Namesake

Twenty years ago, I named a child abuser in my debut novel after Gerald Fremlin, the second husband of Alice Munro and, as the media depictions of the writer made it seem, the love of her life. Five months after the novel was published, Fremlin was charged with having sexually assaulted Munro’s youngest daughter in 1976. You might wonder what I knew while writing my book. I wonder the same thing.

I grew up in a rural Ontario county next door to Huron County, where Munro and Fremlin lived, but, despite her literary celebrity, I never knew about her until I read one of her short stories for a university course in 1997. The story, from 1974, was “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” It’s about a woman who lives for years with a man even though a terrible crime has been committed by one of them against an intimate relation. The woman keeps thinking that the two of them will discuss the crime, but they never do.

Actually, I’m not quite representing the story properly. As vague as my summary is, the story is vaguer, only hinting that a crime has been committed. Reading it as a student, I didn’t yet know that such subtleties and delicate intimations were a hallmark of Munro’s work. I was only baffled by the obliquity.

My solution was to write a master’s thesis on Munro. The more I studied her fiction, the more my confusion turned to admiration. The stories were so well crafted and so wise. Munro wrote vividly and incisively about the region in which I’d grown up. She exposed its flaws, especially its oppressiveness for women, while showing how a seemingly inconsequential place could be the material for great art. She demonstrated that the everyday holds beguiling, irreducible mystery — that, as she put it in her 1971 novel, Lives of Girls and Women, people’s existences are “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

My thesis, which I completed in 2002, ended up focusing on how Munro represents place in “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” and in “Vandals,” a story from her 1994 collection, Open Secrets. “Vandals” is also about a couple going on with their lives in the face of a crime having been committed: a woman named Bea lives for many years with a man named Ladner, who has sexually abused the two children from next door. What she does or doesn’t know about the abuse is a key plot point.

My focus wasn’t the plot, though. I was interested in how Munro wrote about a region that was intimately familiar to me and how she conjured such a rich sense of landscape. Still, I appreciated how she captured the complexities of Bea’s attraction to Ladner in the face of knowing from the start that he isn’t a good person. One of the sentences that I underlined with admiration has Bea asking herself, “For what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity?” It is the kind of sentence that Munro excelled at, both startlingly illuminative of the story’s characters and trenchantly insightful about human relationships more broadly.

It wasn’t just Munro’s writing that I loved. I loved the idea of an author that she represented. She’d made sacrifices to embrace writing short stories as her vocation. She’d eschewed the public eye, preferring the near anonymity of small-town life. I saw the photographs of her with a cocked eyebrow or wry smile and felt a connection. I decided to ask her if I could interview her. But how to get in touch? Thinking that a publisher might stonewall me, I decided to write Munro directly. For that, I’d need her home address.

To get it, I asked my mother. The town where Munro resided was a two-hour drive from the town where my parents live, but the web of social connections in rural southwestern Ontario is such that I figured Mom might know somebody who knew Munro. Sure enough, she did. The address was procured. I sent the letter.

A few weeks later, a handwritten note from Munro arrived in the mail. She told me that she was sorry, but she received too many requests and had to turn down most of them to protect her writing time.

By that point, I was relieved. I’d grown terrified of how meeting her would go. Now, instead, I could enjoy having gotten a note from her. After all, her work was what I most admired. At the same time, a line from Edward Said’s Orientalism kept running through my mind like an accusation: “It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human.”

After my thesis, I started writing The Mysteries. You won’t be surprised to hear that the novel is about a small town in southwestern Ontario, or that I named one of the main characters Alice. Influenced by a recent exposé of sexual violence in Canadian hockey by the journalist Laura Robinson, I also included a plot line about a coach’s abuse of one of his athletes. I gave him the name Stoddart Fremlin.

The surname was my way of acknowledging a debt to Munro’s fiction. Somehow I didn’t worry that Alice Munro, Gerald Fremlin, or anyone else might take the choice of name as malicious. I figured that everyone would know I couldn’t possibly be libelling a man who’d only ever been represented in articles about Munro as her loving husband.

Looking back, I find my line of thinking shockingly naive. But nobody challenged me on the name, not even after The Mysteries was published in 2004 — not until two years later, when I gave a reading at a literary festival in Bayfield, a mere fifteen-minute drive from Munro and Fremlin’s home. During the question period, an older woman in the audience stood up and asked me why I’d named a child abuser Fremlin, given that it was the name of Alice Munro’s husband.

I don’t remember what the woman looked like, but I remember that my face grew hot. I replied that the name was meant as a nod to Munro’s influence on me as a writer. I added that it called to my mind the word “gremlin”— a resonant echo, I thought, for a character who did such awful things.

The older woman nodded and said, “I believe you.” I heard in her voice a complete lack of belief. I heard an implicit accusation echoing a Munro title: “Who do you think you are?”

At the post-reading reception, things got worse for me, because I saw across the room none other than Alice Munro. She hadn’t been a featured author at the festival, but an event organizer was introducing her to the writers in the room, one at a time. I waited for my turn, terrified that she had been in the audience and would have her own thoughts about my character’s name.

When Munro and I were finally introduced, I spoke first, telling her that I’d written her a few years earlier to request an interview. She smiled and said, “I hope I didn’t tell you to fuck off.” She didn’t ask about my novel. We visited only a little more. Others wanted her attention, and I was still too rattled by the audience member’s question to want to prolong the conversation.

Later, whenever I told people about the encounter, I repeated Munro’s first words to me as a punchline, but I always left out the question period. I felt too embarrassed by my reckless naming of the character.

Fifteen years passed before I felt able to write about meeting Munro for the one and only time. I did it indirectly in a short story, “Something Something Alice Munro,” about a doctoral student who’s obsessed with Munro and who, upon visiting Bayfield, is promised the chance to meet her, though that never happens. After the story was published in 2021, a lot of folks got in touch. It was clear that however much they liked the story, they really, really liked the writing of Alice Munro.

When Munro died last spring, my grief, like the grief of all those people, was enormous, even though she hadn’t published anything since 2012 and she’d been out of the limelight since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, the same year that Fremlin died. I marked her passing by taking a road trip to Huron County with a pair of Munro scholars. We visited Bayfield. We viewed the house where she had lived with Fremlin. We visited the tiny brick farmhouse where she had been raised. Neither place had signage to indicate Munro’s connection to it.

Then, one morning in July, I received an email alerting me to an essay by Andrea Skinner, one of Munro’s three daughters with her first husband, revealing Fremlin’s sexual abuse of her, beginning in 1976, when she was nine. Skinner also revealed her mother’s insistence on staying with him after Skinner disclosed to her in 1992 what had happened. And Skinner revealed that after she’d gone to the Ontario Provincial Police in 2004 with letters from Fremlin, in which he admitted to the crimes, he’d been convicted of indecent assault in 2005, with not a single mention in the news media, not even after Skinner reached out to journalists, urging them to cover the story. As a result, the abuse had stayed an open secret among the family, various people in Huron County, and unknown numbers in newsrooms and the literary community.

Right away, I started hearing from friends who had long shared my love of Munro’s writing. None of them had known anything about the history that Skinner had disclosed. All of them were in shock, appalled, and heartbroken — for Skinner, and, in a very different sense, for themselves and everyone else who had looked to Munro as a literary hero. I felt that heartbreak, too: the grief that accompanies the loss not of a person but of an idea of a person.

I also felt consternation at the timeline that now locked into place: the publication of my book in 2004; the conviction in 2005; the woman at the Bayfield festival in 2006. Maybe she’d known about the conviction and wondered if I did, too. Maybe she’d assumed, given the timing, that I’d had some insider knowledge. Maybe she was bewildered by the fact that no news outlet had taken up the story, and she was wondering what to do with her own knowledge of it. Maybe she’d been hoping that I, a writer, might provide clarity about the matter. Instead, all I’d offered was a claim about literary influence and words that rhymed.

I started to doubt my own account. Who could believe that my naming a child abuser after Fremlin was a mere coincidence? Yet how could I have known the truth, when my novel had been published before Skinner even went to the police?

Only one answer suggested itself to me: at an unconscious level, the knowledge had come through Munro’s fiction. In the wake of Skinner’s essay, people began reassessing “Vandals,” in particular, which Munro had written not long after Skinner told her of the abuse. Bea staying with the abuser Ladner suddenly took on a very different cast. So did the story’s attention to the anger that one of the abused children, Liza, feels in adulthood because Bea didn’t protect her from Ladner. Liza’s outrage is so strong that, after Ladner dies, she vandalizes Bea’s house.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a story feeling so much sadness and dread and experiencing so many pangs of troubling inference as I did when rereading “Vandals.” Now it seemed a fraught processing of Munro’s feelings about Skinner’s revelation and about Munro’s complicity in Fremlin’s abuse. In occasionally taking up Liza’s point of view, Munro seemed to be trying to understand Skinner’s perspective. But then there was Liza’s act of vandalism. The possibility that, at some level, Munro understood Skinner’s disclosure to be its own kind of vandalism left me feeling sick. And then there was the ample attention to Bea’s desire for Ladner: we’re told that she “pitied herself for being a victim of such wants.” If read as autobiographical, the story could be taken equally as a clear-eyed self-indictment and a narcissistic self-defence.

When I had previously read “Vandals,” none of the details I was now noticing would have prompted me to view it as autobiographical. Likewise, although the fact that Bea and Ladner get together after she leaves another man recalls the history of Munro marrying Fremlin after divorcing her first husband, the situation of a woman exiting a marriage and starting a new relationship is a motif in so many of Munro’s stories from the 1970s onward that its appearance in “Vandals,” in itself, doesn’t make it seem particularly confessional.

Then I noticed a couple of other details — details that had a much more distinctive autobiographical quality. One of them was that Ladner served in the air force during the Second World War; so too did Fremlin. Another had to do with the name Ladner: I realized that it’s a single letter away from being an anagram of Gerald.

The thing is, when I’d been working on my master’s thesis, I’d spent time pondering the name Ladner, knowing that characters’ names in Munro’s stories typically carry subtle significations. I’d known that Ladner was the name of a suburb in British Columbia, the province where Munro had lived with her first husband and where she lived half the year with Fremlin. I’d even recognized that the name had an anagrammatic quality. But what I’d really noticed was that it contained the word “land,” and that in “Vandals,” Ladner’s assertion of dominion over the land he owns is conspicuous. These aspects of the name had facilitated my scholarly focus on the story’s depiction of place. They’d also misdirected me, steering me away from what now seemed likely: Munro had named the child abuser in her story after her husband. No wonder I’d done the same with the abuser in my novel. I hadn’t known what Gerald Fremlin had done, but — in a way that now struck me as both painstaking and reckless — Munro had left the clues there for readers to figure out.

Rereading “Vandals” shed light on how I might have chosen the name Fremlin for my character, but it left me in the dark about Munro. If anything, the story only increased my sense of not knowing her. In the wake of Skinner’s essay, maybe every devoted reader of Munro’s work has been asking themselves how this author could have let down her daughter in such a profound way; how she could have stayed with Fremlin; how she could have gone on, as she did, publicly keeping up the pretense of a happy family. The question of what she understood herself to be doing with “Vandals” is no less mystifying. How did she think that Skinner or other family members would view it? I can’t imagine what conversations Munro might have had with them to explain herself, though given the culture of silence exposed by Skinner’s essay, it’s easy to believe that nobody spoke of the story at all.

You can read “Vandals” as Munro telling the world that she empathized with her daughter, condemned her husband, and regretted her own complicity in the abuse. You can also read it as a further betrayal of Skinner, transforming her trauma into a public commodity that garnered her mother critical acclaim. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. When “Vandals” was published in 1994, Munro herself had long understood that the most brilliant fiction can involve authorial treachery. In a 1972 essay, she wrote, “Even as I most feverishly, desperately practise it, I am a little afraid that the work with words may turn out to be a questionable trick, an evasion (and never more so than when it is most dazzling, apt and striking), an unavoidable lie.”

In visiting “Vandals” again, I felt that it brought together terrible things to reckon with: The abuse of a child. A family’s failure to stop that abuse. Munro’s failure to support her child after learning what her husband had done. Munro staying with Fremlin. The failure of various people to act when told of Skinner’s suffering. There was also the question of how someone whose fiction was so perceptive and compassionate could be so flawed in her private life, and there was the question of what to do about that fiction now, when the very name Alice Munro evokes a history of abuse, silence, and betrayal that is, cruelly, not just one family’s but a history that countless families share.

For me, the need for a reckoning came in an especially acute way, because, as it happened, the same week that Skinner’s essay was published, I was making final edits to my own soon-to-be-published short story collection, which was slated to include “Something Something Alice Munro.”

Would it be best to remove the story? I read it over and reassured myself that the narrative didn’t present a sympathetic picture of Munro as a person. In fact, it didn’t depict Munro at all; she never turns up to meet the graduate student as planned. Instead, the story was about the student’s idealized notions of her object of study, which have formed solely through reading Munro’s work.

I talked with my editor about what to do. We discussed including the story with a note explaining that it had been written and first published before the recent revelations. In the end, though, that option didn’t sit right, not when the words “Alice Munro” were in the title and not when they appeared in the story more than a hundred times. I didn’t want anyone to pick up my book, see that name, and be flooded by bad feelings.

For that reason, in the version that appears in the collection, the writer whom the student idolizes has another name: Aisling Moon. This writer also lives in a different part of southwestern Ontario than Munro did: the part in which I grew up. I kept Aisling Moon’s biography somewhat similar to Munro’s to acknowledge that I’m not trying to fool anybody regarding the publication history, but I also made the biography closer to my own as a way to recognize that the story now titled “Something Something Aisling Moon” was always about a collective invention, a dream version of Munro that for me has been bound up with a dream version of myself — a projection of the kind of writer and human being that I want to be.

We shouldn’t need revelations as courageous as Andrea Skinner’s to know that our ideals of writers are just dreams. Munro’s writing itself keeps reminding us of the private failings that too often undergird public words. Munro’s ability to bring such failings into relief in her fiction doesn’t excuse her as a human being. It doesn’t even excuse her fiction from whatever lies and evasions it perpetrates. I’m finding it hard to imagine returning to her stories again. But when I do, I’ll do it as a better reader — someone more alive to the things that fiction doesn’t tell us. The voices and perspectives that it omits, distorts, gets wrong. Its public facade and private doings. Its deep caves.