Two words written anonymously in a guest book set off a chain of events that led a longtime Munro’s Books employee to quit her job, disillusioned by her literary hero and her former employer.
Two months ago, Justina Elias would have described her job at Munro’s in Victoria as a fairy tale. She admired the life and works of store co-founder Alice Munro, and gladly gave “starry-eyed” interviews about the literary icon as the store’s head of fiction and social media manager.
After Munro died in May at age 92, the store put out a book for customers to share their memories of the author, and prepared for an event to celebrate Munro’s life, which Elias was slated to moderate.
That’s when the fairy tale began to unravel.
Someone had written “child abuser” in the guest book.
Store president Jessica Walker explained to Elias in an email obtained by CBC News that this was related to the sexual abuse of Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, at the hands of Munro’s former husband — which Walker and “a few” others at the store had known about.
In a newspaper column, Andrea Robin Skinner tells her story of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, Munro’s second husband. Skinner alleges that when Munro found out about the abuse years later, the late famed Canadian writer said it had nothing to do with her.
“This is ‘out there’ in the public, but it hasn’t obviously been picked up by media, though I would imagine that at some point it will be. It is their story to tell, but our position is that we support Andrea,” Walker wrote in the email.
Elias says she was “in shock” hearing this for the first time, and told Walker that she was not sure she could moderate the event in good conscience.
“I had just learned this unimaginably awful thing in which we had apparently been complicit as a business. And then the reaction among my superiors at work seemed to be like, ‘Well, what’s the big deal?'” she said.
“That was a rift that I never really felt that we ended up bridging. I feel like there was a gap in understanding there.”
The store cancelled the event within hours of Elias expressing her concerns.
Walker explained in an email to CBC News that she had heard “extremely limited” details about the abuse years ago from store co-founder Jim Munro, Alice’s first husband, who died in 2016. She said she did not know about Alice’s response to the situation, or the ensuing criminal case, and would have made different decisions about upholding the Munro legacy if she had known “the extent and nature” of Jim and Alice’s failures.
When organizing the event in June, Walker was sent a copy of a blog Skinner wrote about the abuse, which included details she was not previously aware of.
Munro’s fans expressed shock and horror when Skinner spoke out about the sexual abuse weeks later in a Toronto Star column. Skinner wrote that she was nine years old when her step-father, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin, first sexually assaulted her in 1976.
Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to indecent assault in a court case that, until July, was subject to a publication ban that prevented Skinner from being publicly identified.
Stories published by the Star revealed that Munro turned her back on her daughter when Skinner informed her about the abuse, and stayed with Fremlin until his death in 2013.
The Nobel Prize-winning author co-founded Munro’s Books with Jim in 1963, though the ownership was turned over to a group of longtime staff members in 2014.
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The store published a statement after the Star piece came out, acknowledging Munro’s Books “is inextricably linked with Jim and Alice Munro,” and calling the details of Skinner’s experience “heartbreaking.”
It was posted alongside a statement from the Munro family, signed by Skinner and her siblings, thanking the book store for “being very clear about their wish to end the legacy of silence.”
The current owners “have become part of our family’s healing,” it said.
Walker said, in a statement to CBC News, the store’s support for Skinner “was and is unequivocal,” and that it is raising awareness and supporting survivors of childhood sexual abuse through numerous initiatives.
The store announced last month it will donate all future proceeds from the sale of Alice Munro titles to organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse.
Elias, who is also a writer, had considered Munro a feminist icon and deeply identified with her on a personal level.
She says it had been part of every employee’s job to tout the store’s connection with Munro and she was deeply troubled to learn she’d been kept in the dark about the truth.
She acknowledges that the store has taken steps since the truth came out, including a new display that features books about healing from sexual trauma, but she feels Munro’s has failed to adequately acknowledge its historical complicity.
Feeling “disgusted,” she quit her dream job after nearly a decade.
“I thought it was disingenuous to pretend that we didn’t have a deeper connection and investment in that lie, that legend,” she said.
She says several employees, also rattled by the story, worked together with her on an email reaching out to Skinner, and two employees confirmed to CBC News that the store’s handling of the situation influenced their decisions to quit.
‘Almost universally loved’
Fans and followers of Munro’s work were also left reeling by the news.
Tracy Ware, a retired professor of English literature at Queens University in Kingston, Ont., who taught a graduate course on Munro’s work, described her as being “almost universally loved” by people in Canadian literature.
Ware said has been recently struck by Munro’s story Vandals, which The New Yorker published in 1993, the year after Skinner told Munro about Fremlin abusing her. In the story, a woman’s husband abuses neighbourhood children, and she knows and does nothing about it.
“No one ever knew that story was autobiographical in any way, but I think it probably is,” Ware said.
Vandals was included in Munro’s 1994 short story collection, Open Secrets.
While some have described the silence around the abuse as a uniquely Canadian problem, Ware sees it as a “terrible, almost universal truth” that people tend to hide stories around sexual abuse.
“I think people don’t know what to do. Families don’t know what to do,” he said.
Skinner declined an interview with CBC News but said in an email that it was her son, Felix — Munro’s grandson — who wrote “child abuser” in the guest book.
