there are a great many of us, are left with this terrible conundrum that a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child. In one of the most astonishing pieces of reporting that the magazine has had the honor of publishing in recent years, Rachel Aviv explores the story of Alice Munro and her art and the terrible secret of her life and the lives of her family.

[theme music]

I thought we should begin by talking about Alice Munro as a writer. She published 50 short stories at The New Yorker at least and there were people around the office for years who considered her, in many ways, [chuckles] the Chekhov of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer.

Rachel Aviv: I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like your understanding has shifted. To me, there's something beyond the incredibly astute descriptions of people's inner lives. There's something formally that she's turned a short story into sort of stretch the limits of it.

David: What's the work about, really?

Rachel: I mean, it's interesting looking at the Nobel Prize presentation, the secretary is pretty on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who only understand aspects of their life years later when it's been revealed. Many of her early books are about this poor rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful and there are a lot of horrific freak events that happen quickly. She writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it. Not necessarily about herself, but about people going through crises of middle age and then the crises of late age.

I think her stories are unique in the way that they skip forward. Like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time and someone is only grasping what happened in their past belatedly. The thing that feels most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something and then those words would feel alive to her. She would write a story around those words and that this constantly happened to her where it almost felt like she was moving through the world in a different way like things had a secret intensity that she could pick up on and that she wanted to capture somehow.

David: I've been working at The New Yorker for a long time, [chuckles] over 30 years, and Alice died last year, right?

Rachel: Yes, last spring.

David: I think I met her once or twice maybe. She very rarely seemed to come to New York. When she did, it was like a stealth mission. She kept far apart from that so-called literary world, didn't she?

Rachel: There was a really interesting letter that she wrote to her agent and she's saying, "I cannot go on another book tour. In order to be a social self, I have to take so many uppers that I can't sleep for 72 hours. In order to sleep, I need to take so many downers that I'm endangering my life and I'm in this dysregulated state." She was saying, "I don't know if I can publish another book if it requires a book tour because it does damage to myself."

David: Now, I have a confession to make. This past summer, like a lot of people, I read the piece in the Toronto Star by Alice's grown daughter, Andrea. It was a short memoir in which she said that she had been sexually assaulted by Alice's husband when she was very young, nine years old, I think.

Rachel: Yes, and she essentially said, "My stepfather sexually abused me when I was nine and my mother protected him for our entire lives."

David: His name?

Rachel: Gerry Fremlin. Then Jenny, who is Andrea's older sister, and Andrew, who was her stepbrother, both wrote essays as well, talking about the way that the silence had shaped their lives and their families.

David: I read this piece. My first reaction was one of-- I was just startled. I mean, Alice Munro holds a great place in my mind as a reader and frankly, as a citizen of The New Yorker, she's an important figure. My second thought, not long thereafter was that Rachel Aviv should write about this. Before I even had a chance to call you and discuss this, I had heard that you were also [chuckles] thinking the same thing. How did this news affect you? Then, why did you decide to get on it as a piece of writing and investigations so quickly?

Rachel: It's funny because the morning that the Toronto Star article came out, my friend, who's from Toronto, just emailed it to me and was like, "Rachel, you should write about this." Then over the next few days, a few other people, friends were like, "You're writing about this."

David: What did that tell you? [chuckles]

Rachel: I think because it's about so many things that I-- Memory, family trauma, the generational dynamics.

David: The abuse against Andrea by Fremlin, the stepfather, began when she was nine years old. What exactly happened?

Rachel: Alice was away, her father was dying, and Andrea asked if she could sleep in the master bedroom. Gerry Fremlin said, "Okay, don't tell your mother." From there, he got into her bed and sexually abused her. She said it didn't even occur to her to tell her mother because she felt so unsafe in that house. Then it continued until she was through puberty. This him exposing himself to her and trying to--

David: Went on and on for years. Gerald Fremlin had a very strange way of talking about this. When he eventually did, he seemed to be obsessed with Nabokov's novel Lolita and much else. Tell me about Fremlin.

Rachel: After Andrea told her mother about the abuse in 1992, which is 16 years after it happened, Alice left Gerry Fremlin. He then unleashed this torrent of letters in which he was ostensibly defending himself, except what the letters actually were, were incredibly detailed confessions in which he explained that he was responding to this nine-year-old seductress and that he knows that there are Lolitas in the world and he was simply being a Humbert Humbert.

David: How did Alice Munro initially react to this letter that she got from her daughter Andrea saying to her, "Sit down, go to a quiet place before you read this," and she gives her the news? How did Alice Munro react?

Rachel: She did immediately leave her partner and go to their second home on the west coast of Canada. Andrea came there to be with her and felt the experience was not about her, it was about her mother as this betrayed lover. Alice Munro took Gerry Fremlin back within a month.

David: Within a month?

Rachel: Within a month. The way she explained it to Andrea was I loved him too much. I'm too dependent, I'm too old.

David: How do you make sense of why she stayed? It can't just be, "I Loved him and I was dependent on him."

Rachel: She was a participant in a pretty psychologically abusive relationship and had many of the dynamics of women who try to leave men and don't feel like they can exist without that man. There was a confused idea about misogyny. This idea that she often would tell Andrea that it was misogynistic to expect a mother to sacrifice her own happiness because her husband has done a bad thing. Andrea really internalized that and would tell her mother like, "Yes, of course. No one would ever ask a father to do this, only a mother. Therefore, I cannot ask my mother to do this."

Then I think there was this sense for Alice that the writing was the most important thing and that she was on an existential level, like living in this in a way that's hard to describe, where she was watching and not totally present and maybe not able to really feel her daughter's experience, whether it was dissociation or some artistic distance that had become her mode of living.

David: Let's listen to Alice Munro talking to Joyce Davidson for the CBC. This is in 1979.

Alice Munro: Passivity is not something that modern woman is supposed to be content with, let alone striving for. Yet if you're passive, you sit back and watch things and you let things happen.

Joyce Davison: Have you been guilty of that?

Alice: Oh, yes. I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them, just to see what will happen, to see what people will say, to see what people will do. It's probably the overriding passion of my life. Just to see--

Joyce: Is that because you don't want to hurt them?

Alice: Oh, no, that's only part of it. That's the surface part. That's the social behavior, that one doesn't make anyone uncomfortable, but it's also that everything fascinates me, what happens between people.

David: The resonant phrase, for me, there is to see what happens, as if the most essential thing is to see what will happen, and by extension, I think, to see how it becomes the material of her art.

Rachel: That line really resonates because there's this story she wrote years before where a girl is being abused sexually, like being groped on a train.

David: Which one is this?

Rachel: This is Wild Swans. She says she just wanted to see what will happen. It's almost the same language, the sense of like, "I'm just going to keep going here because I'm so curious."

David: To see what the human behavior will be, positive, negative, or otherwise.

Rachel: She describes herself as victim and accomplice and there's this sense of feeling like an accomplice because of that curiosity, of that wanting it to happen or wanting to not interfere with the action that will come to her.

David: It's almost as if she never left her husband and reconciled with her daughters because the conflict was fruitful for her work. Is that unfair?

Rachel: Probably. I mean, I feel like it was more helpless than that because, of course, she had deep wounds from her own life. Like she--

David: Right. She had been beaten badly by her father when she was growing up.

Rachel: Complex dynamics. It was a power game. She would be beaten, and then her mother would come to her like a supplicant with all these treats and she would resist, and then she would fall back into it. I think there's this language of art monsters, which sure applies, but I also feel like it's maybe less interesting or true to the experience of just being very wounded and finding a man who speaks to those wounds and then--

David: What do you mean speaks to those wounds?

Rachel: Who--

David: To heal them?

Rachel: No, not to heal them. To allow her to unknowingly replicate patterns from her childhood.

David: You know, I went back and reread this piece in The New York Times magazine from 20 years ago by Daphne Merkin. It describes the relationship of Munro and Gerry Fremlin. It's not Merkin's fault. This was performed for her, in a sense, but she described that relationship in very sporty, genial terms.

Rachel: It's just like an incredible level of living, of performing. I think she's spoken about that a lot in interviews, of feeling like she is two women. One is the woman being what other people want her to be. The other is the woman who's living in a solitary, watchful, removed existence. The interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea where she felt like--

David: What year is it?

Rachel: I think it was 2004. She felt like she was just being erased. That was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse.

David: How did the police react to that report?

Rachel: I talked to the detective and he was praising her for being this incredibly straightforward witness who looks him in the eye. She had these incredible letters to back it up like she was handing him the perpetrator's confession.

David: What came out of that investigation?

Rachel: It was patched up really quickly. He pled guilty to indecent assault. There was no jury.

David: It was a one-sentence admission of guilt in which the first-person pronoun was dropped. [chuckles]

Rachel: Yes, and then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer, basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press. At the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her, and then abruptly she canceled the plan.

David: Because, in a sense, in publicity terms, they got away with it. It didn't blow-- We should say also that Alice Munro in Canada, her reputation was immense. People referred to her as the queen of the literary scene there. It was people here probably at that time knew other writers, Toni Morrison or John Updike, much more than Alice Munro, somehow. But in Canada was a different story.

Rachel: Yes, I was surprised talking to the Toronto Star reporter who ultimately broke the story. But she said when she was first proposed the story, after Andrea had sent an email, she said no, she didn't want to do it. She didn't want to take down an idol. She didn't want to jeopardize her relationships in publishing. She'd seen Alice Munro as this emblem of feminism and she'd been inspired by the idea, like you could tell your own story and take control over your own story. Ultimately, she did change her mind, but even that thought that in 2024, there was like a day-long pause before she was ready to do it. Even before then, Andrea had reached out to a number of journalists and she got no response.

[theme music]

David: I'm speaking with Rachel Aviv, who's reported for The New Yorker on Alice Munro and her daughter, Andrea Skinner. We'll continue in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

[theme music]

David: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour and I'm speaking today with staff writer Rachel Aviv. In a piece that you can find on newyorker.com called Alice Munro's Passive Voice, Rachel Aviv probes with depth and sensitivity, what happened in Alice Munro's family after Munro's partner sexually abused her youngest daughter. Andrea, the daughter told members of her family about it when it happened, including her father, Jim Munro, but nobody wanted to tell Alice Munro. Nobody wanted to upset her.

Years later, when Gerry Fremlin admitted to the abuse, Alice stood by him. She gradually lost contact with her daughter, Andrea. Rachel, we spoke before the break about how the media ignored this story for many years and it mirrors the way Alice Munro's family dealt with it. You spoke with Andrea Skinner repeatedly and at great length. Here's a recording she made for a survivors' group in Canada called The Gatehouse.

Andrea Skinner: I was estranged from most of my family for many years. Though I had told most of my family about the abuse when I was 10 years old, no action was taken to protect me and I was sent back to my stepfather's house. Unfortunately, nobody did anything to stop it or help me heal at that time. The effects of that were that I felt really devalued and even dehumanized by not just my abuser but all of the significant people of my life.

David: Her siblings, as well as her mother, shut her up.

Rachel: There was this sense of we all need to protect our mother and this feeling that she was very horribly fragile and that this refrain in the family like she'll die if she knows. The sisters took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother, and actually, Sheila almost told her mother but they both-- There was this mythology of we must not impinge on this great career and on this fragile woman.

David: Now, you spoke with Robert Thacker, who's a biographer of Alice Munro. He knew about the abuse. What was his rationale as a scholar, as a biographer to ignore this incredibly pivotal on the criminal record piece of news?

Rachel: I mean, he just basically said, "It's not the book I'm writing." I think what he said to me at one point was, "Every family has a thing like this." [chuckles]

David: I'm sorry, but how did you react to that when you heard that [crosstalk]?

Rachel: I try not to respond with judgment. I think I just listened.

David: But we're sitting here. It's just us two.

Rachel: I mean, why write a biography if you're not going to do-- I think Andrea said in a letter to him like-- He had responded, "I'll make sure I didn't say anything too flattering, essentially, about Gerry." She said, "I didn't mean cross out flattering adjectives, I meant scrap the whole book."

David: Or write an honest biography.

Rachel: Right. She said to ignore this is to ignore the context in which these stories are being created. I think there was this-- He was trying to hold onto this idea and the family members were too, that something-- That this was between Gerry and Andrea, this delusional idea that it was a two-person interaction.

David: What's amazing is how many stories in mid and late career are haunted by, shadowed by, or even you could say about this situation. Which is the story that in your mind is the most directly infested with this?

Rachel: I think It's Vandals from 1993.

David: Talk about that story.

Rachel: I read the letters that Alice wrote to her agent. She said first she wrote that she had started a story and she called it about-- It was about the subject and she said she approached it from different angles. Then she felt like she was going to throw up and she burned it. Then two months later, she had written a draft of Vandals. It's about a young girl named Liza and her younger brother. In the summers, they go every day to play with this man and his wife, who become a mother figure, and the man is sexually abusing the children. It emerges.

The story is structured as an investigation into whether the mother knows and chooses to look away or doesn't know but should know. In that story, there are lines or images that are almost lifted from the letter that Andrea wrote to her mother disclosing her abuse and from a letter that Gerry wrote about their relationship. You can see pieces of [chuckles] language, sentences that must have lit her up in some way or made her feel like she had to build a story around it.

David: Did Andrea go on reading her mother's stories as they came out in the magazine and in books?

Rachel: She did for a while and--

David: Must have been horrific.

Rachel: She said that for a while she almost tried to convince herself to be hopeful and she felt like here she is. She's getting it out. She's working through it. There was one story, Rich as Stink, that has this image of a daughter wearing a wedding dress that burns. Andrea said, "Here is this image of innocence destroyed." There's this feeling that her mother must understand. Then eventually Andrea realized that the insights were going to her characters and not to her daughters and not to herself. Then Andrea felt increasingly enraged by the passivity of the characters, the sense of them existing in this bleak survival mode.

David: One of the striking things about this extraordinary piece is that Andrea doesn't go to pieces. She continues living her life and she has a life. What is it?

Rachel: I think this is a defining problem in her life in a way that she appears to be thriving.

David: Even to her siblings who are deceived by that in some way.

Rachel: Right. In a way, as a child, it was a coping mechanism. There's a sense that she held the key to either destroying her family or keeping their family together, and so they all felt like she was the star of the family, the one who was the most like her mother. She and I had conversations about that where I would say. " I'm worried I'm slipping into that state that the siblings are in where you seem to be thriving. Your daughter just said you have this incredible joy for life. You do seem to have this incredible joy."

I mean something she said to me that I found really profound was one of the letters from the '70s that Alice wrote was about being raped by a colleague. First, she says she was so numb that she just walked aimlessly around the city and missed the class she was supposed to teach that day. Then later on, she says, "It'll make a good story."

David: This sense of dissociation is incredible.

Rachel: Yes, but Andrea said, "When I read that letter, at first I felt pain for my mother because I know that feeling of aimlessly walking around the city." Then she said, "The next feeling I had was rage. That she did a day of that and moved on to have this incredibly productive life and I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city."

David: Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. How did Andrea react to that news?

Rachel: I think what was hardest for her was watching Jenny receive the prize from the Queen of Sweden because Alice was too weak at that point to go to Sweden. She felt like, "Oh, the family really is happier that I'm not in it. Now they can live this one reality."

David: How do you think this affects Alice Munro's literary legacy and how we'll read her in the future? I know lots of people that at first they said, "I'm never going to read her again." Your colleague, Jiang Fan, who was teaching Alice Munro, was-- I just had lunch with her. It just rocked her in a most elemental way. How do you think that will affect Alice Munro's being read in the future?

Rachel: A question that feels almost more alive to me is the way that her writing makes you think about, art at what expense? Not to deny that it's art and that it has value as art, but to think about what existed in its wake, who was harmed, what was sacrificed. That's probably a question that is relevant for many artists but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal, trading your daughter for art. It felt like--

David: Did you see it that way?

Rachel: Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision, but I think Alice did speak with a lot of self-awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter and that person was a writer.

David: Alice ignored her own mother.

Rachel: Her own mother who was dying, who had Parkinson's.

David: There's a certain ruthlessness to it.

Rachel: But the repetition, I think that she could speak very honestly and with a lot of self-awareness about how she had to abandon her own mother to become a writer, that I'm feeling that there was a certain awareness probably about how she also abandoned her daughter to be the writer she became.

David: You, earlier in our conversation, talked about trying not to be judgmental, but in fact, writing in no small part is a collection of many judgments along the way, whether about sentences or how a story moves or the judgments you make. In this story, the real crime is committed by the man, Gerald [chuckles] Fremlin. We shouldn't forget that. I wonder in the end how you do judge Alice Munro generously or something that's--

Rachel: I feel horrified that-- It's hard because what would she say? Did she think the work is more important? Is that just what the decision she made?

David: Do you think she thought of it in those stark terms?

Rachel: I think maybe because in that, one of the most chilling moments for me was when the biographer Bob Thacker, when I read the conversation between Alice and him about-- She was asking him like, "What do my daughters want you to do?" He was telling her and she stated really clearly, "My daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me and I worked a long time to become who I am." She couldn't be more stark than that.

[theme music]

David: Rachel Aviv, thank you so much.

Rachel: Thank you.

David: Alice Munro's Passive Voice is the title of Rachel Aviv's piece. You can read it at our website, newyorker.com and you can subscribe to The New Yorker for reporting like this every week and that's also@newyorker.com.

[theme music]

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.