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...