On Sunday, the daughter of the late Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro revealed a dark secret that sent the literary world reeling. It serves as a reminder about the shocking layers of complicity that develop when families protect abusers. As recounted in the Toronto Star and an , in 1976, Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually assaulted her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner, then 9 years old.

Skinner eventually told her mother the truth when she was an adult — and Munro chose to side with and protect her husband for decades thereafter. Skinner’s story, as outlined both in the essay and the Toronto Star’s reporting in which her siblings cooperated, is robustly supported. It has been investigated by the police and corroborated by her family, contemporaneous correspondence, and by her attacker, who pleaded guilty to legal charges for indecent assault in 2005.

In her essay, Skinner writes that she “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 had 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.” Now, the reckoning that Skinner requested has begun.

In light of her story, Munro’s work reads shockingly differently. In Munro’s work, women are repressed, silenced, and bullied by sadistic men, yet their thoughts and se.