Andrea Skinner

What matters in a story about sexual assault.

Andrea Skinner, the daughter of Alice Munro, who made public her experience of sexual assault by Munro’s husband and its cover-up.

On July 7 2024, in an op-ed in the Toronto Star, Andrea Skinner, the daughter of Alice Munro, wrote about the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin. It started in 1976 when she was nine. She wrote that while Munro was away, Fremlin “climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me.” After that and for years, Skinner reported, Fremlin often exposed himself to her, told her about her mother's sexual needs, and spoke about the “little girls in the neighborhood” he liked.

Andrea told her stepmother, who told James Munro, Andrea’s father. James Munro didn’t confront Alice, and the abuse continued with no adult intervention. Andrea’s father’s business was a bookstore made famous and successful on the reputation of Munro’s writing. He traded his daughter’s wellbeing to keep things quiet. What a shocker. When has a man ever traded his daughter for cash?

When Andrea was 25, she finally wrote to her mother about what had happened. Munro treated the account as if Andrea was reporting an affair she’d had with her husband and said she felt betrayed. What a shocker. When has a creep ever played the victim card?

In response to Andrea’s disclosures, writes Jaclyn Diaz in NPR (July 8, 2024), “Fremlin wrote letters to Munro and the family, threatening to kill Skinner if she ever went to the police. He blamed Skinner for the abuse and described her as a child as a ‘home wrecker’. He also threatened to expose photos he took of Skinner when she was a girl. Munro went back to Fremlin and stayed with him until he died in 2013, Skinner wrote. Munro allegedly said ‘that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her’, Skinner wrote in her essay.”

In 2005, Andrea reported Gerry, who was 80 at the time, to police in Ontario, using as evidence letters he’d sent the family. He pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence and probation for two years. All this was in the public record, but journalists stayed clear of reporting it.

In 2013, Munro received the Nobel Prize in literature. On May 13, 2024, she died at age 92. Andrea said in her op-ed piece she was coming forward now with the full details because she wanted her story “to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”

After Andrea’s piece came out, all I heard people talking about was Munro’s writing. How were they going to keep reading her? Blah, blah, blah. And that is, essentially, the focus of the giant piece, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” written by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker, December 23, 2024. If you are Andrea, or feel for Andrea, or lived a version of Andrea’s experience, as I and a zillion other female humans have, the question—How are we going to keep reading Munro?—is not an important question. It’s not a serious question. It’s a question asked on behalf of money and some notion of a literary establishment. It’s not a question asked on behalf of art, which would be okay in my book, but in Aviv’s piece it’s not a question asked on behalf of art.

Before I started reading the New Yorker piece, I didn’t know the details of Andrea’s experience reported above. I didn’t think to ask, right out of the chute, why isn’t the piece called, “What Happened to Andrea Skinner is Really Bad and Really Commonplace except in this Case it Involves a Famous Writer”?

I was about a third of the way through when I stopped to collect my thoughts. (I’ve since read to the end.) Aviv writes with lucid detail and without the gasoline and matches that would throw only rhetoric and smoke on the subjects. It's a carefully woven tale of SOMETHING with a ton of material drawn from interviews and writings she connects.

The length of the piece and the clinical inspection of this family member’s angle and that family member’s recollection and mea culpa suggests Aviv is telling a family story we care about because the central figure is a very famous person and an esteemed artist. The attention, itself, suggests the conditions of the hurt girl are special, and all of it has a quiet, can you believe this hush combined with a spoon on a tin plate tabloid clatter, a true crime, close-up shot of a bloody carpet.

I felt no impulse to read further because Munro, herself, was at the center—sort of and yet a vaguely drawn questionable lady. I felt I was reading a type of celebrity journalism with a missing conversation about the social framework where these kinds of events and cover-ups happen.

I don't care about the relationship between Alice’s devotion to Gerry and the art she was able to make as a result of it. Harvey Weinstein produced some great movies. Read Munro or don’t read her, any way you like.

It can’t possibly be news that even the weakest men command the protection of the polis to continue their lives out of jail. Everyone knows why the protection continues. It can’t possibly be news that men get a pass and some women write out instructions for the pass. The women who write out instructions for the pass interest me zero. Nor do I care what people make of the reasons Alice wrote out instructions for the pass. This kind of psychologizing bores me to death. Also the possible psychological underpinnings of Gerry’s behavior! More time spent looking at the man! The only story worth telling about any of this is the pass.

The conditions that fostered what happened to Andrea are manifold and social, not the plight of individuals. There is no social context in Aviv’s writing for how men get a pass and how conditions in society make stories like Andrea's not only possible but part of what men like Gerry and the people who prop up Gerrys consider the tribute Gerrys are owed. Gerrys make the world work, and if you want a world in which Gerrys don't get a pass and Andreas are not offered to them on a platter, you would need to think in different terms about what made this story happen.

Aviv’s piece, with astonishing self-regard, makes Andrea a minor character in her own life. It does to her what the people in her life did. The focus is still on the big and famous people, and on a famous person the New Yorker continued to publish while editors were made privy to, or at least heard hints about, Gerry's sexual abuse of Andrea and Alice's response to it all.

There are all kinds of ways to have made a great piece that centered on Andrea, where she was the focus and the people who harmed her didn't get more time to strut their stuff on stage. Few people really want to look at the girl. Certainly not the New Yorker. Few people want to look at the girl—and mainly those people are other girls like the girl.

Here’s another way a story like this goes.

When you are fourteen, you’re invited to spend the weekend in the country house of the shrink who treats your mother, your sister, you, your cousins, your aunt and uncle and god knows how many other people who respect the shrink highly. His name is on their lips all the time.

The shrink touches you sexually in his house. Later that night, he touches you again and moves you on the bed toward having sexual intercourse with him. You get him to stop. It doesn’t matter how. You don’t stand up to him directly. You wouldn’t know how to do that. But you get him to stop.

You don’t want him to be angry with you, and you know he is. He tells you not to tell your mother. He doesn’t mention your father or anyone else. You don’t tell anyone for the next four or five years. You know why you don’t tell anyone. You are right now 78 and this thing in his bed in the country happened in 1960.

The thing that happened determined your life. It determined everything in your life from that day forward. You have never forgotten it. The man died without any intervention from the law, and he did it to dozens and dozens of girls and women. You have never forgotten it because it determined how your life would go.

You were not damaged. You didn’t need to be healed. You were not broken. The thing I have just described happened. That’s what happened. And when John Kennedy was assassinated, you already knew something about how the world worked, and so the shock of the assassination was not the same shock it would have been if André hadn’t come first.

After André, you could not be shocked, and if, for a long time, you are unable to be shocked, you develop a comic sensibility. André didn’t give me a comic sensibility. André gave me nothing. A comic sensibility is what I made of my experience. And look, I just told this story by staying focused entirely on the girl.

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Today in Hudson.

We went out today. No birds did it. No rabbits or mice. They're not insane. It's like minus one or something. One deer did it at the top of our hill, and us.

When I say "out," I mean we walked to the garage and got in the car. Richard has something wrong with his shoulder and needed to get xrays.

We also went to the CVS because I had a coupon that was expiring. Afterward, I said, "I think we should go to the Talbott and Arding and have tea." Richard said, "Let's go home and have tea." I said, "I think we need to sit some place other than our house. Something could happen there. We might meet a stranger." He said, "Can we please go home?" I said, "Okay." He said, "How come you said okay?" I said, "Because we're married, and this is our honeymoon."

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