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The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

The Daily vor 1 Jahr

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1:01:12

“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.

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