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Alice Munro’s publisher has expressed “shock” and “sadness” after the late Nobel Prize-winner’s daughter revealed the childhood sexual abuse she was subjected to by her stepfather.
Writing in the Toronto Star on Sunday, Andrea Robin Skinner said her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, began sexually assaulting her in 1976 when she was nine. Skinner says she wrote her mother a letter in 1992, when she was in her twenties, telling Munro what happened to her, but Munro “loved him too much” to leave him.
Munro, regarded as one of the greatest short-story writers, died in May at the age of 92.
A statement from Munro’s publishers, Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin Random House, reads: “We were shocked and deeply saddened to read Andrea Robin Skinner’s story in the Toronto Star on Sunday. As we conveyed directly to Andrea and her siblings, we support and respect Andrea’s bravery in sharing the trauma she has experienced and the steps the family are taking to heal.”
The essay begins: “Dear Mom. Please find a spot alone before you read this… I have been keeping a terrible secret for 16 years. Gerry abused me sexually when I was nine years old. I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened.”
Skinner says Munro “reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity”, with Fremlin himself painting Munro’s youngest daughter as “a nine-year-old homewrecker”.
Skinner went to the police about the abuse in 2005 and Fremlin, who was 80 at the time, was charged with indecent assault and pleaded guilty. He received a suspended sentence and two years of probation.
Munro stayed with Fremlin until he died in 2013 – the same year she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Munro’s work has sold just over 385,000 units for £3.2m in the Nielsen BookScan era (which only dates back to 1998).
Dear Life, the paperback of which came out just after she won the Nobel in 2013, is her bestseller, shifting just over 86,000 copies for £740,000 in all editions.