What Alice Munro Knew

The man was Gerald Fremlin, a retired civil servant and geographer, who hailed from the same corner of Ontario as Munro. Munro amassed a thicket of honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2013, by turning this parochial backwater, with its “falling-down barns” and “burdensome old churches,” into a stage for the whole human comedy, like Joyce’s Dublin or Faulkner’s Mississippi. “Luck exists, so does love, and I was right to go after it,” Munro concluded in her letter about Fremlin. This July, two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her.