YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT

Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.

- RACHEL AVIV

Andrea was nine when the abuse began. She later wrote that Alice "loves and protects the most destructive person of my life."

“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.”

The day before, Alice had been waiting outside a bank while Jenny, the second of her three daughters, took care of business inside. “My daughter does all that sort of thing now,” Alice wrote. “I’m sort of frightened by it.” A man she knew vaguely from high school, in Wingham, a rural town in Ontario, came out of the bank and recognized her. Alice asked after his two sisters, who turned out to be dead. “Me the only bugger left on the planet,” the man said, nodding. His words seemed to release something in Alice, and she tried to build a story around the conversation. But after several beginnings she doubted herself: “Why, I don’t know—I mean why write. Even my pen seems unwilling.” She crumpled up the pages. Later, Jenny picked them out of the trash.