Clementine Ford has been called an angry loudmouthed polemicist by her detractors, and a leading light of the feminist cause by her many fans.
In her new memoir, How We Love, the Australian writer and broadcaster reveals a softer side - exploring everything from the loss of her mother to cancer to becoming a mother herself.
Photo: supplied
Ford tells Nine to Noon she isn’t moving away from writing books from a feminist perspective, but rather exploring what it is to be human in a broader sense.
“I think that the important thing to remember is that we’re all complicated creatures and sometimes we can be cast as characters in the world and perhaps we’ve put ourselves in those boxes and we don’t resist being put in those boxes," she says.
"I’m a human like anyone else and as such I loved, lost and grieved. I’ve grown up and I’m going to be 41 this year, so I’d got a lot of adult life to reflect on and I think that people who may have felt or may have looked at my work in the past and thought ‘oh, that’s not for me’… will find something in this book which definitely interests them, because we’ve all had those experiences if we’re lucky enough, because we’re human and we’re alive and that involves a gamut of different emotions and different experiences of love and that’s part of what being alive that makes life so rich.”
The writer doesn't spend much time on Twitter these days, admitting using the platform had been a brutal experience and a place where a sense of etiquette and dignified discourse can get disappear in the fiery mist of defending oneself.
“I tweet very occasionally now if I have something to share or sometimes unfortunately the platform of Twitter is just good to get the idea out," she says. "But mostly I don’t use it because I realise it’s bad, it’s just a bad place for everyone, to be honest, but especially a bad place for people who end up, like me, feeling quite primed all the time to have a fight with someone.”
She says when she has revisited Twitter she’s instantly reminded of what she hates about it.
“All you need to say, particularly if you’re a woman with strong opinions, is express some vague allegiance to feminism and you have 50 men in your inbox calling you the most horrible of names.
“Just the relentlessness of it. You do get to a point where you’re not only kind of swimming in that toxic bilge every day, but you start thinking, this is the discourse. This is clearly how people talk on this platform and it does impact you, it does affect you. I don’t think I was impacted in terms of feeling like deep despair about myself. It’s like you lose some sense of what is reasonable behaviour. When I’ve made a misstep and tweeted things that are regrettable, which I’ve apologised for genuinely, I’ve also thought ‘well, this is how people talk on this platform’.
The process of writing her new book has been transformative, bringing more self-insight and empathy for the many people she had been up until this point in time, but particularly for her adolescent self.
“There were parts of the book that were quite difficult to write just in terms of feeling some kind of sadness for the younger versions of me, particularly things that happened to me in my teenage years, familiar to many of us.
“I felt a lot of sadness about what that girl believed about herself, or endured, or experienced in the world and yet at the same time, I found that to me it's one of the most profoundly healing things and it’s something I’ve been talking about a lot when talking about the book. I didn’t realise this would happen when I was writing it. It’s one of those beautiful, unexpected consequences.”
One of the main themes running through the book is the best way to love ourselves is to forgive ourselves and to understand that we have multiple selves, she says.
Before, she would make disparaging remarks in public and private about her younger self, but that is no longer the case.
‘Part of the process of writing the book was revisiting all of these younger versions of myself and in doing so feeling so much empathy and love for them that now it’s really impossible for me to make those statements and that’s been such a healing thing to do.
“To look at those past versions of myself and think ‘thank you so much for getting to where I am today, rather than thinking ‘you’re dumb, ugly’ and saying all of the horrible things to ourselves that we’ve always thought about yourselves.”
For Ford, love is to be seen and known, something very different to being desired. What we know about our partners is a measure of a depth of love and feeling, and being remembered for who we are is ultimately what we all want in life, she says.
“That’s the desire that we all have – to leave an impression on the world and on the people around us and in doing so understand who we are as well."
Although not advocating that we should all be an island and not rely on anyone else, she prioritises love of self above romantic attachments.
“Ultimately the person that we have to get along with the best and the person we have to secure the love of the most is ourselves because we will be our constant companion through life," she says.
Photo: Allen and Unwin
Aside from her feminist polemics, she says she has written candidly about emotions over the years, and the chapter about the loss of her mother at 25 is no different. Her mother was 57 when she died of cancer. Writing about the loss, she says, allowed her to appreciate what her mum had meant to her.
“I’ve been writing about my mum since I’ve been a public writer and it wasn’t so difficult in that sense because I’ve excavated a lot of it on the page," she says. "Of course, I cried when I was writing it and listening to the audiobook, but it wasn’t like a beast that I was wrestling with, it was a very beautiful cathartic experience of grief, which I’m kind of at now.”
The feeling of that chapter is one of gratitude, of knowing a complicated woman who loved the family deeply. That feeling was not immediately accessible after the loss, Ford says.
“We always want more time, but the gratitude we had for the time we had is such a beautiful position to get to and it’s not possible in the immediate aftermath of losing someone, it took some time to get her, but like everything you just have to walk through it, keep walking… until the clouds break and you can see on top of the mountain and you can see everything for what it was and it’s such a beautiful view.”
Maternal love is touched upon by Ford, who explores the nuanced version, the complexity of being a mother.
“It’s really, really hard to be a mother," she says. "It’s hard on your emotional sense of self and we’re not allowed to talk about that because anything that explores that depth in women is dismissed as being indulgent…"
Having her own child now makes her appreciate how she never gave her own mum space and the dualism mothers face in loving a child unconditionally, but also raging against the fact your self does not fully belong to you any longer.
“The inescapable need that your children have for you is beautiful and precious. It is a huge gift, but it is also incredibly hard and you wrestle all the time with the child you have within yourself, the way that you were parented that were lacking, your fear that you might create some of the bad patterns that you witnessed… I have those struggles all the time.”
The vulnerability and raw passion of adolescence is also expressed in her book.
“We ascribe this value to different kinds of love. When you’ve been married for 25 years it must be the most profound type of love… But I often think actually some of the most raw, intense and passionate loves of my life are completely unrequited ones that I had when I was 14 and 15 years old. I actually really didn’t want them to touch me because I was so terrified of what it all meant, but just the sheer force of romantic fantasy could power of a bloody city.”
Clementine Ford is well known for her first two books: Fight Like A Girl and Boys Will Be Boys. She’ll be appearing at the NZ Festival next month.
