Two decades ago, when I asked the editor of The New York Times Magazine whether he would be interested in a profile of the Canadian writer Alice Munro, his answer was that she wasn’t a “sexy” enough figure, adding that another writer had previously attempted a piece that didn’t work out. I argued that Munro, although not a household name, was probably among the best—if not the best—contemporary short-story writers and deserving of a profile. She had been compared to no less than Chekhov (Cynthia Ozick), Tolstoy (John Updike), and Flaubert (Claire Messud). (Her Nobel Prize in Literature would come in 2013.)
I had admired Munro’s stories from the beginning, the dazzling plainspoken prose that dipped into lyric moments, attesting to underground passions, unarticulated longings, and unspoken regrets—or “open secrets,” as the title of one of her collections has it. She seemed to know her female characters from the inside out, bringing out the clandestine layers of feeling that accompanied them while they went about their prosaic lives, polishing doorknobs or mopping the floors—lives which she once described in her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, as “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
There she goes, in story after story, spilling the reader’s furtive and transgressive thoughts quietly but surely: the conflicts of being a mother; the resentments of being a daughter; the shame of unrequited sexual longing; the restless commitment of marriage. One feels at some point as though one has ceased reading about life and instead has entered into a conspiracy with the words on the page. Another way of defining the singular nature of Munro’s universe is “gossip informed by genius,” as one Canadian critic once put it.
Munro’s writing, which seems if not quite directly autobiographical then certainly indebted to her own life, is the sort to prompt a keen interest in the person behind the writer. She was disinclined to give interviews, however, and found book touring an ordeal. “Most writers,” noted Ann Close, her editor at Knopf, whom I would interview for the piece, “go around the country in the form of their personas,” implying that Munro’s authentic self was the only persona she had.
Dan Menaker, the fiction editor who worked on her stories for four decades at The New Yorker, said he found her letters “curiously brief and strangely somewhat detached.” Munro was also characterized by many of the people I talked to as modest and unassuming; one of her former (male) editors described her to me as a “sweet, little-old-lady type.” As I would discover, however, this is the last thing she was.
After the New York Times Magazine editor reluctantly agreed to the piece, we then had to persuade Munro, which the publicists at Knopf managed to do. (It undoubtedly helped that her 11th collection of stories, Runaway, the title story of which revolves around the fabrications that console, was due to come out shortly.) Despite all my efforts to prepare, little did I know the polite but steely resistance that would meet my efforts to engage Munro after I traveled for what seemed like days to Clinton, Ontario (population 3,200), three hours southwest of Toronto. (I don’t drive.)
Or that 20 years later Munro would become part of an explosive sexual scandal involving her youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, and Munro’s allegedly pedophiliac second husband, Gerald Fremlin, with whom she had lived for the past 35 years in his parents’ tiny house by the railroad tracks. Skinner’s charges, made on the Web site of a Canadian organization dedicated to victims of childhood abuse called the Gatehouse, set the literary world agog, eliciting a cascade of outraged responses, which included terms such as “art monster” and suggested that many of Munro’s stories had to be read differently in light of this news, or should not be read at all.
A Whiff of Genius
Munro and I met for lunch at her regular table at a bar called Bailey’s, on the tiny main square in Goderich, one straggly town away from Clinton, on a Saturday afternoon in early September. (We had originally agreed to meet at her house, but she changed her mind.) I had read Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro, the bittersweet 2001 memoir by her eldest daughter, Sheila, which emphasizes her intense sense of privacy about her writing and a certain distant, hands-off attitude toward mothering. It also discloses that Munro was not beyond applying a wooden spoon for disciplinary purposes. (Munro had asked Sheila several years earlier, a bit incestuously, if she wanted to write her biography.)
When I asked Munro about her feelings regarding her daughter’s book, she surprised me with her readiness to implicate herself and conceded that Sheila may not have received her best efforts: “She wasn’t the utter joy of my life she might have been.”
A bit earlier Munro admitted she “never had the longing to have children,” and in an interview with The London Free Press in 1974 that I dug up, she said she was glad to have had her children—she had three by the time she was 25—but added, with shocking candor, that “I probably wouldn’t have had them if I had the choice.”
One of her former (male) editors described her to me as a “sweet, little-old-lady type.” Although, as I would discover, this is the last thing she was.
Munro was 73 at the time we met, a trim and still beautiful woman who was elegantly dressed in an ivory silk blouse, off-white pants, and arty yet sophisticated earrings. Her silvery hair was carefully coiffed; long gone were the slightly unkempt curls of her early photos. I complimented her on having remained thin, as one appearance-conscious woman to another, and she immediately corrected me. “I’ve always been thinnish,” Munro declared. “I was never a thin girl. I was bulimic for a while before the word existed,” she added. “I thought I was the only person who discovered it. Most women I knew got a heavy maternal figure; I was determined not to, as part of maintaining my identity.”
I was struck momentarily that her self-conception as a writer seemed more tenuous, notwithstanding all the acclaim, than her identity as an alluring woman. “I still haven’t claimed being a writer,” she told me less than 10 minutes into our lunch. “My husband claims it for me. I still write in a corner of the dining room, and I often answer the phone.”
Later she asserted that “I’m frightened of being overvalued. Someone will shoot you down. Being a writer is a shameful thing. It’s always pushing out your version. I try to correct for this.” I suspected that her conflicts about writing had to do with the fact that where she came from, “nobody was interested in writing or the world of literature.” Munro’s family—her father was a failed fox farmer and her mother died when she was 13—lived in what Munro described as “a kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived…It was a community of outcasts. I had that feeling about myself.”
I pondered the possibility that she needed a male presence behind her to affirm her talent and her right to use it. Perhaps she thought there was something unseemly, even unwomanly, about the ego and ambition it took to be a professional writer, producing book after book—that it was strictly a man’s province. Although she also resented this reality, as she saw it: “I get very upset with the thought of the way a man’s work is accepted and honored. People don’t expect to phone up and talk to the man. He’s writing. He’s got a room where he writes.”
At the end of our conversation, which went on for four hours, lubricated by many glasses of wine on Munro’s s part (“My charm has a time limit,” she warned), she got up to lock the bar’s front door behind us for the afternoon. “I have permission,” she gaily announced, “to close this place up.” At the time I thought I hadn’t found out much about her other than her enthrallment with Fremlin, a World War II veteran and a retired geographer seven years older than she, whom she invoked almost reverently as “my husband” rather than by his name.
She first encountered him and felt an immediate attraction when she was 18-year-old Alice Laidlaw, a scholarship student at the University of Western Ontario and newly engaged to James Munro, a bookstore owner, with whom she would go on to have a 20-year marriage and three daughters. (According to Sheila, the couple argued a lot, not about practical things but about different views of life. “In the arguments, my father was on the side of conformity, conventional values, and conservative politics, and my mother was on the side of individualism, left-wing politics, and rebellion against conventional values.”)
I remarked that Fremlin sounded like the love of her life, and it was one of the few moments Munro came out into the open instead of ducking behind a habitual, Canadian-bred reticence, admitting that she “fell for him,” her gray-green eyes alive with the memory of it. This visceral impulse was no doubt helped by the fact that Fremlin was her earliest official appreciator, the first to see a whiff of genius in the novice writer.
Fremlin wrote Munro a fan letter about a story of hers that had appeared in the college literary magazine—she recalled the youthfully portentous title, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” with a forgiving laugh (“O.K., O.K.,” she said, “we were all young once”)—but what she really hoped he would do, apparently, was ask her out. “I wanted him to say something like, ‘When I laid eyes on you … ,’” she explained, her voice trailing off, sounding like one of her own multi-layered characters: a young woman newly engaged, about to revise the course of her destiny on a dime, without so much as a good-bye to her former life.
I asked whether she would have gone off with Fremlin then and there; she answered, simply and unhesitatingly, “Yes.” For a moment I saw in her the character of Pauline, the adulterous wife and mother in her 1997 story “The Children Stay,” who decides to bag an existence of “married complicity” to run off with her lover.
“I wanted him to say something like, ‘When I laid eyes on you … ,’” she explained, her voice trailing off, sounding like one of her own multi-layered characters.
Munro left her first husband in the 1970s, when she was in her early 40s, to move in with Fremlin, who up to that point had been a bachelor, and his dying mother. (All three daughters stayed with their father and lived with their mother during the summer.) She had re-met him when she took a year-long academic appointment at the University of Western Ontario, where they had been students together. Although it seemed like a radical move, I thought there had always been a radical undertone to Munro’s stories, a wish to flee the conventional life in favor of carnal desires and brazen impulses.
At the end of our interview, Fremlin picked Munro up from the bar. A tall, prepossessing man, he asked how much she and I had had to drink, as though he were her minder, or a father, and then the two of them went off to shop for groceries. Years later, I still remember being left standing alone outside that little bar, with a slightly uneasy feeling about the couple, although I couldn’t exactly place it and didn’t put it in my piece.
On further reflection, there seemed to be something cut off about them, a symbiotic quality that ensured that they would be left uninterruptedly to themselves. And indeed, Fremlin hadn’t even said hello to me, the writer who came all the way from New York to interview his wife.
After they left I walked over to the narrow, white Carpenter Gothic house, with a blue roof and brown wooden shutters, where Munro lived (she had told me to take a look) and went around the back to study the garden. All was as she had described it to me: the large pond, the railroad track beyond the hedges, and Fremlin’s quirky artworks (an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub on its side against a tree trunk, painted to resemble a Holstein cow and then provided with a pair of rusting, propeller-like ears; a weather vane erected on an old, striped barber pole). Munro’s only contribution were the flowers, and the whole garden seemed like a shrine to Fremlin’s creativity. After I left, although we seemed to have had a good rapport, Munro and I were never in touch again.
“No Moral Scruples”
On Sunday, June 17, of this year I received an e-mail out of the blue from Skinner, in which she said she had begun “publicly sharing my story of childhood abuse and healing, and thought it might interest you to see how your interview in 2004 with my mother, Alice Munro, inadvertently became a key piece in my story. Please share this link with anyone you feel may benefit.”
I read her piece immediately, with its chilling details. I also went back and re-read my long-ago profile to see how it might have elicited this response in Skinner. I wrote to her saying that I admired her courage and that I had liked her mother but thought she had a selfish strain.
On June 29, Skinner wrote me again, seeming not to have received my response: “[I] realized with horror that you might have thought I was trying to implicate you. I want you to know that your interview played a part in my healing because it helped me see how far my mother was willing to go to protect herself and Gerald Fremlin, no matter the cost to me. I understood very well how charming my mother came across, and did not feel you were supposed to see through it.” I wrote her back on July 15 and asked whether she might be willing to talk, but she responded that although she appreciated my interest, her “only job for the foreseeable future is responding to survivors as the emails pour in.”
By this time, Skinner’s story was out in the world. Outraged articles were published about Munro’s staying with Fremlin after she had been told in 1992 by Skinner, then aged 25, about Fremlin’s abuse. Fremlin responded by writing a letter to the whole family in which he threatened to kill both himself and Skinner, whom he described as a “homewrecker,” comparing her to Lolita, and apologized for being unfaithful to Munro.
Although Munro left Fremlin for a few months, she eventually returned to him, saying she needed and loved him. Andrea finally reported the abuse to the police in 2005, and Fremlin pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence and probation for two years. He died in 2013, and Munro died, after years of dementia, this past May.
There has always been a radical undertone to Munro’s stories, a wish to flee the conventional life in favor of carnal desires and brazen impulses.
At bottom, as I see it, this is a story about sexual thralldom; what Munro called “the black life of the artist”; and deeply ambivalent mothering. It is also about the perhaps monstrous lengths a writer will go to protect his or her talent. This sort of devil’s bargain is something we are less judgmental about when it comes to male writers (Charles Dickens, for example, built a wall between his and his wife’s bedrooms and tried to have her committed to a madhouse) than we are when it comes to female ones.
In retrospect, clues to Munro’s nature were there all along, especially, as an article in the Toronto Star pointed out, in the 1993 story “Vandals,” published a year after Andrea told her mother about the abuse. In it, a woman who is regularly mocked and dismissed by her husband stays with him even after it emerges that he has molested their neighbor.
I recently talked with Charles McGrath, the New Yorker editor who brought Munro to the magazine, despite William Shawn’s misgivings about the roughness and crudeness in her work. McGrath admitted to being “astonished” by the revelations and insisted that there were no clues in the writing, although he also said that “she’s very clear about the bad behavior of men, especially in the early stories.” He commented on how “powerfully under the pavement the sex drive is. In her books, people change their lives overnight because of sex.”
One question that deserves further scrutiny is what role Skinner’s biological father, James Munro, played—or failed to play—in this disturbing scenario. Skinner told her stepbrother about the abuse when she was nine, and he in turn told his stepmother, who told James Munro. Why, knowing this, did he continue sending their daughter to Munro and Fremlin for the summer, even if he sent her along with an older sister to keep an eye on their stepfather? Why have we exclusively blamed Munro? Although these revelations will undoubtedly alter our perception of Munro and her writing forever, removing her stories from college reading lists won’t change the past.
There is undoubtedly an element of sensationalism in this saga. No one would have blinked an eye if Munro were not a genius in her genre but one of her fictional housewives. I still remember her telling me at that lunch, 20 years ago, almost as an aside, that she had “no moral scruples.” Did she mean it? Or was it yet another of her disclaimers to prevent an outsider from figuring her out? In any case, she remains a closed secret, one no retrospective analysis or condemnation or defense will pry open.
Daphne Merkin is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of numerous books, including the memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression and the novels Enchantment and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love. She is currently working on a book about her experiences in psychoanalysis
