In The Dark
From The New Yorker Radio Hour: Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets
Tue, 11 Mar 2025
Alice Munro, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was perhaps the most acclaimed short-story writer of our time. After her death, last year, her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her starting when she was nine years old. The abuse was known in the family, but, even after Fremlin was convicted, Munro stood by him, at the expense of her relationship with her daughter. In this episode, the New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv joins the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, to talk about how and why a writer known for such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and how Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” Aviv tells 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.”Follow The New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Chapter 1: What shocking revelation did Alice Munro's daughter share?
Hi, In the Dark listeners, it's Madeline. Our team is hard at work at a new story. But in the meantime, I thought you'd be interested in hearing this episode from the New Yorker Radio Hour. It's an interview with one of my favorite writers at the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv, talking with New Yorker editor David Remnick about her latest astounding story. It's about the writer Alice Munro.
Alice Munro is one of the most acclaimed short story writers of our time. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The New Yorker published more than 50 of her stories. But after Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner came forward with a shocking revelation. Andrea revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by her mother's husband.
And she revealed that her mother, the famed writer Alice Munro, upon learning of the abuse, chose to remain with her husband. In this episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, Rachel Aviv takes us through her reporting, including her reexamination of several of Monroe's short stories, stories that now appear to have been fictionalizing the secret story of her own family.
Keep listening for the full episode and be sure to follow the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Alice Munro was a master of the short story in our time, the Chekhov 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 longtime 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 a 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 Aviv explores the story of Alice Munro 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 Munro 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 Chekhov of the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about her qualities as a writer.
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Chapter 2: How did Rachel Aviv conduct her reporting on Alice Munro?
Let's listen to Alice Munro.
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 um 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 of my life just to see what will happen. Now, 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 with. But it's also that everything fascinates me, what happens between people.
The resonant phrase for me there is to see what happens. As if the most essential thing is 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 this story she wrote years before where a girl is sort of being abused sexually, 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 this 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.
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