AUTHOR IN CRISIS MARGIE ORFORD ON HER NEW MEMOIR
We take a look at Margie Orford’s beautiful, brave and bold new memoir
TO HER many readers she’s South Africa’s unequivocal queen of crime but there’s a lot more to Margie Orford than her popular Clare Hart series. In this beautifully written memoir, she takes an unflinching look at her life and the passion, anger and sense of restlessness that have constantly driven her.
The structure is very clever – instead of working chronologically, Orford looks at her life through the prism of a devastating series of losses, including the end of her marriage – all of which leave her in a very dark place as she tries to build a new life for herself in London.
It’s a brave and very readable story about a woman on the brink who needs to understand her past so she can face the future.
Why did you decide at this specific point to write a memoir?
Our stories can and do change our worlds. I had written about things that have concerned me for years, but in the form of fiction.
But now, in the middle of my life, with my life in crisis, I wanted to understand why I have written the novels I have, done the journalism I did. I surprised myself and it made me turn what had become an incapacitating depression into something with shape and, I hope, hope and beauty. I believe the personal is political and so it is always a political act for a woman to tell her story in public.
Were there any lightbulb moments for you when you were writing it?
So many! I saw patterns in my behaviour and decisions that’ve shaped my life – restlessness and a compulsion to move, to get things done, a kind of fire that is much more anxiety than it is focus and ambition. Although, there is the latter.
I also understood how much and how intensely I have loved – especially my life-changing, lifemaking daughters.
But, to be fair, most of my lightbulbs were those energysaving ones that flickered very slowly into brightness. It took me a long time to understand what was going on.
Are you in a happier space now than you were in the autumn of 2018?
I think so, many days yes. I’m glad to be alive or neutral about being alive. But the current of despair that runs deep underground in the soul – or wherever it is that things like that live – is still there. And so, I keep an eye on it.
You remarried in 2022 and have a very interesting living arrangement with your husband. How’s it working out having two separate homes with an interconnecting door and would you recommend this set-up?
Yes! It’s the best! Katharine Hepburn said something along the lines that the ideal marriage is to live next door and visit occasionally.
The proximity of marriage, of cohabitation, is not really something a sane woman can survive. I find it very difficult to be “on” all the time, to pay attention to someone else’s needs, etc.
I can’t write unless I can be alone. But there is a lot to be said for companionship and having dinner together. So far, it has been wonderful. I love going to visit – it means you always dress up, just a little bit, and so does he.
Give us an idea of an average day in your life?
I have a house on the edge of an enormous park, Alexandra Palace, so in the morning I wake up and open my curtains and look at the huge old oak tree outside my window and wonder how I got here. Then I get up, astonished, and get down to writing the book I’m working on – a novel again.
Often I go and work in the British Library as I can’t mess around there. And when I walk through the tumult of London’s streets I sometimes feel infinitely fortunate to have made it so far, to be alive.
Other times I want to run, back to the silence one finds in Namibia or in the Karoo. I see my daughters who live here, meet the friends I have made and WhatsApp all my people back home.