Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist: Margie Orford discusses her memoir ‘Love and Fury’

NON-FICTION AWARD

Criteria: The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

We asked Margie Orford, author of Love and Fury: A Memoir (Jonathan Ball Publishers), some questions about the book, which is shortlisted for the non-fiction award:

The first entry for ‘love’ in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary reads “a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties”. The first entry in the same reference work for ‘fury’ is “intense, disordered and often destructive rage”. To what extent do these definitions differ from or align with your interpretation of these concepts?

I came to the title late in the process of writing. The word “love” is one of those handbag words into which everything needed, forgotten and random is flung. In Ancient Greek, there were different words for various types of love — love between friends, love between parents and children, erotic love, and the love for strangers (also known as hospitality). So one word — love — is something of a deception we need to examine with care. Love — a complex and vital emotion in whose name things are done and then explained away with “but I love you” — both connects and flings us apart.

Primal need, dependence, passion, intellect and how one relates to people one doesn’t know are all jumbled together in this one small four-letter word. There are too many meanings and feelings associated with the word. There is love for mothers, blind patriarchs, husbands, lovers, friends, countries, books, babies and sisters. There is at once too much meaning and too little space. The word is like a bomb, like dynamite. To live, I had to examine these loves and how they have played out and blown up in my life, as well as how they have destroyed and enriched me. My failures at “loving” and being loved shaped my life. Love and the lack thereof affect all our lives. Love has been the fire of my life, as has that other fire — fury.

Fury, anger, rage — so many English words are available for that emotion which, like love, transforms, creates, destroys and makes new. The fury I feel revealed itself to me in the writing of this book, with all its “disorder” and passionate intensity. Fury, like love, can and does kill. Women’s fury — our rage and anger, like our love — is a vital and positive political and personal force. Yes, it disorders things and disrupts them, but so it should. We inhabit a world that is ordered all wrong. It needs to be disordered and loved back to its senses.

What is crucial is knowing what, who, why and, most importantly, how we love. So too our fury — for the injured, the dismissed, the murdered and the oppressed — is central to political and societal transformation. Fury is fire, yes, but fire brings life — cooked food, warmth and beauty. These great powers of love and fury need to be understood, liberated and harnessed so we can live, be free and love ourselves, our intimates and those we do not know.

Sisonke Msimang’s advice from her memoir is to “write from your scars, not your wounds”. Do you agree with this maxim, and did you employ it in writing your deeply personal narrative?

Yes. A scar is skin-writing — a warrior mark of your battles, your healing and your bravery. Scars are portals where readers — those others for whom one writes — meet you, the writer, and themselves.

In your opening chapter, you write, “The rain started, scudding over the muddy ground, driving me away. Once inside, I retrieved my pen and notebooks, tearing out the pages of ‘To whom it may concern’ death notes. I have had to be quiet and patient long enough for the shy night creatures of the mind to slip out of their shadows so I could befriend them. This book kept me alive; I will give it that.” Please elaborate on the literal and figurative ways in which your book kept you alive.

I have lived with an impulse towards suicide for much of my life. Suicide is a cold, hard-eyed, mocking goblin who appears in my mind and torments me. That mental space is, I came to understand in writing this book, the absence of love. And we cannot live without love. That place is also the absence of fury. I could not turn on that intruder and tell him to take his stench, his ice and his cold, hard un-love and just get the hell out of my house-mind. All the anger I marshal to protect those I love, the anger I have drawn on to write novels about gendered violence, abandoned me. I would feel its fire being snuffed out, leaving me cold and alone with this heartless thing (in me or of me) that would explain in a voice of impenetrable reason why everyone would be better off if I were absent, if I was dead. But my “writing” — I think of this one small gift as separate from the actual me — saved me by granting me a very specific writer’s block. I can and have written anything — it is how I earn my living — but I could not write a suicide note. The words would not arrange themselves properly on the page. They were so clichéd, so rubbish! I tore them up. My writer’s heart — that core of love and creativity — went into hiding and would not write the words the goblin wanted. I cannot tell you how furious I was with my “writing”, which would not obey and went into hiding, but which wrote this book as an explanation of why I could not produce that short letter.

What impression do you want readers to take away after reading the book?

I want readers to feel love! I want you to feel fury! On your own behalf! I want you to know you are loved and seen. If there are things that have infuriated you in your life, I want to impress upon you that your fury, like your love, is simultaneously fire, shield and weapon — and that, when used wisely, when transformed into words and movement, it will free you.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

This book made an honest woman of me. I laid down the defences I had started erecting from my earliest years to protect imagined others from the shameful-little-girl truth of myself. I have felt intense shame — sexualised female shame many will recognise — but the illumination was this: when you understand the history of your shame and accept it, you will find your fury and your own transformation. It’s only possible to love open-eyed and open-hearted if you befriend your shame, vulnerability and power.