Mary-Rose MacColl opens up about her traumatic childhood

In her new memoir, author Mary-Rose MacColl tells a raw and emotional tale of overcoming trauma and letting go of the past

Adecade ago, misery memoirs were all the rage. The worse your childhood, the better your book sold. Sometimes – such as in the case of American James Frey’s 2003 fake memoir A Million Little Pieces – you even made bad stuff up in order to get more readers. But Mary-Rose MacColl’s extraordinary new book rewrites the misery memoir. You couldn’t make it up – being groomed by your female high-school teacher so you could end up three-in-a-bed with her husband, eventually getting pregnant through rape – nor could you write so beautifully, powerfully and heartbreakingly unless you were a writer prepared to put everything on the line.

MacColl is such an author. All writers have two lives – one they live and one they live again through words – and this memoir is her testament, shaped and controlled on the page. If once she was a 15-year-old kid at the mercy of her elders when she was supposed to be safe in their pastoral care, now she is a 56-year-old adult with full mastery over both her story and her life.

One of the perpetrators of her abuse is dead; the other is out there somewhere, growing old, having got off scot-free. MacColl isn’t after revenge or retribution. Even when she sat glued to the television as she watched last year’s Brisbane sittings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it wasn’t anger fuelling her. She doesn’t want the high school she attended in the mid-’70s investigated, nor does she have any wish to make a formal complaint. “Rage is more destructive of the person who’s enraged than anyone else,” she says. “Because what they did was such a fundamental betrayal of my developing self, I’ve had to let it go.”

What MacColl seeks instead is understanding and acknowledgment of her experience, and to explain it not only to the daughter she gave up for adoption but also to her readers. In the memoir, she tries to “tease apart these unequal power relationships” and explain what it’s like on the ground of one such relationship – “the harm it does later, for sure, but also how helpless you are to do anything”.

But what she seeks above all else is absolution from the shame she’s lived with most of her adult life. “Letting go of shame has been a big thing … I’ve worked really hard to let go of the shame around all this,” she says.

In a book that should be harrowing – and certainly is in parts – what MacColl achieves is a work of spare, transcendent beauty. She is writing about exposing her most private self in public: “I am by nature a private person. Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame.

“Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing. If you don’t allow them air, you will not go on. They will drag you back down with them. You will die, slowly or quickly. If you allow them air, bring them up to the surface, you can watch them float away.”

Through the power of words, MacColl succeeds in letting pain and a deep sense of shame – all her worst secrets – be rinsed away. She lets her readers share her sense of relief in the knowledge that even our worst experiences carry the possibility of redemption, that it is in the nature of life to keep seeking “something good and right in the world”.

MacColl – a columnist for the Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine from 2013 to 2016 – is the third child (and only girl) of four children born to the late Brisbane journalists Dugald MacColl and Rosemary Lynch. Her parents met as young journalists in the ’50s (her dad was once chief sub-editor on the Courier-Mail).

But, like many women in the ’50s, her mum stopped working when babies came along. Possibly she suffered from postnatal depression – or from being stuck in the suburbs with no adult company and four unruly kids – but something “knocked her from happiness to unhappiness”, as her daughter puts it. MacColl recalls her as a warm, loving mother but – for whatever reason – she found life difficult. Once, for a short time, the children went to a Brisbane children’s home so she could “have a rest”.

MacColl writes that growing up in a big Catholic family in Brisbane’s western suburbs was more “Addams Family than Brady Bunch”. The house was a mess, the kids were allowed to scribble on the walls, their dad’s sense of humour ran to asking a random kid how old they were: “Seven,” you’d say. “Do you want to live to be eight?” Yes. “Then shut up.”

It didn’t help that MacColl was what is euphemistically known as “full of beans”. She was a tomboy, smaller than other kids, and had worked out that the best way to get noticed was to do things you’re not supposed to. “I was always labelled attentionseeking,” she says. Three generations of women from MacColl’s mother’s family attended the inner-city Brisbane Catholic All Hallows’ School, but only MacColl succeeded in being asked to leave when she failed Year 10. She set off fire alarms and pressed the emergency button in the elevator; her report cards were full of comments about her being too talkative, attention-seeking and disruptive.

When MacColl moved to a smaller private Catholic school in Brisbane to repeat Year 10 – alienated at home and at school, a bright girl whose intelligence had yet to be harnessed – she was perfectly placed to be preyed upon. She was a girl looking for heroes and when her form teacher became her mentor – apparently interested in her welfare, someone she could tell things to – the teacher became her new hero. She craved her hero’s attention and affection. Soon, the defenceless teenage girl would be willing to do anything for her.

There are things in life you can only approach side-on. Some things are too hard to look at full-square and can only be ever glimpsed from the corner of one eye. It’s no surprise that some people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder – soldiers, victims of terrorism or life-changing accidents, sexual assault victims – have trouble piecing together the moment their lives changed. For others, a particular scene will endlessly repeat over and over, impossible to erase from the mind’s eye.

MacColl spent years in therapy – different kinds of psychological therapies as well as physical ones – to recall exactly how she lost agency over her physical self. She thinks it started with her teacher’s husband kissing her; she knows for sure that by year 11 she started sleeping in their bed. She was a teenage girl, they were in their late 20s; first it was cuddling, then it became sexual (without full intercourse). Her teacher’s husband said it was better for MacColl to learn about sex from good people than “from some pimple-faced idiot”.

Where were her protectors? Where was her mum, her dad? Apparently MacColl’s parents believed their daughter to be a wayward girl, already thrown out of one school, and that the teacher and her husband offered guidance, a good influence on a troubled girl’s life. Besides, by then MacColl – like many other stroppy teenagers – believed her parents to be fools.

Apart from anything else, her grades were improving. Because her hero was interested in her, she began to work harder. By the

time Year 12 came around, MacColl was on track to gain university entrance; in the last months of school she applied for a journalism cadetship and was offered a job at the now-defunct Brisbane afternoon daily newspaper The Telegraph. She started in Women’s News under the formidable Miss Erica Parker, then the doyenne of Queensland women’s journalism.

Now comes the moment it takes MacColl many long years to remember. She’s just turned 18, a virgin, on the brink of adult life. She’s drunk too much beer and the teacher’s husband is on top of her, even though she’s yelling at him to stop. She’s on a beach, trying to kick him away but she’s not strong enough, he’s holding her down and it’s hurting.

And now she’s pregnant. Pregnant the first time she has sex, pregnant through rape. She’s a good Catholic girl, so there’s no question for her of abortion. Instead, it’s off to a mother and baby home for wayward girls in Melbourne and the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau for the adoption of a baby girl she names Ruth.

In the years that follow, there’s a lot of self-harm in the desire to forget: drinking, cutting her arms with razor blades, deep dives into debilitating depression. She can’t get her old job back (she told them she was leaving to travel and the editor can’t trust such a flibbertigibbet). For a time she even stumbles back into the arms of the teacher and her husband before finally getting the courage to write to them telling them she never wants to see them again.

Bit by bit, she claws back her life: successfully completing a journalism degree at the Queensland University of Technology, moving into higher education as an administrator and corporate writer, having the great luck of meeting the kind, understanding man who would become her husband at 30 (David Mayocchi, now 58, a faculty manager at the University of Queensland).

“He’s such a sweetheart, a beautiful man. I’m so lucky,” she says. He was the first person to whom she told the whole sad story. “It was several weeks before I realised he wasn’t going to leave me because of what I’d done,” she writes in her memoir. It was years, too, before she could see that she was not the one in the wrong.

The moment she realised she had to deal with her traumatic past came after the birth of her much-wanted baby Otis (now 14). She was 38 when she woke up one day wanting a baby and 41 by the time she gave birth, pretending to be an elderly primigravida (a woman over 35 who is pregnant for the first time). None of her friends knew she’d had a baby girl 23 years earlier.

Then, one day when MacColl was out in the park when Otis was a toddler, he started screaming when she strapped him back into his stroller. At first she thought he was objecting to being manhandled but then she saw she’d inadvertently pinched the soft skin of his belly in the stroller clip. Immediately she undid the strap but Otis cried and cried and the horrible stain of her mistake on his unblemished baby skin did not fade for weeks.

At home, MacColl collapsed, howling, her whole body shaking uncontrollably. “If it weren’t so terrifying, it might have been funny,” she writes. “When I pinched Otis in the stroller clip, baby Ruth came back, demanding to be grieved, and with her came the secrets I had kept for so long.”

Today, sitting in the bright sunshine outside her local cafe in an inner-city Brisbane suburb, MacColl understands that what happened after she accidentally hurt her son “was some kind of post-trauma stuff and because we have babies in our bodies, it was in my body I experienced it”. “I realised I’d just been surviving, really, for a long time,” she says. For many years, she wasn’t “in” her body, having left her body behind as a teenage girl to escape the shame of it.

By then, MacColl had published three well-received novels ( No Safe Place, her first novel published in 1996, was runner-up in the 1995 Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It was about a sexual misconduct case in a university: if her subconscious knew it had something to work out, her conscious mind did not. “I piled plots on like mattresses in the hope the reader would and wouldn’t feel the pea,” she writes in her memoir.)

But after she accidentally hurt her son, she couldn’t write. “I stopped writing … and fell apart,” she says. “At first you don’t know what’s going on, you think, ‘Oh, that’s normal’, but then you know it’s not and it just gets worse and worse. I would just dissemble, really, I’d just fall apart, without provocation sometimes, there was this awful shuddering and stuff.”

This dismaying state continued for some years, until therapies – both physical and mental – helped lift MacColl from her lifedenying state. Slowly she began her step back towards the light of life: contacting baby Ruth’s adoptive mother, letting her unresolved grief and anger go, learning to re-enter her body. Swimming helped, putting one arm up and over, then the other, breathing. She began to swim regularly, and still does. “I’m a pretty revved-up person,” she says. “Swimming for me is a kind of meditation, you just move through the water, the water takes you along and you become part of it. It’s really very beautiful.”

And she began to write the story of her life to the daughter who was once part of her body, the baby she could not forgive herself for giving away.

Fiona Inglis, of Curtis Brown Australia, has been MacColl’s literary agent since 2009, when MacColl sent her the original version of the memoir, then entirely addressed to her daughter. MacColl wanted it published anonymously. She was – and is – scrupulously concerned about protecting her daughter’s identity.

Inglis read the manuscript in one go. The book brought her to tears. She was astonished when the manuscript wasn’t instantly snapped up by publishers (possibly because of MacColl’s desire to publish it anonymously). But when Inglis offered the manuscript again last year, the first publisher she showed it to (MacColl’s usual publisher, Allen & Unwin) wanted it. Inglis suggests times have moved on, with increased public awareness of the sexual exploitation of children. “The Royal Commission may have had some impact. Perhaps it allowed publishers more freedom to explore these difficult issues, having seen so many people come forward to talk about their experiences,” she says.

For MacColl, letting her secrets rise up has proved cathartic. She still worries about the privacy of her family – and in particular the privacy of the now grown-up daughter she has met only once – but by publishing the book under her own name, she’s finally able to say, “I am not ashamed”. The book may no longer be addressed to the baby girl she gave up all those years ago, but it is a love letter of great beauty to her all the same.

For A Girl: A True Story Of Secrets, Motherhood and Hope by Mary-Rose MacColl, Allen & Unwin $30, is out now