Kathryn Heyman’s latest book, a memoir, begins with her 50 metres above deck, trembling on a piece of metal less than a foot wide, on a vessel called the Ocean Thief. Alongside her sailing crew, she’s caught in a vicious storm in the middle of the Timor Sea.
But before we get to the reason why she’s with four strange men on a listing ship, and how ultimately scouring the ocean for crustacea on that unstable trawler proves to be her salvation, the narrative swerves a couple of years back in time. We are now at a party in Sydney full of beautiful shiny people, but, alas, 20-year-old Heyman is conscious that she’s not one of the favoured ones and feels her outsider status keenly. She seems destined to be forever “the girl whom pretty girls would choose to be their second-in-command”. Drunk and wobbly, she leaves the party and hails a taxi. What happens next are memories without words, “a series of sensations in the dark. Heat. Light. Swerve. Sick …”
The ensuing court case in which Heyman alleged rape against the driver will prove as traumatic as the original assault itself; due to her state of inebriation at the time, Heyman’s credibility is questioned and then destroyed. We already know the low conviction rates for rape in Australia but Heyman’s account underscores just how patriarchal the legal system is and how vulnerable to further abuse are women who dare to bring their alleged attackers to reckoning.
Fury itself is studded with vignettes of sexist, misogynistic, lecherous behaviour and assault from both boys and men, which cumulatively make for difficult reading, particularly when framed within the ongoing #MeToo movement. Back then, Heyman had yet to find her voice to confront and to rebuff, “How do they know, have always known, that I will take the mortification into myself and feel the blaze on my cheeks and keep my eyes on my feet while I walk away? Mouth closed, face burning. Bile in the stomach. This is what it’s like to be a girl, to be this girl.”
This memoir is her retaliation. In some ways, the book follows the classic trajectory of pain and redemption; it is, yes, a “misery memoir” insofar as Heyman is elevated to a level of grace and transformation after enduring a litany of hardship, but though the concept of being saved by the “wild unknown” may seem hackneyed, what distinguishes Fury is the quality of the writing.
Well-versed in the exploration of (male) power, control and violence in her previous works, this is Heyman’s seventh book, and though a memoir, she brings all her storytelling skills honed in writing fiction to hand. The title itself has been carefully chosen. Nicknamed “Little Fury” by her father when she was a child for her habit of biting those who displeased her, Heyman has reclaimed the moniker meant to be derogatory. There’s a certain pleasure, she thinks, in giving vent to her fury, the “certainty that her wild, hungry anger would protect her”.
It’s that sharpened and belated sense of thwarted justice that prompted her to write her story anew. “I tried to shift myself to be the kind of girl who fits, bending myself around the world, squeezing into corners, making myself thinner than I was, trying to be less hungry, less angry … But I was not that girl.”
There is little surprise to learn why, growing up, Heyman grapples with her self-worth. Her foundations were already shaky. With an impoverished background featuring domestic violence, tiny rentals and feckless sharehouses, there was not just financial poverty at stake, but imaginative scarcity. The only place she’d ever found home was among books; it was there that the possibilities of elsewhere beckoned. But not seeing herself in any of these tales, “all of them with young men striding through the world wielding swords or cars or horses or girls”, she vows to one day step into her own map.
Rather than being chronological in scope, Fury matches the duck-and-weave and back-and-forth of Heyman’s peripatetic existence as she hitchhikes, camps, subsists on low-rent jobs and tries to escape in whatever way possible. Forever falling and failing, “a dandelion spore drifting and landing wherever, whenever”, it’s only on the wave-tossed Ocean Thief that she feels grounded, where she’s finally forced to confront experiences long denied and find the language with which to express herself. “Like the net, I was unbound, muddy memories emerging unbidden and unwelcome, the weight of me dropping, ready to be sorted”, she writes.
There on the open sea, the “orange disc”, shrieking birds, dipping dolphins and dignity of hard, physical labour offer a romantic vantage point. But waxing lyrical aside, such poetic and painterly details are balanced with being at the mercy of the fickle elements and existing for a spell in that liminal space without boundaries. Aboard the Ocean Thief Heyman is finally able to write an adventure tale in which she’s the heroine of her own story.
• Fury by Kathryn Heyman is out now through Allen & Unwin in Australia and in the UK through Myriad
