The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

The Daily

Jan 12 2025 • 1 hr 1 min

“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.”

The judgment would prove premature. In July 2024, two months after Munro’s death at age 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

You Might Like

Global News Podcast
Global News Podcast
BBC World Service
The Morning Brief
The Morning Brief
The Economic Times
ANI Podcast with Smita Prakash
ANI Podcast with Smita Prakash
Asian News International (ANI)
ThePrint
ThePrint
ThePrint
FT News Briefing
FT News Briefing
Financial Times
Economist Podcasts
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
Top of the Morning
Top of the Morning
Mint - HT Smartcast
Daybreak
Daybreak
The Ken
The Daily
The Daily
The New York Times
The Journal.
The Journal.
The Wall Street Journal & Gimlet
WSJ What’s News
WSJ What’s News
The Wall Street Journal
HT Daily News Wrap
HT Daily News Wrap
Hindustan Times - HT Smartcast
WSJ Tech News Briefing
WSJ Tech News Briefing
The Wall Street Journal
The Global Story
The Global Story
BBC World Service
Newshour
Newshour
BBC World Service
The Cārvāka Podcast
The Cārvāka Podcast
The Cārvāka Podcast