She’s well known as the creator of the Clare Hart mysteries set mostly in Cape Town, but Margie Orford has spent the past four years writing her memoir, Love and Fury, a fact she revealed at the recent launch of the book at Love Books in Johannesburg, while in a lively conversation with Sue Nyathi.
Though Orford was brought up in Namibia, she was born in London and indeed the memoir opens in London, with Orford in her early 20s. The book is structured around the places she has lived — from London, to Namibia, Cape Town and New York — and comes full circle back to London, where she is now living again. While written in a linear way, Orford returns to her childhood and adolescence, threading the narrative through with glimpses into in her life when she was growing up. In fact, the memoir is also structured like this, taking a look at seminal moments in her life rather than trying to fit each and every event into its pages. Sometimes years are skipped over, which means that the pace of the book, while measured, moves along at a clipping rate.
We meet Orford in London after she has left SA, having attended boarding school and university there. In 1985 she was detained under the state of emergency and wrote her final exams while in prison, an experience she returns to through the memoir.
An accidental pregnancy results in marriage in her early 20s and the birth of the first of her three daughters. While her husband goes off to work, she is left to care for her baby and soon finds herself floundering, far away from home and from a family support structure in London. At the back of her mind is that small but insistent voice that whispers about her own need to be writing, but “Later!”, she says to it.
Returning to Namibia, her husband is still going off to work, she is left at home, needing more of an outlet for her talents. A newspaper article about a publishing venture, Now Namibia Books, is the catalyst for her own career. Talking herself into a job, Orford is then responsible for a number of publishing ventures through the 1990s.
Shortly before the birth of her third daughter, she is busy putting the finishing touches to her first book, Double Trouble, about a pair of Namibian Nancy Drews. Orford leaves Namibia to take up a Fulbright scholarship in New York at the end of the 1990s.
The pull and responsibility of motherhood is strong. Going away means she will have to leave her children with her parents at first, while she and her husband settle in. Her father doesn’t want her to go. The tug is strong, as is the conundrum. Orford is now 35, and aware that it’s now or never. She leaves, her children will follow later on, and the years in New York are a flowering of potential. Whether to remain in academia or return to the world is a question that is answered by her supervisor, who believes she needs to be out there.
But it is also the place where she begins to realise that there is a silence beginning to take hold in her marriage. “Aidan was lying on the bed reading to Grace and Jamie. He glanced at me standing there with my library books under my arm, but there was so much distance in his eyes, it was as if I was looking at a stranger. I saw in that seemingly inconsequential moment that we were no longer travelling together. When I look back, I pinpoint that as the moment our separation began.”
And so begins the next decade and a half of her life, as she and her family set up home in Cape Town, a place with more opportunities and better schools. This is also the place where she will conceive the idea for her best-selling Clare Hart novels. Orford works as a journalist in those years, reporting on violence against women, among other topics. The violence haunts her: “I reported accurately, but all a journalist can do is provide a never-ending list of facts, and those facts could not reach the complex, tangled truth. For that I needed a wider scope of fiction.”
In 2005 she was filming a documentary in Walvis Bay, “shooting inside an incinerator plant in that bleak Namibian port that stinks of fish and guano”. She writes: “As trussed bags of rubbish were funnelled into the furnace, it occurred to me that this would be the perfect way to get rid of a body.” The outline of her private investigator comes to her “fully formed and flawed”. Orford relates that she had business cards printed with the word “writer”. While acknowledging that the “card business sounded like a scam” ― she hadn’t written her novel yet ― that is how she “became” a writer.
Rejections follow until the small feminist press Oshun, led by Michelle Matthews, publishes the novel; the Hart series, five books in total, is a success. Orford also reflects on her work with prisoners, offering creative writing classes to them, and eventually producing an anthology of their work.
Through the years a painful silence continues in her marriage. Her husband is not making enough money to support them, and Orford’s fictional writing sustains them all instead. The marriage continues till they sit on the patio, smoking, and Orford tells him she can no longer continue with their marriage. She relates how a look of relief flashed through his eyes before the pain took over his features. The unravelling of a 25-year-old marriage is easily achieved in the divorce courts — but shrugging off the secure carapace of such a partnership takes longer.
She takes up fellowships overseas and eventually settled in London. But the depression that follows is a testament to the deep turmoil that uncoupling can trigger. Thoughts of suicide haunt her, and antidepressant pills make her feel unlike herself. Writing a memoir pulls her through.
And then her beloved sister, Melle, dies of an aneurysm. The narrative is threaded through with her reminisces about her close relationship with Melle. The loss is a shocking blow, and the memoir is put aside for more than a year.
Here then are the bones of a life lived passionately to the full, taking the experiences that life has to offer and making her own luck. Love and Fury, as its title promises, is about the fury Orford has experienced as a woman coming to feminism, breaking out of a domestic world that could not satisfy her, and encountering the world, in all its violence. From apartheid SA to post-independence Namibia and an SA emerging from its repressive past, Orford has observed the world keenly. The memoir moves from the private to the public sphere of that violent world, and back again.
I loved it, plain and simple. Orford is raw and honest in her writing about her struggles against depression, suicidal thoughts, a crumbling marriage, and the pull of feminism that has led her towards the life she only faintly imagined when she had her first baby, and heard that voice saying “later”.
Highly recommended.
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