Podcast Transcript
Kathryn Heyman “Fury”
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Kathryn Heyman
Nicole Abadee
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for Good Weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books Books Podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicoleabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Today I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Kathryn Heyman to Books, Books, Books to talk about her latest book "Fury," a memoir, published in May this year by Allen and Unwin in Australia, and by myriad editions in the United Kingdom. Dr. Kathryn Heyman is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher. She has written six novels. The first was "The Breaking" published in 1997. Most recent was "Storm and Grace," published in 2017, to critical acclaim. Her work has been nominated for and won literary awards in Australia and internationally. Her essays and travel writing have been published in The Times, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and Vogue. Kathryn has taught writing for many years, and in 2012, she founded the Australian Writers Mentoring Program. She is also the program director at the Faber Writing Academy at Allen and Unwin. Since 2016, she has been an honorary professor of humanities at the University of Newcastle. She has been receiving extraordinary reviews for "Fury," just one of them that I wanted to refer to, The Independent in England said this, "in this book about class and poverty, and the tenacity it takes to overcome trauma. The writing is sharp and beautiful. The insights unflinching and brave." Kathryn Welcome to Books, Books, Books.
Kathryn Heyman
Thank you, Nicole, good to be here.
Nicole Abadee
Could you start by telling us what is "Fury" about?
Kathryn Heyman
"Fury" is a memoir of a year in my life after a traumatic sexual assault trial, when I effectively ran away from my life, and ended up on a trawler, a fishing trawler in the middle of the Timor Sea, and the Arafura Sea. And that experience saved me. So it's a memoir about wilderness. It's about salvation. It's about what happens after trauma, how you make yourself from really slim resources, and possibility. But I did realize just really recently, really recently, in the last few days, I was reading something about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And I thought, Oh, I'm writing about PTSD.
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, you've been writing novels since 1997? When did you first decide to write this memoir? How long have you been thinking about doing that?
Kathryn Heyman
Well, I've been thinking about the Ocean Thief, the boat that I was on, for a very long time. Probably since I got off it I'd thought about writing about that time, and that world, and, but I hadn't thought about doing it as a memoir. That wasn't my intention at all. Over many years, I told my husband various little stories about the Ocean Thief and, and every now and then he'd say, "Oh, you really should write that you really should write about that." And I kept saying, "Yeah, I know, I really want to, I always thought I would but I don't know how I don't know what the center of the novel is." I kept thinking it was a novel, you know. And then I had to sort of invent something, I had to make it some other thing. Even I looked last night, at some early emails, and I saw that I'd emailed a British writer friend, Gil Dawson, in early 2017, and said, "as I'm working on this novel, it's called Girl. It's about it's very, very autobiographical. And it's about all I know, really, at this point is it's, you know, she's 20ish. She's on a fishing trawler. She's run away from from a sexual assault trial. She's frightened." And my friend emailed back and said, "well, surely that sounds like it's a memoir." So it took me a little while. I mean, actually, I would say for the first half of Writing "Fury". I was kind of thinking, well, maybe maybe I call it autofiction. I wanted to sort of hedge my bets. Because I just I think to find the voice, I needed to allow myself, the novelists process to find a writerly voice. And one of the things that people have talked about is the sense that this reads like a novel. Well, the experiences were a bit novelistic to be honest, they had a kind of "On the Road" feel to them. But of course, I'm applying novelists craft. So yeah, the moment when I thought, this is a memoir, and I'm owning it as my actual story was really quite late in the day, probably probably late, late 2017. I think by the time I received the copyright agency author fellowship, for "Fury", and at that stage, I said, it's a it's a memoir,
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, the events that you describe, the rape trial, and the time that you spent on board The Ocean Thief took place over 30 years. Do you think that you needed that time to put a distance between who you were then and who you are now?
Kathryn Heyman
Yeah, I do. That's right. It was, it was 30 years ago. And I think a couple of people have said to me things like, was it cathartic? writing this, this book? And I, my response is always very similar and kind of horrified, absolutely not! And if it was cathartic, then it wouldn't be a good book, I suspect, I think it's important, probably, especially with this the subject matter, I'm going into, the territory - not just in terms of sexual assault, but in terms of poverty class - and, and the kind of sense of, you know, fury, it's important that that is tempered with time and with craft and the kind of maturity, that I just, even I think 10 or 15 years ago, I don't think I'd have had the skill or the emotional resonance, to bring it all together to have a real sense of what, who I was speaking to, of, of what, what I needed it to be. Yeah, and of it not being cathartic of it being an end result rather than a beginning result.
Nicole Abadee
"Fury" was originally meant to be published a year ago, but COVID intervened, and obviously publication was delayed until May of this year. As it's turned out, there couldn't be a more opportune time for a book like this to be published, when Australian women generally are seething with rage at the treatment of women in particular, the Brittany Higgins rape allegations and how they've been dealt with, could you ever have predicted that it would be such a timely book?
Kathryn Heyman
I mean, I would, it saddens me that it's a, that it's a timely book in that way. And, and it's kind of ironic, when, when the book was when we made the decision to delay the book (which was really my decision actually) we had a meeting and and with Allen and Unwin and I was sort of panicking a little - not panicking, maybe too strong a word - but it just seemed, this is not going to, I don't know how to publish this book, how to talk about this book, if we're in a period when we were not talking face to face,
Nicole Abadee
No festivals, no launch, no...
Kathryn Heyman
No all the things that I thought this book in particular really needs. So it was the right decision, but I did feel, you know, like, "Oh, this is, oh the moment will have passed." And I remember saying to my husband and my agent "you know, my only, you know, worry is that we're having this conversation now." So that was kind of in early 2020. You know, we've been having the conversation about #metoo and, you know, this was the moment for this book, really and I'm not I don't know, you know, I don't know how it'll go. That was my sort of feeling. And my husband, you know, laughed and said, "I don't think I don't think patriarchy and male violence against women is going to be fixed by this time next year. But you know, good luck with that because if it's fixed by 2021, then then how your book goes is the least of your worries, to be honest." So no, I couldn't have and it's also been true in the UK, the kind of real up swelling of anger and sadness.
Nicole Abadee
There'd been a recent dreadful incident of a woman being raped and murdered by an off duty policeman.
Kathryn Heyman
That's right. That's right. And it's exactly that feeling of, we are told to go to the police, we are told to get in taxis, we're told to make ourselves safe by making sensible, ladylike decisions. Now, it is shown to us repeatedly that those decisions do not save us. What saves us is men behaving properly and quite simply not raping and not murdering. It's really it's a very simple guideline. And, you know, the bars not super high there.
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, we're not going to talk about the details of your sexual assault, because as you've said many times this is not a book about sexual assault, but just so that listeners understand you were raped by a taxi driver, hence the reference. I want to talk now a little bit about your childhood. You grew up in circumstances of poverty and violence. Could you tell us a little bit about what your life was like as a young person?
Kathryn Heyman
My father was a policeman. Ironically, yes I think violence amongst police officers amongst male police officers is, was and I think still is pretty endemic, to be honest. It it was certainly then a culture that we rewarded a certain blustering and brash kind of masked masculinity, which my father absolutely embodied. So my father was violent. My, my, my mother was, we had, she had five children and my parents divorced when I was six or seven. So I was quite young. And my, my mother, so at that time, there were The Ellsie women's shelter was was founded, I think, in 1974 and my mother divorced my father, around that time left, left him around that time.
Nicole Abadee
after 22 years,
Kathryn Heyman
After 22 years, absolutely. And it was really hard for her to leave, it was really difficult. She had a lot of opposition, including, you know, priests and the church and the state, you know, other police officers, doctors, the places that you would think, you know, maybe maybe they will help me, it was in the end, actually, though, it was some kind of radical nuns, who, who helped her and who also taught her to drive, you know, that kind of symbol of emancipation for women of that generation. Yeah, a group of nuns driving a combi taught her to drive so I kind of love that and like, you know, it wasn't just because a lot of those nuns were very feminist, she got a job. That kind of enabled her really to leave, of course, because she, she, there was no settlement. So you know, those days where you could marry well, and divorce. Well, that was not what was playing out, or certainly not for a woman of my mother's experience. So she left with nothing except the children and it was hard for her to get the children. So she was an enrolled nurse, which is, you know, very, very, it's kind of one above a, you know, kind of carer, unskilled carer, but it's not the same as a registered nurse. So it's it's hard work, shift work. Poor pay. And she worked. So on one hand, it was really tough shift work, you know - a shout out to anyone who's who's working shift work. It's a really tough way to live. It's hard on your body. So she was exhausted for a lot of the time. But at the same time, working in that hospital was, I observed that being like a light being switched on for my mother. It gave her a community. It gave her purpose. She loved the hospital. She loved that work. She loved being useful. Actually, my mother died in that the same hospital that she'd gone to work in and there were...I'm tearing...there were people who were the children who had been delivered. You know, my mother worked in obstetrics for a long time. And yeah, there were people that were born while she was while she was on. And so it you know, it was it, it was really powerful to see the way way that work was liberating. And I think actually quite formative for me, I think it kind of lodged in me that sense of work is hard. And the kind of work that she did was, you know, it's a lot harder than the kind of work that I do. Physical work is hard, but it can also be rewarding.
Nicole Abadee
And Kathryn, you lived when you were younger, in lots of different houses, they were always rented You've said in theory, the only place I'd ever found home was among books, and words and learning. Who introduced you to books?
Kathryn Heyman
It came about a few ways really. Firstly, play school, when I was very little, you know, in play school they have they read the story. And I remember seeing I remember, viscerally the feeling of the pages turning and that kind of hunger for this really special time that you get with a book is quite, you know, that sound of the pages turning, I mean, you know, I replicated it with my own kids. You can see that little quiet, desperate absorption, the same little look that they'd get if you're opening a block of chocolate or something, you know, what's going to happen. So clearly that was there. But when I started school, I had a kindergarten teacher who saw the hunger that I brought to stories, and that I brought to those SRC cards that we used to have. Those kind of story cards, I don't know whether you remember them. They were fantastic. They were such great things. A lot of passionate readers I know where we're hooked through those cards, including my husband who had a very different class background from mine. But thanks, thankfully, I will say partly as a result of those cards, that teacher saw my hunger and would send home, you know, little parcels of books. It's unfair to say that, you know, there were there would be, you know, I had older sisters, they would also read to me. So it wasn't the complete Matilda, books were not considered the enemy. It's just that they were not a priority.
Nicole Abadee
And you write something lovely about how there was a local St. Vincent DePaul, and they were selling boxes of books for the price, you pay for a bag of lollies. And you started buying boxes of those books. And you've said in the book, "those books saved my life, they became my templates for better kind of story templates for an escape plan." Could you talk a little bit about what you were reading then? And what books meant to you?
Kathryn Heyman
Those boxes of books were just again, that mouthwatering thing. And for years, I would sort of when I was younger, I'd sort of mentioned that, you know, when you'd go to the charity shop and you'd buy these books, as if this was a thing that all kind of, you know, eight year old kids would do and people would look at me blankly. I think I was a slightly odd child perhaps. So I buy these, you know, I'd cash in the drink bottles, you'd could get those little drink bottles, cash them in for five cents. Because my dad was a policeman, we had we kind of lived in what's called the police house. So I started cashing them in when when I was quite young, getting these coins and taking them to the blue charity shop and buying these boxes of books. And, and they would have a lot of those boarding school books, a lot of kind of 1940s English books, there was a lot of English stuff playing because I guess that was, they were the books that were being kind of sent off to the charity shops. And and then occasionally, they'd be something that had found its way in that was completely inappropriate kind of Mills and Boon type story. I just read everything I didn't care. You know. I remember "Trinity" I think that's what it called what it's called by Leon Uris was in thre, big fat book and I remember kind of you know, going okay, well this looks good and fat, I'll have a go of that and, you know, toddling off to school with my big fat Leon Uris and a teacher going, "I don't think this is...let's find something else for you."
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, in secondary school, your English teacher, Miss Pitt introduced you to poetry to what you call "the thrill of the word," and in particular, to the idea of reading poetry aloud. Can you tell us a little bit about the impact that had on you? Yeah. I'm sure I had read poetry before then but I hadn't quite had that sense of being, as I say, creeped open by it. And I remember her introducing, introducing us to Hopkins first. And I mean, that I would defy anyone not to be blown away by even now. By by Hopkins and, and that kind of density of language, I think that experience of reading, and I remember her saying "this has to be read out loud." The sense that the language itself had musical power, or rhythmic power and enter a kind of transformative, transporting power. And then the neck, the one that really was I think my first experience of being emotionally transported was Kenneth Slessor and it was "Five Bells," to you know, without wanting to be too much of a, of a teenage cliche. Let's move now to what you describe I know in your teachings, as the inciting incident - the sexual assault, before we get to talk about that, and the reporting of it, it's impossible not to be really bowled over by the fact that through this book, you recount what seems to be an almost endless litany of sexual assaults that you were exposed to from a very young age. Whether it's the man next door, whether it's local school boys, whether it's men exposing themselves to you in public. Do you think that you are unusual in that respect? Or do you think that your experiences as a young woman in the 1980s was fairly typical?
Kathryn Heyman
I think it was fairly typical, to be honest, I'm pulling them together because I have a project, you know, and part of my project is to make it clear that, that although I am writing about something that begins with, with a sexual assault, that is, that crosses a really clear legal line, that, that there is a spectrum of male invasive behavior that young women effectively grow up with.
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, let's just talk a little bit about your own sexual assault, when in fact, we're not going to talk about that. What I want to ask you about is what happened when you reported it to the police?
Kathryn Heyman
And I made the decision to, to report, to report it to go through that process because I, I was effectively convinced by...I was lucky, lucky... I was picked up after the assault by another taxi. By a taxi driver who said, "you know, you should, I should take you to the police station," I was saying, "just take me home, I just want to go home, and sort of forget about this." My life and my story would have been very different. If I had done that, I suspect if I had gone home to my, you know, scrappy sharehouse, I would have just gone I'm just not thinking about it. I'm done. I'm just, it would not have been, as you said, an inciting incident in the way it turned out to be. So I felt that he was right, that I should report it that you know, they should catch him. This should not happen again.
Nicole Abadee
You were about 19? Kathryn, weren't you?
Kathryn Heyman
Yeah, yeah, I'm 20. And I was very drunk. You know, I was a young woman at a party, you know, kind of celebrating life...
Nicole Abadee
And doing something safe. Rather than trying to walk home or catch public transport, you walk straight out of the party, and you flag the taxi. Right?
Kathryn Heyman
So I from the moment I walked into the police station, the the the first when I said I've been raped, the sergeant and he is so vivid to me. He's never, you know, like, I can still remember kind of every crease of his face size, the sound of his voice. And he said, "Well, I don't know about that girl, but you've certainly been drinking." And that was like cold water had been thrown on my face. I remember kind of just "okay, this is what, this is how this going to go go"
Nicole Abadee
I've written that line down that just summarizes his attitude.
Kathryn Heyman
Yeah. And you know, I mean, that that is exactly as he said it, of course, when you're writing a memoir, there are moments like that it's a kind of, was that what he said? was it? you know, and that was, you know, the tone the everything to the word. And that was then how it, how it played out, for the most part, there was a great sense of I was a problem in every possible, in every possible way.
Nicole Abadee
And then it got worse, then you had the experience of the sexual assault trial. And you write how you felt "that it was as though you were the one on trial" which tragically is the experience of many women in your position who report rapes. What happened at the trial? You said, as you describe that section in the book, that it marked, you said "it marked the end of me, the end of this version of myself" What happened at the trial to you?
Kathryn Heyman
I think what I, I don't know what I expected, but I think what I perhaps hoped is that I would have some ally in the courtroom. And I did not I did not have any ally,
Nicole Abadee
And you had no one with you from your family. Did you?
Kathryn Heyman
I had no one with me. But within the system, there was no one there. For me, metaphorically, physically. It's just that that system, that process was not there to serve me that is really clear.
Nicole Abadee
And of course, they're not your proceedings as prosecutorial proceedings, you are there as a witness for the prosecution. You're not a party.
Kathryn Heyman
Exactly. So that I mean, everything in that process means that you're you're, you're there to serve someone else effectively. I'm not suggesting that that that that you know that the whole process of how that happens should be overhauled, but certainly my experience, was this is brutalising all the usual cliches - and they are cliches, are cliches for a reason -of being attacked, being absolutely decimated in every possible way. Everything that could be held up to say that I was, that I was, you know, an untruthful person that I was a deceptive person that I was a person who, who was inviting sexual assault that, you know, it was it was just a really horrific experience. Actually, you know, there were times that I had have said it was more brutalising than the, than the assault itself. I mean, I think giving quantities or you know, marks out of 10 to trauma is tricky. So I have stopped saying that because I just think I don't know that I can, that I can apportion it in that way. But certainly it was. What I think part of it was that in that courtroom, it became really clear to me that it wasn't just a gender war, it was a class war.
Nicole Abadee
Why do you say that?
Kathryn Heyman
It was again, everything in that process, everything in that system was really clear to me, you are not the power here and, and this is not for you, you are other in this environment. And that, of course made me think the world is not for me, you know, I don't mean in in a depressive sense, I wasn't suicidal, I wasn't remotely suicidal. I was angry. It was the beginnings of being angry, the beginnings of almost not quite angry enough to be able to name it yet. But a sense of an unnamed i didn't, i don't think i articulated it to myself, but a feeling of that, that kind of fury that you get in the face of injustice.
Nicole Abadee
And we do see that I mean, to your enormous credit, given what you've experienced and how young you were, we do see flashes of anger. We see it in your interview with the policeman who behaved so appalling and we we see it in response, to, your response to some of the questions that the defense barrister is asking you. After the trial where you were the witness for the prosecution, the taxi driver is acquitted and you feel enormous shame about that. And you write at various other points of the book, of various other sexual assaults at different levels of severity that you experienced. Each time you write about those you write about the shame that you felt, and you talk about one time at one point, you talk about shame as your constant companion, your underwear and your overcoat. Why do you think it is, that it is the female victims who feel the shame for the male perpetrators wrongdoing - criminal activity?
Kathryn Heyman
I think there's also something very particular about sexual assault, or indeed sexual abuse, that that somehow invites the victim to take that shame into themselves, because it is a boundary crossing, deeply intimate. invasion. So, so a threshold is crossed, that I think kind of punctures something, to be honest. I think also the, and this is where I do celebrate some of the shifts that we are in now. Shame is like a mould that really grows in silence, and in the dark and when we have that sort of "oooh we must not speak of it." Of course, what that is saying is "there is something wrong with you, this is your shame, this is your, you must be silent" that the message underneath that is "you should be ashamed." It's your job to keep it quiet. So I think that's the really big shift that we now have, that young women, you know, like Grace Tame, are saying, actually, this is not my shame, so I'm goijng to stand up, and I will shout it because it belongs there. I mean, that, that thing of, you know, women who would be sitting on airplanes or buses and look over and there's a man, it still happens, you know, masturbating. Now, I haven't personally experienced that one. But I know women who have I know more than one woman who has had that kind of experience. Now, I like to think and I do think that now, most young women would call it out, "stop doing that, you disgusting perv!"
Nicole Abadee
That seems to be the best answer doesn't it? By women sharing their stories and refusing to just stay silent and to internalize the trauma but to call it out? Like, as you say, Grace Tame has, like Brittany Higgins has, the other answer, it seemed to me is what we were talking about before, which is female anger. Your, your book is really a muted howl of fury. And I think that's what so many women are experiencing, it seems to me, that's another way of flushing out that shame. Don't be ashamed, be angry.
Kathryn Heyman
Well, I remember years ago, a therapist friend saying that she felt that depression in, in some cases was rage that had not been expressed. It takes a heck of a lot of energy to hold anger down. And if you're spending all the energy holding that down, then that's energy that isn't going somewhere else. So yeah, I mean, I think I I'm really clear that, that what I'm writing about is the in terms of anger, isn't rage, that it's a kind of about the mobilizing power of fury, which I think is a much colder, sharper, precise...I can, I sort of have a sense of it visually like a sword, it's sharp, and you need it, you need a bit of that. I, I think, for me anyway, rage is way less useful. It's not that you can help rage, but rage in the way I feel it or, or understand it, is a sort of scattered...that's more than howl so it's really useful. And I think you kind of need that, to be able to take action to be able to, to do a bit of chopping off of legs.
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, let's move now to talk about your time on the Ocean Thief. So after the trauma of the rape and then the rape trial, you literally ran away to sea. At the age of 20 you went to work for a season on a fishing trawler with four men Carl, Mick, Frenchy and Dave, what was your time like on the ocean Thief? TTell us a little bit about the day to day experiences.
Kathryn Heyman
Working on a fishing trawler is incredibly hard work physically. So that was the first thing that it was shere physical work, muscular work, work that that led to the kind of exhaustion I have never experienced before nor since, including with young babies. And so that, that, so what that means you see, so when you're trawling you tend to hawl up. A fishing trawler has a big high sort of metal bar, we call it an A frame, like if you imagine it like a big high A. And then on either side of this A frame you have these wide outrigger booms and from those booms you, you drag two nets. On the sort of trawler that I was on, that's not the case for all trawlers, but for big trawlers that go out for whole seasons, that's how they tend to work. So, so what that means is, you know, we were trawling the nets, and then we bring them in every few hours. So you're physically I mean, now there are electronic winches, there was a lot of just physically pulling things up, winching ,physically, you know, manually. And then you're sorting through the catch for what you're looking for, which in our case, was prawns. And so that's really fast. And then the waste is dumped back into the sea, it's, again, there have been some changes, but maybe not enough. Um, and then the whole process starts again. So that's a kind of constant cycle. So you're often sleeping for just a couple of hours. At night you sleep for a couple of hours, yeah and you get back up and go through the process again, then you have this and it's noisy, you know, well, while all of that's going on, it's noisy, and industrial noise. But then in the daytime, you know, there's a period when you anchor and you're, it's completely quiet, it's quiet, unlike anything else, because there's no, there's no street noise. There's no horizon, there's no people. So this sort of contrast between chaos noise, incredible laziness and deep, deep, quiet. And a contrast between kind of industrial, what I think of as industrial ugliness (without wanting to sound to sort of 19th century aspirational) that, you know, but that's what I, metal trays and the kind of particular visual and aural quality of industry contrasted with absolute wilderness, extraordinary beauty. Wild sunsets in the sense that there's no one else here but it provided that sense of real escape.
Nicole Abadee
I want to ask you about this because you use, you talk a few times when you're describing this experience on the ocean, and you use the word freedom. And I know that you've been asked, and it's an obvious question, given what you'd experienced - you'd been, you'd been raped, you just had this horrific experience - did you feel afraid to step on a boat with four men you didn't know and set out to sea?
Kathryn Heyman
I wasn't frightened. I don't think I was. I mean, I was, well, on the Ocean Thief as I have said, I was frequently frightened and I was frequently I, I think I was frequently in physical danger. You know, there were disastrous storms, there were, there were at least two occasions when I did not know if I would survive. It was very frightening. But that was a fear, actually, that I could manage and I have learned, I learned then and I and it has, it has been a kind of baseline of my life since then but I can rely on my own body. I know my own strength, and that is really 100% a gift of that boat and that time
Nicole Abadee
you've done a lot of, I shouldn't call them extreme, but activities since. You've done scuba diving, you've done free diving, that, to me seems enormously physically brave.
Yeah, I think what I came to know then is that physically, I trust my own body. I will always choose a kayak rather than a motorboat, you know. I kind of don't necessarily trust machinery. But I, I feel much more safe if I'm in charge of what's happening for me physically. So all of that was dangerous. All of that was frightening. But the men were not frightening.
Nicole Abadee
And, and why not?
Kathryn Heyman
Well, as I have said before, they were really, really very simple. They were not rapists. That was not their intention, you know, it's, they were there to do a job. Their aim, their goal was to to get a good catch and make some good money. And sexually assaulting a woman on the boat was not on their agenda.
Nicole Abadee
You didn't know that when you got on the boat,
Kathryn Heyman
I did not know that and it and I will not say that, that doesn't happen and didn't happen on those boats. But I don't think it happens as much as you might expect, given the circumstances.
Nicole Abadee
I seems to me that given what you've been through, there was almost a sort of fearlessness or recklessness in you, like what had happened to you was really the worst thing that you could imagine happening and after that, you, you were in a sense, fearless, I guess?
Kathryn Heyman
Look, I think I think there's a few readings of it, to be honest. I think as I said, At the start of our talk, I realised recently that I was also writing about PTSD. You know, I think I was in a kind of PTSD, which is one of the reasons that when I was on the boat, I was getting sort of bombarded by a series of memories that were sort of swimming up all over the place. I think that's kind of PTSD. I've removed myself from trauma, I'd removed myself from the things that were meaning that I was sort of replicating trauma and, and I was having a series of aftershocks effectively. So I think people, in people who were traumatised don't necessarily make the best decisions. Arguably, on the other hand, I think perhaps my instinct was actually highly attuned by that stage. You know, I'd hitchhiked to the end of the country and I had, I had you know, had a sort of instinct around people
Nicole Abadee
I should make that clear, we haven't talked about that but you basically made your way from New South Wales to the Northern Territory, by hitchhiking.
Kathryn Heyman
Yes. Which again, you know, absolutely there is a reading that is you were really running at danger, you were really testing out...and I think that was part of it to testing out okay, I haven't been safe, where I should be safe
Nicole Abadee
In the state of my hometown flagging a taxi to get home after party...
Kathryn Heyman
So, so then what what, what? Where will I be safe? But the other thing I think, is that I had been unsafe, because I was female, I had been, you know, guilty of being female, that was how it felt. So stepping onto that boat, and particularly shaking off the role of what was the female role of being the cook and choosing, by incompetence, not to be in that role, I was really saying, kind of, to myself, and to the world, I guess, "okay, so I'll be, I'll be in the male world, I'll I'll, I'll that's that will make me safe, because I'll be one of them. I'm not trying to be female now." So, so that I think was part of what was playing out as well. But you know, as I've said, the crucial, crucial thing, is what the men chose to do.
Nicole Abadee
Kathryn, I want to ask you, just as we close about the idea of transformation and remaking yourself. You refer at one point to the poetry of Larkin and you, you talk about his explanation, that when removed from the familiar, you are perceived differently. And so you perceive yourself differently. Is that why you needed to run away so that you could reinvent yourself?
Kathryn Heyman
100% 100% that's from a poem called, the line isn't, but but Philip Larkin wrote a poem called the "Importance of Elsewhere" which is a sort of praise song to his experience of being in Ireland and, and finding new things about himself. I think that I do think my life would have played out very differently, if I had not made that decision to stick my finger out and step onto that highway. I can't know what it might have looked like. But I do know that, that became a circuit breaker, a lifeline, a threshold that I was able to cross over into a new story. That in order to to make something new, you know, it's like, if, in order to decorate, you've got to clear the surfaces, you've got to...I think I still do that in in my life as a sort of, "okay, we need to kind of clear everything, what have we got?" So I had to do that. I had to throw everything out and go "okay. When I'm left now, just with me, it's a clean slate. I could do anything, I could be anything."
Nicole Abadee
Knowing what you know, now, Kathryn,, if you could go back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self, to that girl who had been through that horrific experience, who was embarking on this, what turned out to be a transformative experience on the Ocean Thief?
Kathryn Heyman
Well, you know, I was thinking recently about, about two things in relation to that young woman. I was looking actually there was Marie Claire had an excerpt and they used a photo of me, two photos of me when I was young and one of them in particular, you know, I was looking, I have no makeup on and I wore a lot of makeup at that time, it is one where I have no makeup on. And I was looking and thinking, I look so young, unsurprisingly but also this really deep sense of, a kind of circle of looking at her and thinking "You saved me, kid, you know, you, you made me" and the kind of back at you as sort of, "I am going to save you." So my message to that young self is this one...there's a, there's a poem and I cannot remember the writer to my mortification, but the poem is called "To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Bathroom Stall Next Door" and, and the final and it's a woman speaking to this woman who she can just hear weeping. And she's saying things like "if you've ever opened yourself to someone you did not want to open to" and she goes through this sort of list, a litany. And the final line is the line that I would say to that younger self, which is "Hold on. Joy is coming."
Nicole Abadee
That's a wonderful note to end on. Catherine, thank you so much for speaking to me today on Books, Books, Books. It is the most extraordinary book, talk about a book whose time has come and I heard Jennifer Byrne interview you recently and she said something very powerful and it seemed to me very apt that she had this feeling that in the same way that Julia Baird's book "Phosphorescence" was really the book for 2020, that your book "Fury" really is the book for 2021 and what women in particular are experiencing now. Congratulations and good luck with it.
Kathryn Heyman
Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole Abadee
Thank you for listening to Books, Books Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website nicoleabadee.com.au to listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast. You can also find me, Nicole Abadee, on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and give Books, Books, Books a rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking Books with you again soon.