Love and Fury – A Memoir

four

“There is no way to say something out loud that you can't say to yourself first. And so I was silent. But the body knows what the mind doesn't, and it has its own ways of getting what it wants, and I had gone off the pill. I told Aiden it made me nauseous and that my breasts hurt, which was the truth. I said hormones made me blue and that was true too. I was blue. The tears I had not shed in South Africa had risen to the surface since I had been in London. They would appear when I rattled along the Underground to work.

twenty-one

“The truth is, being contained in the back seat of the car, pinned down by my children’s bodies, their hands searching under my clothes for skin to caress, was bliss. It was also true – I thought as the veld whizzed by and we kept a lookout for kudu and baboons – those two weeks with nobody to attend to, nobody to interrupt me, nobody asking for food or comfort, had been bliss too. Being away and being alone had restored my sense of self. I had been able to think and to write.

twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

thirty-two

“I stayed put and lost myself in books. I had a decade of reading to catch up on and, because books were the place I had escaped to ever since I had learned to read, I went into a reading frenzy. I distilled what I read into sentences that occasionally had an elegance to them. I spent whole days in the library. Although ambition and work do not fill an empty Sunday-morning bed, and nothing substitutes for the joy of nuzzling the warm nape of a sleepy child’s neck, I learned to live without this. No matter that it was hard, I was ecstatically absorbed.

fifty-two

“So, I went on at her about my eccentric but good-enough childhood and my well-intentioned parents, doing my best to keep from her everything that really troubled me. The experiences I could neither name nor claim, I had channelled into my writing. I saw no reason to repeat them, but I suspect I knew even then that if I did, she would be onto me – and there would be nowhere left for me to hide.