In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker, who has devoted thirty years of his life as an academic to a close archival study of Alice Munro’s work.

It was revealed that Thacker had known for two decades that Alice’s daughter Andrea had been sexually molested by her stepfather Gerald Fremlin. When Andrea approached Thacker to ask him to make revisions to the manuscript of his book, in the light of this information, it was just at the point when the manuscript was complete and about to be printed, and he declined. He declined again when a revised edition of the book appeared several years later. He has always maintained that as an archival scholar, he had no interest in personal family dynamics and in the psychological aspects of Alice’s oeuvre.

Gerald Fremlin pled guilt to a charge of indecent assault and served a suspended sentence with two years probation. Alice Munro chose to remain with Fremlin rather than support her daughter.

In this episode Caroline Baum talks to Robert Thacker and explores the uncomfortable moral terrain of a biographer when presented with explosive material that they feel is beyond the scope of their particular focus and asks where does the biographer’s responsibility lies.

To read an in-depth account of Andrea Skinner’s experience and its repercussions for her, for Alice Munro and for Munro’s reading public, go to the excellent piece by New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice

There is also an essay by Anne Enright in her latest anthology Attention, on the Munro affair.

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