Alice Munro's daughter was sexually abused by her stepfather, but when the Nobel laureate in literature found out, she still chose to stay with her husband.
"I want my story to be part of the story about my mom," writes daughter Andrea Skinner in Toronto Star.
In a chronicle in the Canadian newspaper, Andrea Skinner writes, just weeks after her mother Alice Munro's death, that she was subjected to sexual abuse by her stepfather at the age of nine.
According to Skinner, it was the summer of 1976 when her stepfather Gerald Fremlin, while Munro was not at home, crept into her bed and sexually abused her. She also writes that he exposed himself to her during car rides, told her about little girls in the neighborhood he "liked", and extensively told her about her mother's sexual preferences.
When Skinner was 25 years old, she told her mother about the abuse, but her mother still chose to stay with the perpetrator until his death in 2013.
"She reacted exactly as I had feared – as if he had been unfaithful to her," writes Skinner.
When Munro over ten years later publicly praised her husband in The New York Times, Skinner went to the police. Fremlin confessed and was convicted in 2005 for sexual abuse.
The reason Andrea Skinner is now telling her story is because she wants it to be part of the celebrated author's legacy:
"When I went to the police, it was because I wanted there to be evidence in public records that I didn't deserve what happened to me. But I also want my story to be part of the story about my mom," she writes.
Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She passed away in May this year, 92 years old. After her death, she was hailed worldwide, including by Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
