Alice Munro’s Passive Voice
The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.
By Rachel Aviv
December 23, 2024
“I am a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her partner of four decades, Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, had recently died, and she was living near her daughter Jenny, in Port Hope, east of Toronto. “I’m a writer, as I said, and I suppose that sticks for a while even though you don’t due do due it anymore,” she wrote, in shaky longhand. “I am going to write what happened yesterday, though at first I did not mean to, didn’t think of it, as I don’t anymore.”
