TORONTO.- The daughter of the deceased Nobel Prize in Literature Alice Munro accused the second husband of writerGerard Fremlin, the sexual abuse and wrote that his mother stayed with him because she loved him too much.
Munro, who died in May at age 92, was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved writers and a source of pride in her native Canada, where a reckoning over her legacy is now underway.
Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter with her first husband, James Munro, wrote in an essay published in the Toronto Star that Fremlin sexually assaulted her in the mid-1970s when she was 9 and continued to harass and abuse her until she was a teenager. Skinner, whose essay was published Sunday, wrote that she told the author about Fremlin’s abuse when she was in her 20s. Munro left her husband for a time but eventually returned and was still with him when he died in 2013.
“She reacted exactly as I feared she would, as if she had found out about an affair,” Skinner wrote. “She said I had told him too late, that she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if he expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s failures. She insisted that what had happened was between my stepfather and me. It had nothing to do with her.”
Distancing between writer and daughter
Skinner wrote that as a result, he became estranged from his mother and siblings. Shortly after the magazine The New York Times After publishing a 2004 article in which Munro spoke glowingly of Fremlin, Skinner decided to contact the Ontario Provincial Police and provided them with letters in which Fremlin had admitted to abusing her, the paper reported. Toronto Star In a companion story also published Sunday, the 80-year-old pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence, one that was not widely reported for nearly two decades.
The news shocked and saddened the literary world, although some readers, and Skinner herself, cited parallels in the author’s work, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 and hailed as a master of contemporary short stories by the judges.
The owners of Munros Books, a prominent independent store in Victoria, British Columbia, issued a statement Monday expressing support for Skinner and calling her account heartbreaking. The author co-founded the store in 1963 with her first husband and Skinner’s father, James Munro, who continued to run the store after their divorce in 1971. Two years before her death in 2016, Munro turned the store over to four staff members.
“Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to process this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the shop we have previously celebrated,” the store said in a statement.
Skinner wrote that she had told her father, with whom she lived most of the year, about the initial abuse, but that her father told her not to tell her mother and continued to send her to Munro and Fremlin during the summers.
“The store’s current owners have become part of our family’s healing and are modeling a truly positive response to revelations like Andrea’s,” reads a statement from Skinner and other family members posted on the store’s website. “We fully support the owners and staff of Munros Books as they chart a new future.”
Brothers support Skinner
Although Skinner spent many years estranged from her siblings, they have since reconciled and her family has spoken to him Toronto Star in support of Skinner. While they felt the world needed to know about the cover-up and that sexual violence needed to be talked about, the Star reported, Munro’s children believe her acclaimed literary reputation is deserved.
“I still feel she’s a great writer, she deserved the Nobel,” her daughter Sheila Munro told the Star. “She dedicated her life to it and showed her incredible talent and imagination. And that’s all she really wanted to do with her life. Write those stories and get them out.”
Sheila Munro, who is also an author, wrote about her mother in the 2002 book Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munroa project suggested by Alice Munro. Sheila makes no reference to Skinner’s abuse, but notes that her mother often drew on her private life and that she struggled to separate Munro’s fiction from the reality of what actually happened.
Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker told The Associated Press that Munro stories like Silence y Runaway They focus on children separated from their parents. In VndalosA woman mourns the loss of an ex-boyfriend, Ladner, an unstable war veteran who assaulted her young neighbor, Liza.
As Ladner grabbed Liza and crushed himself against her, she felt a sense of danger deep within him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he might burn himself out in a lightning strike, leaving nothing but black smoke, burning smells and dead wires, Munro wrote.
Thacker, whose book Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives Published in 2005, the same year Fremlin was convicted, she told the AP she had long known about Fremlin’s abuse but omitted it from her book because it was an academic analysis of his career.
“I expected there would be repercussions one day,” Thacker said, adding that she even spoke to the author about it. “I don’t want to go into details, but it tore the family apart. It was devastating in so many ways. And it was something she spoke about deeply.”
FUENTE: AP
