The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Rachel Aviv reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for The New Yorker. Munro was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and perhaps the most acclaimed writer of short stories of our time, but her legacy darkened after her death when her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner had sexually abused her beginning when she was nine years old. The crime was known in the family, but even after a criminal conviction of Gerald Fremlin, Munro stood by him, at the expense of her relationship with Skinner. In her piece, Aviv explores how, and why, a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and discusses the ways that Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” she tells David Remnick. “That’s probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal—like trading your daughter for art.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alice Monroe was a master of the short story in our time, the check-off of her era. She published more than 50 stories in The New Yorker, and then in 2013, she won the Nobel Prize in literature. But shortly before her death, her legacy darkened when her youngest daughter, Andrea, revealed that she'd been sexually abused by Monroe's long time. partner. This began when Andrea was just nine years old, and it was kept secret in the family, even after the man confessed to it in letters. And So now Monroe's ardent readers, and there are

great many of us, are left with this terrible conundrum that a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child. In one of the most astonishing pieces of reporting that the magazine has had the honor of publishing in recent years, Rachel Leve explores the story the story of Alice Monroe and her art and the terrible secret of her life and the lives of her family. I thought we should begin by talking about Alice Monroe as a writer. She published 50 short stories at the New Yorker at least, and there were people around the office for years who considered her in many ways, you know, the checkoff of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer. I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read. the short story so many new times and each time feel like your understanding has shifted. To me, there's something beyond the sort of incredibly astute descriptions of people's in our lives.

There's something formally that she's sort of turned a short story into and sort of stretch the limits of it. What's the work about, really? I mean, it's interesting looking at the Nobel Prize presentation. The secretary is pretty on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who only understand sort of aspects of their life years later when it's been revealed.

for many of her early books are about this kind of poor rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful and there are a lot of horrific sort of freak events that happen quickly. She kind of writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it, not necessarily about herself, but about people going through sort of crises of middle age and then the crises of late age. And I think her stories are unique in the way that they kind of skip forward, like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time.

And someone is sort of only grasping what happened in their past belatedly. The thing that feels sort of most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something. and then those words would feel like alive to her, and she would sort of write a story around those words

and that this constantly happened to her where sort of it almost felt like she was moving through the world in a different way, like things had a kind of secret intensity that she could pick up on and that she wanted to capture somehow. You know, I've been working at the New Yorker for a long time, for 30 years, and Alice died last year, right?

Mm-hmm. No spring. I think I met her once or twice maybe. She very rarely seemed to come to New York and when she did it was like a stealth mission.

She kept far apart from that so-called literary world didn't she? Yeah, there was a really interesting letter that she wrote to her agent and she's saying

like I cannot go on another book tour in order to sort of be a social self I have to take so many uppers that I can't sleep for 72 hours. And then in order to sleep, I need to take so many downers that I'm sort of endangering my life and I'm in this sort of disregulated state.

And she was saying, I don't know if I can publish another book if it requires a book to her because it sort of does damage to myself. Now, I have the confession to make. So this past summer, like a lot of people, I read the piece in the Toronto Star. by Alice's grown daughter, Andrea.

And it was a short memoir in which she said that she had been sexually assaulted by Alice's husband when she was very young, nine years old, I think. Yeah. And she essentially said, you know, my stepfather sexually abused me when I was nine, and my mother protected him for our entire lives. And his name.

Jerry Fremlin. And then Jenny, who is Andrea's, older sister, and Andrew, who was her stepbrother, both wrote essays as well, sort of talking about the way that the silence had shaped their lives and their families. I read this piece. My first reaction, what I was one of, I was just startled. I mean, Alice Monroe holds a great place in my mind as a reader and frankly as a citizen of the New Yorker. She's an important figure. And my second thought, not long thereafter, was that Rachel LeVieve should write about this. And before I even had a chance to call you and discuss this, I'd heard that you were also thinking the same thing. How did this news affect you? And then why did you decide to get on it as a piece of writing and investigations so quickly?

Well, it's funny because the morning that the Toronto Star article came out, my friend, who's from Toronto, just emailed it to me and was like, Rachel, you should write about this. And then over the next few days, a few other people, friends were like, you're writing about this. What did that tell you? I think because it's about so many things that I, you know, memory, sort of family, trauma, the sort of generational dynamics. The abuse against Andrea by Fremlin, the stepfather, began when she was nine years old. What exactly happened? So Alice was away, her father was dying, and Andrea asked if she could sleep in the master bedroom, and Jerry Fremlin said, okay, don't tell your mother.

And from there, he got into her bed and sexually abused her. She said it didn't even occur to her to her to tell her mother because she felt so unsafe in that house. And then it continued until she was through pure. this sort of him exposing himself to her and sort of trying to proposition. So went on and on for years. And Fremlin, Gerald Fremlin, had a very strange way of talking about this when he eventually did. He seemed to be obsessed with Nabokos novel Lolita and much else. Tell me about Fremlin.

I mean, so after Andrea told her mother about the abuse in 1992, which is 16 years after it happened, and Alice left Jerry Fremlin, and he then sort of unleashed this like torrent of letters in which he was ostensibly defending himself, except what the letters actually were were like incredibly detailed confessions in which he explained that he was sort of responding to this nine-year-old seductress

and that he knows that there are Lolitos in the world, and he was simply being a humpurt, a humpurt. And how did Alice Monroe initially react to this letter that she got from her daughter, Andrea, saying to her, sit down, go to a quiet place before you read this, and she gives her the news. How did Alice Monroe react? Well, she did immediately leave her partner and go to their second home on the west coast of Canada. and Andrea came there to be with her

and felt the experience was not about her. It was about her mother as this sort of betrayed lover. Alice Monroe took her Jerry Fremlin back within a month. Within a month. Within a month. And, you know, the way she explained it to Andrea was, you know, I loved him too much. I'm too dependent.

I'm too old. How do you make sense of why she stayed? I loved him and I was dependent on him. She was a participant in a pretty psychologically abusive relationship, and had many of the dynamics of sort of women who try to leave men and don't feel like they can exist without that man. There was a sort of confused idea about misogyny, like this sort of idea that she often would tell Andrea

that it was misogynistic to expect a mother to sacrifice her own happiness because her husband has done a bad thing. And Andrea really internalized that and would tell her mother, like, yes, of course, like no one would ever ask a father to do this, only a mother, therefore I cannot ask my mother to do this. And then I think there was like this sense for Alice that the writing was the most important thing and that she was sort of on a kind of a kind of. kind of existential level, like living in a way that's heard to describe where she was sort of watching and not totally present and maybe, you know, not able to really feel her daughter's experience, whether it was, you know, dissociation or some sort of artistic distance that had become her mode of living. Let's listen to Alice Monroe talking to Joyce Davidson for the CBC.

This is in 1979. Passivity is not something that modern woman is supposed to be content with, let alone striving for. And yet, well, if you're passive, you sit back and watch things, and you let things happen. Have you been guilty of that?

Oh, yes, I will let situations develop way past the point where I should stop them. Just to see what will happen, to see what people will say, to see what people will do. It's probably the overriding passion. my life just to see it will happen. Is that because you don't want to hurt them? Oh, no, that's only part of it.

That's the surface part. That's the social behavior. That one doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. But it's also that everything fascinates me that happens between people. The resonant phrase for me there is to see what happens. As if the most essential thing, It's to see what will happen, and by extension, I think, to see how it becomes the material of her art.

You know, there's this, that line really resonates because there's the story she wrote years before, where a girl is sort of being abused, like sort of being groped on a train. Which one is this? This is Wild Swans. and she says, you know, she just wanted to see what will happen. It's almost the same language, the sense of like, I'm just going to kind of keep going here because I'm so curious. To see what the human behavior will be positive, negative, or otherwise. And she describes herself as victim and accomplice, and there's the sense of feeling like an accomplice because of that curiosity, of that wanting it to happen, or,

wanting to not interfere with the action that will come to her. It's almost as if she never left her husband and reconciled with her daughters because the conflict was fruitful for her work. Is that unfair? Probably. I mean, I feel like it was more helpless than that because, of course, she had, like, deep wounds from her own life. Right, she had been beaten badly by her father when she was growing up. And sort of complex dynamics. it was a power game sort of.

She would be beaten, and then her mother would sort of come to her, like a supplicant with all these treats, and she would sort of resist, and then she would fall back into it. And I think, you know, like there's this language of, like, art monsters, which, like, sure applies, but I also feel like it's maybe less interesting or true to the experience of, you know, you know, just being very wounded and sort of finding a man who kind of speaks to those wounds. And then... What do you mean speaks to those wounds? Who...

To heal them? No, no, not to heal them. To allow her to sort of unknowingly replicate patterns from her childhood. You know, I went back and re-read this piece in the New York Times magazine from 20 years ago by Daphne. It describes the relationship of Monroe and Jerry Fremlin. And it's not Merkin's fault. This was performed for her. in a sense.

But she described that relationship in very sporty, genial terms. Yeah. I mean, it's just like an incredible level of sort of living, of performing. And I think she's spoken about that a lot in interviews of feeling like she is two women. You know, one is the woman who's sort of being

what other people want her to be. And the other is the woman who's sort of living a solitary, kind of watchful. removed existence. And so, well, the interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea where she felt like... What year is it? I think it was 2004. And she felt like her, she was just being erased. And that was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse. How did the police react to that report? I talked to the detective and he was, you know, praising her for being this like incredibly

straightforward witness who looks him in the eye and you know and she had these incredible letters to back it up like she she was handing him the perpetrator's confession and what came out of that investigation it was sort of patched up really quickly he pled guilty to indecent assault there was no jury it was a one sentence

admission of guilt in which the first person pro-inanin was dropped. Yeah. And then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press. And at the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her. And then abruptly she canceled the plan. Because in a sense, in publicity terms, they got away with it. It didn't, it didn't blow it. And we should say also that Alice Monroe in case. Canada, her reputation was immense. People referred to as the queen of the literary scene there. It was, you know, people here probably at that time knew other writers, Tony Morrison or John Updike, much more than Alice Monroe somehow. But in Canada, was a different story, no?

Yeah, I was surprised talking to the Toronto Star reporter who ultimately broke the story. But she said when she was first proposed the story after Andrea had said, an email. She said no. She didn't want to do it. She didn't want to take down an idol. She didn't want to jeopardize her relationships and publishing. She'd seen Alice Monroe as this emblem of feminism, and she'd sort of been inspired by the idea that you could tell your own story and take control over your own story. And ultimately, she did change her mind. But even that thought that in 2004, there was like a day-long pause before she was ready to do it. And even before then, Andrea had reached out to a number of journalists, and she got no response. I'm speaking with Rachel Levive, who's reported for the New Yorker on Alice Monroe and her

daughter, Andrea Skinner. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with staff writer Rachel Leve. in a piece that you can find on New Yorker.com called Alice Monroe's passive voice. Rachel LeVeeve probes with depth and sensitivity. What happened in Alice Monroe's family after Monroe's partner sexually abused her youngest daughter. Andrea, the daughter, told members of her family about it when it happened, including her father Jim Monroe. But nobody wanted to tell Alice Monroe.

Nobody wanted to upset her. And years later, when Jerry Fremlin admitted to the abuse, Alice stood by him. She gradually lost contact with her daughter, Andrea. Rachel, we spoke before the break about how the media ignored this story for many years, and it kind of mirrors the way Alice Monroe's family dealt with it. You spoke with Andrea Skinner repeatedly and at great length. Here's a recording she made for a Survivor's Group in Canada called The Gatehouse. I was estranged from most of my family for many years.

Though I had told most of my family about the abuse when I was 10 years old, no action was taken to protect me. And I was sent back to my stepfather's house. Unfortunately, nobody did anything to stop it or help me heal at that time. And the effects of that were that I felt really devalued and

even dehumanized by not just my abuser, but all of the significant people of my life. So her siblings as well as her mother shut her out. There was this sense of

of like, we all need to protect our mother. And this feeling that she was very horribly fragile and that like this refrain in the family, like she'll die if she knows. And the sisters kind of took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother. And actually Sheila almost told her mother. But they both, there was this kind of mythology

of like, we must not impinge. on this great career and on this fragile woman. Now, you spoke with Robert Thacker, who's a biographer of Alice Monroe. He knew about the abuse. What was his rationale as a scholar, as a biographer, to ignore this incredibly pivotal on the criminal record? Yeah.

Piece of news. I mean, he just basically said, it's not the book I'm writing. I think what he said to me at one point was every family has a thing like this. I'm sorry, but how did you react to that when you heard that kind of out of his mouth?

I try not to respond with judgment. I think I just listened, but... But we're sitting here, it's just us too. I mean, why write a biography if you're not going to sort of do... Yeah, I think, you know, Andrea said in a letter to him, Like, he had responded, you know, I'll make sure I didn't, like, say anything too flattering, essentially, about Jerry.

And she said, I didn't mean cross-out flattering adjectives. I meant, you know, scrap the whole book. Or write an honest biography. Right. And she said, you know, to ignore this is to ignore sort of the context in which these stories are being created. I think there was this, he was trying to hold onto this idea. And the family members were, too, that. that this was between Jerry and Andrea,

like this sort of delusional idea that it was a two-person interaction. What's amazing is how many stories in mid and late career are haunted by, shadowed by, or even, you could say, about this situation. Which is the story that, in your mind, is the most directly infested with this?

I think it's vandals from 1990. Talk about that story. I read the letters that Alice wrote to her agent, and she said, first she wrote that she had started a story, and she called it about, it was about the subject. And she said she approached it from different angles, and then she felt like she was going to throw up, and she burned it. And then two months later, she had written a draft of vandals.

It's about a young girl named Liza and her younger brother, and in the summers they go every day to play with this man and his wife who has sort of become a mother figure. And the man is sexually abusing the children. It sort of emerges. The story is sort of structured as an investigation into whether the mother knows and chooses to look away or doesn't know but should know. And in that story, there are lines or images that are almost lifted from the letter that Andrew wrote to her mother disclosing her abuse and from a letter that Jerry wrote about their relationships.

So it feels you can sort of see pieces of sort of language, sentences that must have like lit her up in somewhere, like made her feel like she had to build a story around it. Did Andrea go on reading her mother's stories as they came out in the magazine and in books? She did for a while. It must have been horrific. You know, she said that for a while, she almost tried to convince herself to be hopeful, and she felt like, okay, here she is. She's getting it out.

She's working through it. You know, there was one story, Richest Stink, that has this, image of a daughter wearing a wedding dress that burns. And it's this like, and Andrea said, here's this image of innocence destroyed. Like there's this feeling that her mother must understand. And then eventually Andrea realized that like the insights were going to her characters and not to her daughters and not to herself.

And then Andrea felt increasingly enraged by sort of the passivity of the characters, the sense of them sort of existing in this bleak survival mode. One of the striking things about this extraordinary piece is that Andrea doesn't go to pieces. She continues living her life and she has a life. What is it? You know, I think this sort of is a defining problem in her life in a way that she appears to be thriving.

Even to her siblings who are deceived by that in some way. Right, and that, you know, in a way, as a child, it was a coping mechanism. There's a sense that, like, she held the key to either destroying her family or keeping their family together. And so they all felt like she was kind of the star of the family, the one who was the most like her mother. And she and I had conversations about that where I would say, like, I'm worried I'm slipping into that state that the siblings are in where you seem to be thriving. Your daughter just said you have this incredible joy for life. you do seem to have this incredible joy. I mean, something she said to me that I found really profound was one of the letters from the 70s that Alice wrote was about being raped by a colleague.

First, she says she was so numb that she just walked aimlessly around the city and missed the class. She was supposed to teach that day. And then later on, she says, well, we'll make a good story. The sense of dissociation is incredible. Yeah, but Andrea said, you know, when I read that letter, at first I kind of felt pain for my mother, because I know that feeling of, you know, aimlessly walking around the city. And then she said, the next feeling I had was rage that, like, she did a day of that and sort of moved on to have this incredibly productive life. And I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city. Alice Monroe won the Nobel Prize. How did Andrea react to that news?

I think what was hardest for her was watching Jenny receive the prize from the king of Sweden because Alice was too weak at that point to go to Sweden. And she felt like, oh, you know, the family really is happier that I'm not in it. Now they can live this one reality. How do you think this affects Alice Monroe's literary legacy and how we'll read her in the future. I know lots of people that at first they said, I'm never going to read her again. Your colleague, Jayang Fan, who was teaching Aliceman,

I just had Lunger with her. She just rocked her in a most elemental way. How do you think that will affect Alice Monroe's being read in the future? A question that feels almost more like alive to me is the way that her writing makes you think about art at what expense not to sort of deny that it's art

and that it has value as art but to think about what existed in its wake who was harmed, what was sacrificed and that's probably a question that is relevant for many artists but Alice Monroe kind of makes it visible on the page. Like it felt so so literal, like, you know, trading your daughter for art.

It felt like... And you see it that way? Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision, but I think, you know, Alice did speak very... With a lot of self-awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter. and that person was a writer.

Alice ignored her own mother. Her own mother, who was dying, who had Parkinson's. So there's a certain ruthlessness to it? But the repetition, I think, that she could speak very honestly and with a lot of self-awareness about how she had to abandon her own mother to become a writer, that I'm sort of feeling that there was a certain awareness probably about how she also abandoned her daughter to be the writer she became. And earlier in our conversation talked about trying not to be judgmental, but in fact, writing in no small part is a collection of many judgments along the way, whether about sentences or how a story moves or the judgments you make. And in this story, the real crime is committed by the man, Gerald Fremlin. We shouldn't forget that.

And I wonder in the end how you do judge Alice Monroe. Generously? I mean, I feel horrified. I feel horrified that it's hard because, like, you know, what would she say? Did she think the work is more important? Is that just sort of what the decision she made? Do you think she thought of it in those stark terms? I think maybe.

Because in that, you know, one of the most, like, chilling moments for me was when the biographer, Bob Facker, when I read the conversation between Alice and him about, she was sort of asking him, like, what do my daughters want you to do? And he was telling her. And she stated really clearly, you know, my daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me, and I worked a long time to become who I am. And she sort of, I mean, couldn't be more stark than that. Rachel Leviv, thank you so much.

Thank you. Alice Monroe's passive voice is the title of Rachel Levive's piece, and you can read it at our website, New Yorker.com. And you can subscribe to the New Yorker for reporting like this every week, and that's also at new yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. I want to close the program and begin the new year by thanking everyone at the Radio Hour and at the New Yorker. And thank you for listening and a happy new year.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Mass, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccate. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.