no.65. women round a table

I sometimes (try to) write something pithy about the state of the world at the start of these emails, but where to begin? Right now, I’m consumed with questions of motherhood both in my own life and in the wider world. I haven’t watched Adolescence but I worry profoundly about parenting a boy. I watch in horror as health professionals are being arrested for performing abortions in the US and more and more girls and women are experiencing enforced motherhood. I think about the thousands of children in Gaza, the dead ones, and the ones still alive who have been robbed of all a child should have, worst of all, their mothers. Today I read about the 61 children who have died in the last four years in the UK due to domestic violence. Closer to home, I worry about my capabilites as a mother, now and in the future. I wonder if I’m a good mother. I worry daily about ambition and motherhood, how they bleed into each other, or not, as the case might be, instead becoming seperate islands I have to ferry between. I watch the weight of being a working mother on the women in my life and wonder how on earth we’re meant to do it all. The little electric shocks that go off in my head throughout the day caused by the things in my life are only intensified by the sureal headlines that I can’t look away from. These thoughts swirl and swirl and swirl, the political and the personal somehow impossible to seperate, and it feels like lava constantly errupting in the earth’s crust, lapping at my feet… Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic but everything feels very dramatic. In my head, there is a man in the town square shouting the end is coming! There is a heat to life at the moment, which I guess is just a roundabout way of saying: the world is on fucking fire.

On with the show

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I recently wrote and hosted a podcast called Echoes of Harm. There are four 20-minute episodes and it explores the psychological toll of male violence across Europe. I’m very proud of it and hope you’ll listen. l was granted the space to interview some truly incredible people, including Gino Cecchettin, whose daughter, Giulia was murdered days before her graduation by her ex-boyfriend - a case that rocked Italy on the same scale that Sarah Everard’s murder did here. I also spoke with Rosa Logar. Rosa opened the first refuge in Austria in 1978, pioneered perpetrator removal legislation in the 1990s and was involved in nearly all major EU laws regarding MVAWG, including the Istanbul Convention. Remarkably, Rosa told me that when she started working in this space in the early 70s, people said domestic abuse “didn’t exist”. Now retired, in the last few years she’s been to Ukraine three times to support her “sisters”.

During our conversation, Rosa introduced me to a book called Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Lewis Herman, which was first published in 1992. Herman revolutionised the understanding of women’s trauma caused by male abuse and the New York Times called it “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud”. According to Herman, it was the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that first demanded women’s trauma be recognised and understood. Reading that book made me realise, possibly for the first time, that the women’s lib movement wasn’t only about material things, like equal pay or abolishing sexual harassment - as important as these things were. The fight was for something more essential, almost existential: the validity of a woman’s own reality, the right to define her experience, and have her experiences acknowledged, witnessed, accepted as real and true. Younger generations love to pick holes in that movement and there are some really big ones, but I’m constantly learning how seismic the shift they created was.

It’s not always easy to spend many hours thinking and writing about male violence and the trauma women carry as a result. I discovered fact-checking femicide numbers across Europe is a particularly peculiar task. Collecting data is not my thing at the best of times, and with femicide, it’s not a straightforward task. There’s no standardised counting method. Some countries don’t count at all. Working late into the evenings, it was an uncomfortable juxtaposition; an annoying task that was also a devastating reminder of what is happening every day. In Spain, I discovered, they also count the ‘near misses’, a strange no man’s land category, I thought, closer to purgatory. Are these women considered almost dead? Does surviving strangulation or being pushed down stairs make you lucky? As I tried to find these numbers, one minute I’d be frustrated at the niggling task and the next it felt as if vines were growing around my neck, the horror imprinting itself on my skin. It goes without saying that toll of this is nothing compared to what happens to victims, but, nonetheless, there is heaviness that comes with this work, an occupational hazard.

Yet, despite everything, or maybe because of everything, there was a lightness working with the all-female Italian team who I made the podcast with, and a very natural and easy friendship developed. A few weeks ago, I flew to Rome and we presented the podcast to our sponsor. That evening, the team took me for dinner and invited a couple of their friends along; more smart, bilingual, interesting women. In total, there were six of us and we shared pizzas and bottles of beer. And for all the sadness and fury of working on a project for three months about the way that male violence can rob women of their sense of self, their sense of reality, their freedom, their joy, their lives, we were laughing. We were full of ideas and opinions, and I realised, not for the first time recently, that the only way to carry the burden of male harm is to spend time with women. Brilliant, kind, smart and funny women.

More recently, I travelled to north London to see some of my oldest friends. Once again I was sat around a table with five other women eating pizza. This time the talking was interrupted by M’s 4-month-old but it continued over coffee the next morning. I’d had a conversation with another woman the day before about feeling overwhelmed and said the only time I don’t feel overwhelmed - by motherhood, by everything in life that needs doing, by all the things I can’t control - is when I’m in the company of other women. And that’s how I felt that evening as I spread my worries on the table like cards, knowing however tricky my hand, these women would make it all feel okay.

As I write, this viral clip of a restaurant in Belfast filled with dozens of women singing Celine Dion at the top of their lungs comes to mind. It was a boozy brunch and All Coming Back to Me Now is being belted out with all the confidence of downing a bottle of cut-price prosecco before midday. It’s chaos and it’s the sort of thing you look at and think, Fuck, I love being a woman. It’s a funnier, far more budget version of what I imagine the Taylor Swift Eras tour felt like. The word that so many women used to me about that was “safe” - to be in a stadium with that many people, to be a woman exposed to thousands of strangers and not feel a threat was remarkable and wonderful. It was clearly joyful, some even describing it as a quasi-spiritual experience.

And that’s because when women feel safe, they feel free. Which, after all, was what the women’s lib movement was built on; consciousness-raising circles that allowed women to safely speak their mind as a route to freedom. When women feel safe they are free to sing at the top of their lungs, to have opinions and talk without a filter, to demand equality and respect, to trust their own minds, to lay their cards on the table and unburned themselves, even just for a moment.

And so, after I made a podcast that constantly reminded me men hate women so much they are killing them every single day, I also remembered just how glorious being a woman can be - and that the way through nearly anything in life, however devastating or worrisome or lonely, always starts together, women round a table, talking.

Some really great things:

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. It’s her first work of fiction in over a decade, it’s beautiful and I was lucky enough to interview her about it for Grazia.

The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’ Death Row by Lawrence Wright. I don’t say this flippantly: this New Yorker piece is one of the best pieces of narrative non-fiction I can remember reading. A group of nuns befriend women on death row in a Texas prison while the author, a Texan man, grapples with his faith and a lifelong sense of betrayal. Some of women’s crimes are unpseakable, but for nearly all of them so was what they endured as children. One woman is widely believed to be innocent. Another murdered her own child.

This may be a bit niche but I was fascinated by this episode of The Political Scene in which the hosts explore how the Founding Fathers looked to ancient Rome as a guide in how to build a democracy (or not), and how their worst fears are now playing out today: Is Donald Trump a Caesar?

Plus! Dominique kindly asked me to talk about my home for her lovely newsletter, Nesting.

Thanks for reading,
Until next time

Marisa