'A raw, painfully honest, heartbreaking account of a young woman raising herself out of abuse and poverty to become her own hero.
'A roadmap of recovery and transformation, this is the story of becoming heroic in a culture which doesn't see heroism in the shape of a girl.
'At the age of twenty, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.
'Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create or live a decent life, how to have hope or expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of words to name the world. This was to become her salvation.
'After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery and harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed. Finally, she could name the abuses she thought had broken her, could see 'all that she had been blind to, simply to survive'. More than that, after a period of enforced separation from the world, she was able to return to it newly formed, determined to remake the role she'd been born into.
'A reflection on the wider stories of class, and of growing up female with all its risks and rewards, Fury is a memoir of courage and determination, of fighting back and finding joy.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Book It In : Kathryn Heyman
Lucy Clark
(interviewer),
2021
23741069
2021
single work
interview
podcast
'Features editor Lucy Clark talks to Kathryn Heyman about the indignities that women endure throughout their lives and the craft of writing a memoir.'
'In her early 20s, Kathryn Heyman spent a season aboard a six-berth fishing trawler, Ocean Thief, that was scouring the Gulf of Carpentaria for tiger prawns. She’d hitchhiked up the coast from Sydney with a handful of clothes, a flick-knife she didn’t know how to use, and 10kg of books. It was an escape plan without a plan: “I had no deadline, no outcome, no-one waiting,” Heyman explains in Fury. “There was no-one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring.” She arrived on deck as Kacey, an untested galley cook who couldn’t fry an egg; she left as Kathryn, a toil-hardened deckhand. It was a transformation – a strengthening – that made other transformations possible.' (Introduction)
'Heyman’s novels explore male power, control and violence. Now, she turns her sharp storytelling skills and lyrical prose on her own life.'
'It took hitchhiking to Darwin and a job on a fishing trawler to transform Kathryn Heyman.'
'Heyman’s novels explore male power, control and violence. Now, she turns her sharp storytelling skills and lyrical prose on her own life.'
'In her early 20s, Kathryn Heyman spent a season aboard a six-berth fishing trawler, Ocean Thief, that was scouring the Gulf of Carpentaria for tiger prawns. She’d hitchhiked up the coast from Sydney with a handful of clothes, a flick-knife she didn’t know how to use, and 10kg of books. It was an escape plan without a plan: “I had no deadline, no outcome, no-one waiting,” Heyman explains in Fury. “There was no-one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring.” She arrived on deck as Kacey, an untested galley cook who couldn’t fry an egg; she left as Kathryn, a toil-hardened deckhand. It was a transformation – a strengthening – that made other transformations possible.' (Introduction)
Book It In : Kathryn Heyman
Lucy Clark
(interviewer),
2021
23741069
2021
single work
interview
podcast
'Features editor Lucy Clark talks to Kathryn Heyman about the indignities that women endure throughout their lives and the craft of writing a memoir.'
