The Night That Changed Me

Acclaimed author Kathryn Heyman’s confronting and compelling new memoir, Fury, is the story of finding courage in a culture that doesn’t see heroism in the shape of a girl. Here, she charts the traumatic event that changed the course of her life and fuelled her determination to challenge a predatory male world

- Kathryn Heyman

The party was in Sydney, in an apartment full of people I didn’t know. Beautiful people, funny people, smart people. A friend, Penny, had dragged me along. I do remember what I was wearing. I’ll always remember that, I suppose. Earlier that year I’d found, in a charity shop, a green-and-black-checked vinyl trench coat with a pointed collar and a neat belt. Inside the vinylI sweated like the inside of a car, but it was worth it. I had a little skirt on underneath, and green pointed boots. I kept drinking, waiting for someone to notice me, to speak to me, to find me funny, or interesting, or to like my careful green trench, to notice how witty it was, how ironic. But none of these things happened.

Penny stayed in the kitchen, running her hand down the arm of someone called Jeff. She tilted her head back and laughed, revealing the long line of her throat. That head tilt, that laugh, that hand slipping easily down a muscled arm: I couldn’t do it, couldn’t quite understand it. When I tried, the laugh came out broken, the hand too firm on the arm, the head was thrown back so fiercely that I could hear my own neck crick. I’d watched it right through high school but even now, at 20, I still couldn’t understand it. It looked like a performance, all of it – the hair flicking, the gathering in giggling groups, the coded language. But I’d somehow missed the rehearsal notes. I’d brought cheap wine, shared with Penny. She’d brought me. As an audience? As the plainer friend? She was a girl who’d got the rehearsal notes.