Alice Munro’s decades-long relationship reminded me of stories about women who marry a guy—often a “macho” one—for the wrong reasons and end up paying for it with years of misery.
Just read two pieces—by Giles Harvey’s “What Alice Munro Knew” in The New York Times (NYT) and Rachel Aviv’s “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice” in The New Yorker (NY)—about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2013). They both dealt with Munro’s knowledge—and silence—that her second “husband,” Gerald Fremlin (died of cancer in 2013), was a pedophile who sexually abused Munro’s youngest daughter (starting at age nine) from a previous marriage.
Munro, a Canadian, died earlier this year at age 92. I was an admirer of her fiction (mainly short stories), even writing a favorable piece on it for the Hollywood Progressive. Later that year (2014) in an article for LA Progressive I mentioned one of her best stories, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which inspired the 2006 film Away From Her, where Julie Christie plays an elderly woman struck by Alzheimer's. The irony of Munro’s story is that for about the last dozen years of her life, Munro herself suffered from the same condition and ceased writing her stories.
Louise Erdrich What struck me about the two essays mentioned above was that Munro’s decades-long relationship with Fremlin reminded me of so many stories I had heard about women who marry a guy—often a “macho” one—for the wrong reasons and end up paying for it with years of misery. (A somewhat similar story about another famous female writer, Louise Erdrich, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, occurred more than a quarter century ago.)
In the NYT essay about Munro’s knowledge that her second “husband,” a retired government employee and geographer, was a pedophile, there are these revelations:
- “Munro referred to Fremlin as her second husband, but in fact they were never legally married.”
- Prior to living with Munro, beginning in 1975, “he had never married or lived with a woman.”
- They began living together when she was in her early 40s after a few years “blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband [Jim] of two decades [and]... a series of brief but bruising love affairs.”
- About Fremlin, she wrote (in 1975), “This time it’s real... He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle... grown-up.”
- She had first met Fremlin decades earlier (in the late 1940s) at the University of Western Ontario, where she developed “a crush” on him. He was “an Air Force veteran who flew bombing missions over Germany, was a few years older than the other students, [and] with his outspoken atheism and moody good looks, Fremlin struck Munro as a Byronic figure, full of danger and allure.” But “she was already engaged... and more than 20 years went by before she saw Fremlin again.”
- By then (1975) Munro and Jim had had three daughters, Sheila (age 21), Jenny (16), and Andrea (7), and both parents had been “energetically unfaithful” and unhappy with each other.
- Sheila later described Fremlin as “brusque and eccentric [with a] stick-it-up your-ass, let’s-cut-through-the-bullshit kind of attitude.”
- In 1976, when 9-year-old Andrea went to visit her mother and Fremlin, the daughter revealed in 2024 that she “awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was 9 years old.”
- Although Fremlin propositioned Andrea at least one more time before she reached puberty—telling her “how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Munro"—Andrea was warned not to tell her mother, and did not do so until 1992.
- But Munro was unwilling to accept her daughter’s accusations, and after a few weeks separation “Munro took Fremlin back” and remained with him until his death in 2013—despite his being found guilty in 2005 of the Andrea-initiated charge of “indecent assault” and receiving a two-year probationary sentence.
In Harvey’s essay he asks himself, “How could a writer [Munro] who was capable of such power on the page prove so feeble in real life?” And he mentioned Munro’s “appalling failures as a mother.” To better understand her “failures,” both he and Aviv read back over some of Munro’s stories and found, as Harvey put it, that her “failures as a mother seem to have been an imaginative incitement, instrumental to her artistic project.”
But Harvey also found a partial explanation in a work, “Father-Daughter Incest” (1981), by the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, who “spoke to 40 women who were sexually abused by their fathers or stepfathers.”
Herman found that “most of the mothers... were unwilling or unable to defend their daughters. They were too frightened or too dependent upon their husbands to risk a confrontation. Either they refused to believe their daughters, or they believed them but took no action. They made it clear to their daughters that their fathers came first and that, if necessary, the daughters would have to be sacrificed. Only three of the mothers decided to leave their abusive husbands, though in each case the women soon returned. They found life without them ‘too hard to bear.’”
In 2019, already deep into her Alzheimer’s years, Munro admitted (according to Aviv) to daughter Jenny that “it was beastly of me not to get rid of him [Fremlin].” But she indicated that she stayed with him partly because he threatened to kill himself if she left him.
Of course, that might not have been the main reason they remained a couple until his death. Perhaps psychiatrist Herman’s group study is a better guide. We already know, for example, that human beings are not primarily motivated by rationality, and Herman’s study also helps explain why so many adults continue to abide by poor spousal choices.
I have no easy answer as to the why of such choices. But I do have a few hypotheses—guesses really that I hope are more “educated” than not. In reviewing a recent TV series about a woman mainly indifferent to religion who falls for a rabbi, I wrote, “after meeting him at a party, she is simply attracted to him—and he to her. And such attractions are hard to explain. Why these feelings occur we don’t know. They just do. And when they do, we often go with such feelings. Sometimes listening to our hearts rather than our brains can be disastrous, but sometimes such reliance can work out okay.”
I am also reminded of what historian Rick Shenkman wrote in his Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (2016): “Evidence is abundant that public opinion is often not rational and that multiple forces, some unseen [including Stone-Age instincts], are shaping our response.” Perhaps some women’s attraction to “macho” men reflects a “stone-age instinct,” a carryover from a time when the protection of strong men was needed more so than today, when machoness can often do more harm than good.
Another guess I have is that values are not as important to us as they should be—either on the conscious or unconscious level. I doubt whether many single people considering someone as a possible future spouse delves very deeply into the question of whether or not the two of them share common values. But in a marriage, agreement on fundamental values can be an important cement enhancing the relationship.
In all of this speculation, I am not suggesting that falling in love and then marrying someone should be a completely rational operation. Often I have heard someone admit that a certain individual is a “wonderful person” but “I’m just not attracted to him [or her].” And I get that. (In my own case I consider myself to have been incredibly lucky to have fallen in love and then been married to a women for almost six decades whom I thought was not only attractive but who also shared my most important values.)
Another culprit in leading some singles to make bad choices is a simplistic approach to love. Partly because of our media, we tend to overemphasize Hollywood’s favorite type—romantic love—but there are various other types, especially agape, which is sometime referred to as “brotherly love” or charity. It was this type of love that the great lover of the poor, Dorothy Day, had in mind when she wrote: “If we could only learn that the only important thing is love, and that we will be judged on love—to keep on loving, and showing that love, and expressing that love, over and over, whether we feel it or not, seventy times seven, to mothers-in-law, to husbands, to children—and to be oblivious of insult, or hurt, or injury—not to see them, not to hear them...not judge, not do anything, but love, love, love.”
Although romantic love can be an important component of spousal love, especially in the early years of a marriage, in the latter stages—especially if ill health enters the picture—a love closer to the agape described by Day often takes precedence.
Partly because reading the pieces on Alice Munro motivated this present essay, it has focused more on women’s spousal choices rather than on men’s. But I am not suggesting that many men choose more wisely. We men sometimes overemphasize certain traits like looks or sex appeal and underemphasize others like character or goodness.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that “according to the American Psychological Association, [in 2022] approximately 40-50% of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is even higher, with approximately 60-67% of second marriages ending in divorce.” And, unfortunately, not all of those who never divorce can be considered partners in a happy and loving marriage.
