Both women have used their work to process childhoods ravaged by neglect and abuse. Meeting for the first time, they discuss survival and anger, Fagan’s new memoir, and the state of the UK’s care system today
The writer Jenni Fagan and the actor Samantha Morton have not met one another until today and there is, from the start, a sense of occasion – as if they were destined to be friends. They are together in London, on a sultry August afternoon, because of a book: Fagan’s extraordinary, harrowing and uplifting memoir, Ootlin, about growing up in the Scottish care system. It has drawn Morton in Fagan’s direction because, when she read it, it spoke to her personally – as she is keen to explain.
They sit down, at right angles to one another, in an upstairs room in a Soho club. Fagan is dressed in black; even her nails are black – goth chic or a souvenir of having once been a singer in 90s punk bands. She wears a turquoise bracelet that could double as a string of worry beads, and has beautiful eyes: blueish-green, dancing, observant. Morton is dressed in a linen trouser suit, and her warm, eager, unmade-up face is turned towards Fagan’s. Two women – in black and white – talking as if they had known one another for ever.
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