What if your mom is a famous feminist and she didn't protect you from sexual abuse?

On Andrea Robin Skinner and her mom, Alice Munro

Yesterday a writer I know emailed me telling me that various Canadian news outlets were interviewing Canadian writers for their commentary on Alice Munro’s daughter’s recent article in the Toronto Star which details how Munro chose to stay with the man who sexually abused her daughter (and who was an active sexual predator). This writer was asking me if she’d like me to give my name as someone to interview and I said yes, thanks for thinking of me. It actually means a lot that this writer chose to reach out to me, because incest survivors are rarely centred in the media handwringing that follows articles like this.

I read the article, trying to gather my thoughts for a soundbite statement, but I was immediately aware that I would be processing this article in therapy and that my feelings about it are much bigger than a soundbite. For those who don’t know, Alice Munro is a very famous, very celebrated, Canadian author who recently passed away. Into the storm of memorialization that followed the important writer’s death, her daughter added the story of her mother’s inaction in the face of sexual abuse. Alice Munro’s husband, the step father of Andrea Robin Skinner, sexually assaulted Skinner as a child, as well as displaying many other sexually abusive behaviours like flashing and openly talking about his sex life to a child.

Skinner’s experience mirrors my own and that of incest survivors generally. After Skinner was assaulted she told her father, who believed her but made the decision not to tell the mother what had happened. Skinner, as a young child, was forced to continue to see the man who assaulted her, and he continued to abuse her. Skinner writes “when I was alone with Fremlin, he made lewd jokes, exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighbourhood he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs. At the time, I didn’t know this was abuse. I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories.”

After I told my own mother that my grandfather had forcibly made out with me, I was told that it was good I told her, and then I simply had to continue seeing him regularly. Like Skinner, I felt tasked with “preventing sexual abuse” by evading my grandfather’s constant advances, trying to protect my younger sister and cousins, and even sleeping in a tent at night because I was too afraid to sleep in my bed. My grandfather, like Skinner’s step father, did not stop. The adults in my family, including my mother who is a celebrated feminist scholar, did not seem to think anything was wrong, despite my grandfather’s obviously predatory behaviour, and despite my obvious terror.

Skinner, like me, and like most incest survivors, went off the deep end. For her, it was bulimia. For me, alcoholism. Both classic choices for incest survivors. While Canada was celebrating Munro’s prowess as a writer, her daughter suffered the obvious effects of child sexual abuse. I can’t describe how much I relate. While my mother was travelling the world speaking at conferences on feminist motherhood and being widely celebrated, I was panhandling, having sex for money, and trying to evade being locked up when I ended up unconscious in the hospital again. I was always treated like I was crazy and my successful, middle class parents made no connection between my descent into poverty and chaos and their total denial of the incest in our family.

When Skinner was 25, her mother read a story about a girl who was sexually abused by her step father. Munro asked her daughter “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” Munro’s apparent expression of sympathy and concern for the sexually abused girl in the story prompted Skinner to find the courage to disclose to her mother that her own step father was sexually abusive. Munro answered her own question about why the girl in the story did not tell her mother by responding horribly to her own daughter’s disclosure. Skinner writes “She reacted as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.” Munro told Skinner “about other children Fremlin had “friendships” with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed” and when Skinner expressed how she had been hurt by the sexual abuse Monro declared “But you were such a happy child!” Skinner concludes that the child in the story didn’t tell her mother because “she would rather die than risk her mother’s rejection.”

Skinner doesn’t speculate on this in the article, but I would like to point out that it is very obvious to me that Munro was already aware that her husband was a sexual predator. Incest functions through denial and requires the other adults to look away. Fremlin was a sexual predator who preyed on multiple children and did not work very hard to keep it a secret. It would be very difficult for any adult not to notice this. A healthy adult who noticed this would do everything in their power to prevent a sexual predator from having access to children. But incest functions as a spell of unreality, in which we can both know and not know what is happening. I believe that Munro asked the question “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” not as an invitation for her daughter to disclose, but as a safeguard against the erosion of her own self image. She wanted to share a fantasy with her daughter in which the mother would have acted protectively, if only she had known. Because her daughter was so traumatized through the pervasive denial of child sexual abuse, she did not expect her daughter to tell. In this way, the mother’s failure to act can be blamed on the daughter. If only she had told. But then Skinner did tell, and Munro was faced with the reality that the girl in the story didn’t tell because she knew her mother would not react well.

Munro initially ended things with Fremlin in the wake of the disclosure, but then chose to go back to him, and remained his partner until his death in 2013. In justifying her decision to return to the man who sexually abused her daughter, Munro argued that “our misogynistic culture was to blame if [Skinner] expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.” When I told my own famous feminist mother that I had to move my sixteen year old sister out of the house when I was nineteen because she begged me to, sobbing, because our father had started to come downstairs and stand outside her bedroom at night and give her secret gifts and compliments, and we both knew what that meant, my mother attacked me and accused me of “anti-feminist, mother-blaming rhetoric.” Reading Skinner’s description of her own famous feminist mother using feminism to justify her complicity in the sexual abuse of children is a shocking resonance that makes me wonder if other self-described feminist women are using feminism this way.

When I was a child, I promised my mother to never “Rebecca Walker” her. My mother had explained to me that Rebecca Walker, daughter of famous and widely respected feminist author, Alice Walker, and feminist writer and thinker in her own right, had publicly criticized her mother’s parenting (there were no allegations of sexual abuse within the Walker family that I know of, to be clear). I understood from my mother that this was a great betrayal and I promised her I would never do this to her. Like Rebecca Walker, I grew up to be a writer like my mom. I have spent my entire career writing about trauma and sexual abuse, and I have always been extremely careful to protect my mother’s identity, including by changing my name. My mother is probably the most widely known contemporary scholar of feminist mothering. It is very likely that there are readers of my work who are also readers of hers, and the analysis of sexual abuse and incest that I do in my work is never brought into conversation with my mother’s scholarship on feminist mothering (that seems to have nothing to say on sexual abuse or sexual abuse prevention) because no one knows that she’s my mom.

I have protected her because I love my mom. It is that simple and that painful. We collectively respond to incest and child sexual abuse through dissociation and splitting. Either someone is a full person we love, admire, and respect OR they are responsible for perpetrating or allowing the sexual abuse of children. According to our dissociated thinking it can’t be both. The reality is that it is always both. Every single person who perpetrates or is complicit in the sexual abuse of children is loved by someone. Every single person who perpetrates or is complicit in the sexual abuse of children is a full, complex human being with many qualities and experiences. Many of them are important, well respected members of society. Many of them have produced works that are deeply important to other people. All of this is true and none of it negates the reality that they perpetrate or allow the sexual abuse of children. You can see this collective dissociation whenever a public disclosure like Skinner’s takes place. Some will insist that Munro is a monster and that’s all she ever was, and that any continued engagement with her work is sexual abuse apologism. Others will continue to love her work and admire her, and will do so by finding ways to deny and downplay the abuse Skinner describes.

Very few of us will find the courage to do what Skinner is asking us to do. She writes “I wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” She is asking for two things specifically: 1) to have the story of the sexual abuse she experienced, and her mother’s inaction, become part of the stories people tell about her mother (she doesn’t ask that it be the only story, but that it be included and put into conversation with the other stories about her mom’s life and work) and 2) that all interviews, biographies, and events showcasing her mother’s work wrestle with the reality of what Alice Munro chose to do (wrestling is very similar to a word I use a lot: grappling. Another word that might be appropriate here is reckoning. Either way, Skinner is asking us to be with the complexity, to wrestle with it and try to make sense of it. How can this revered feminist writer and icon be the same woman who allowed a sexual predator access to children? How can a mother so successfully cut off empathy for her child? How can my mom, who I love so much, not care that I was so severely hurt as a child? Wrestling with these questions is something Skinner, and all incest survivors, have been doing all our lives).

What Skinner is asking us to do is what most people refuse to do when it comes to the sexual abuse of children. She is asking us to stop dissociating. She is not asking Munro’s fans to denounce Munro. She is asking for the story of the sexual abuse, and her mother’s role in it, to be included in our larger understanding of Munro and her body of work. She is asking for the sexual abuse, and her mother’s role in it, to cease being an unspeakable secret and to be integrated into the rest of reality where it belongs. On both sides of the dissociative split she risks punishment and misunderstanding. Those invested in remaining fans of Munro will likely attack Skinner and attempt to undermine her credibility. Those who want to take sexual abuse seriously will dehumanize Munro, turning her into a monster, which lets us all off the hook. If Munro is a monster then we never have to ask ourselves how a human being, how a mother, how a celebrated, intelligent writer, how a feminist could do something like this. If Munro is a monster there is no space for her daughter’s grief.

When we stop dissociating we can finally begin the work of facing child sexual abuse and collectively taking responsibility for it. When we stop dissociating we can let go of the culture war bullshit of deciding which famous people’s history of sexual abuse makes them permanent bad guys and which we will quietly pretend we don’t remember hearing about so we can go on enjoying their work. We can stop pretending that sliding into someone’s dms to tell them that the writer or musician they like is “bad news” does anything at all for survivors of child sexual abuse and we can begin to ask ourselves, what would actually help? We can face the reality that people we love, respect, and admire abuse children. We can face the reality that incest is not monstrous and unthinkable, but actually quite common place and normalized. We can start having the hard and necessary conversations within our own families and social worlds to prevent the sexual abuse of children. And we can begin to materially support survivors of child sexual abuse by advocating that trauma therapy become government funded healthcare, and by destigmatizing and treating with compassion the results of child sexual abuse: addiction, poverty, homelessness, eating disorders, self injury, criminalized forms of survival, and psychiatrization.

I want to stop dissociating about my mother. I want the feminist professor who has empowered so many women and changed so many lives to become the same person who cruelly attacked me and called me “anti-feminist” for disclosing the sexually abusive behaviours of my father. I want this to be the same person because it is the same person. I want us all to be able to hold these realities together. The same woman who ordered me feminist magazines for young girls and encouraged me to be a writer also allowed her children to be around a man who openly sexualized us. The same woman who speaks to packed auditoriums on why we need a feminism for mothers also told me to my face that “all grandfathers do that.” My mother is not as famous as Munro, so I can only imagine the extent of Skinner’s dilemma, but I know what it’s like to have someone look at me starry eyed and sincerely say “you are so lucky to have a feminist mother” meanwhile I’m fighting my way out of the insanity that surviving incest creates.

My friend, and literary superstar, Tara McGowan-Ross, wrote on her instagram in response to Skinner’s article “In most of the instances of the childhood sexual abuse of girls I have ever even heard of, adult women not only do not protect their daughters but treat them like competition.” This is part of what Skinner is asking us to wrestle with. In our collective dissociation, we are used to thinking of incest as a dynamic between the perpetrator and the victim. But incest always takes place in the context of a family, and always requires the complicity and participation of other adults. I don’t believe for one second that Munro only became aware of her husband’s predatory behaviour when her daughter disclosed the abuse at the age of 25. She absolutely knew, and she chose not to know. In her case, the dissociation took the form of a fantasy in which the real threat was not to her daughter’s and other children’s safety, but to the fidelity of her marriage and, therefore, to her worth and status as a woman. I think this is a common form of dissociation for the female partners of male sexual abusers.

In my case, my mother’s sense of competition with me was more subtle but it was there. My mother dressed me like a much younger child as I hit puberty and neared my teenager years. At the age of twelve she was dressing me in clothes meant for seven or eight year olds (I was a small child). She discouraged me away from the rites of passage that signal differentiation and growing into an adult. I never learned to ride a bike or to drive a car. I was not allowed to wear make up and my socializing as a teenager was treated with suspicion. I always felt like doing age appropriate things with my peers was a betrayal of my family. While these failures to allow me to grow up represent the general neglect in my family, I also believe they were an attempt to freeze me in time and prevent me from becoming a woman, because then she would be forced to acknowledge that she was competing with her daughters for her partner’s sexual attraction.

Like Munro, my mother felt personally attacked by my disclosures. Over the many years that I have attempted to help my mother understand my perspective, she has repeatedly insisted on defending her motherhood over and above showing curiosity or concern for my pain. She has always insisted that this “one little thing” (my grandfather forcibly making out with me when I was 12) should not overshadow all she did and the fact that she was a “good mother.” I have never denied that my mother was, in some ways, a good mother. She definitely created the conditions under which I became a writer, and being a writer is my favourite thing about myself. I love my mother and I appreciate all the good that she did. My naming the sexual abuse in my family is not an attempt to discredit the good she did, or to dehumanize her. I simply need to tell the truth because not telling the truth makes me sick and puts me at risk of repeating the cycle. Yet, due to my mother’s dissociation, and the dissociation of the larger culture, I am not allowed to tell the truth and love my mother at the same time.

I think we are way too comfortable asking “how could she?” as a rhetorical question, rather than as a real question. I want us to sincerely ask: how could she? What created the circumstances in which an intelligent, successful, feminist woman could tolerate knowing that her partner is a sexual threat to her children? How did that come to be? It is only when we seriously wrestle with this question that we will begin to understand how incest works, and therefore, how to prevent it. In my mother’s case I know that she grew up inside the realm of unreality where neglect, abuse, and sexual violence were commonplace and never spoken of. She has trauma stacked on top of trauma and she was taught nothing healthy about family, autonomy, sexuality, or boundaries. She was taught that the best she could hope for is to be a chosen woman, and she did even better than that by being both a chosen woman and a success in her own right. Incredible! Call it a day! But she never opened the door of her own trauma or took a look at what’s inside. Therefore, she never stopped dissociating, and so she was never able to really attune to her daughters or to have empathy for them. Instead she was stuck in survival mode and protecting what’s “most important.” In the twisted logic of incest, remaining “chosen” by an abusive man can become what’s most important. In the dissociation of incest my mother cannot connect with empathy for her daughters without connecting to her own profound trauma. She does not want to open those floodgates and she does not want to face the reality that she has repeated the cycle. She certainly doesn’t want to face the reality of who she has chosen as her most beloved and what he is capable of.

I don’t know if Munro was sexually abused but I would bet money that there was incest of some kind in her family of origin. Saying this does not absolve her of responsibility for her choices. She is responsible. She allowed her daughter to be sexually abused. I think it would be even more accurate to say that she knowingly gave a sexual predator access to her daughter and other children because it was easier than facing the reality, confronting her husband, and losing the relationship. The damage and the suffering this caused for her daughter cannot be overstated. It is the worst betrayal imaginable and it creates a type of pain and loneliness that I think few people can understand. It’s a pain Munro likely knew herself, in some form. The reason it matters that sexual abuse is passed on through families is not so that we can absolve people of responsibility, but so that we can better understand, predict, and intervene upon sexual abuse. And so that we can empower survivors to break the cycle.

I have so much respect for Andrea Robin Skinner and her courage to tell the truth. I am emboldened by her willingness to bring the secrets out of the realm of unreality and into the shared reality of public discourse. I am humbled by her principled clarity in the face of the media backlash she will surely receive. I know how complex all of this must be for her, and how she is expected to repress that complexity in order to be a good, believable victim. Our demand that she dissociate from what she loved about her mother leaves no room for the enormity of her grief and the unspeakable pain of being betrayed like this by her mom. I want us to answer her call and refuse to dissociate. If you love Alice Munro’s work, the ask is not to throw it away, but to revisit it with this new information. I believe that if we look honestly at Munro’s work, we will likely find evidence of this truth already there. Incest never goes away. It hides in plain sight. And until we gain literacy for seeing how the logic of incest is shot through our culture, we will continue not to see what is right in front of us.

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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