Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
Irena - The Irena Hatfield Story
By Irena Hatfield and Mark Amdur
Published by Harper Collins
 What would you do if (and this will be a big IF for most people) you were charged with the gunshot-at-point-blank-range murder of your spouse - 'the person you held most dear in the world' - more than 10 years after the dreadful event took place, and despite your protestations of innocence?
Further, if you were then splashed across nearly every newspaper and television news bulletin, the subject of endless conjecture, and painted as someone of wanton morals where sex is concerned.
And to compound things, you live near and work (in a high-profile public contact position) in one of Australia's smaller cities. A largely sleepy place where scandal is taken up and whispered without restraint by those who you brush shoulders with every day.
Anonymity will be a thing of the past. In its place it's hello to a certain kind of infamy.
Would you hide your head in shame, do as expected and slink away with your metaphorical tail between your legs? Hope it all blows over? Move to a new town, city, or even country and change your name?
Or would you take the what little control you have over such things and do what you could to make it work for you - do the press interviews that nobody expects you to do, go on Sixty Minutes (and don't act the victim - challenging a suddenly embarrassed Richard Carlton whether he actually likes sex!), and, when you have finally been acquitted of the charges, write the tell-all book.
It's no secret around town that Lismore Regional Art Gallery director, Irena 'Hatfield' has recently released just such a book after her very public experience of the aforementioned scenario.
Nobody who has read Irena could deny that she hasn't been through the wringer leading up to and after her 1997 arrest, with the book painting a harrowing picture of how much the whole affair turned her life upside down and inside out.
Being "betrayed" by a loved one in the way she was - with the consequences so shattering - could not be anything but devastating (an ex-lover's complaint reopened the case and led to her arrest). Especially when it compounds an original tragedy.
However, in this reader's experience everybody has had an 'unusual life' in some manner or other - and most have a sob story to tell about their upbringing. But thankfully they don't inflict them on the reading public, particularly in very averagely written pieces of tell-all literature that stumble between titillation and voyeurism.
Her credited ghost-writer, Mark Amdur, might have been expected to bring something a little more substantial to the tale. As it is the book limps through its initial chapters, only to become a livelier affair (no pun intended) in the latter half when the details of the court case emerge.
That said, if I were a member of the Lismore 'glitterati' (a dubious epithet if ever I've heard one) I'd be winging my way to a bookshop this instant to see if I was named. Because boy(s) does this book name local names!
A word of warning though, if you are a sensitive soul (particularly where sex is concerned) then be prepared to turn as red as a beetroot at sunset. If Irena is nothing else it is frank and honest about its subject's sex life.
Ultimately, Irena probably serves its author well as a kind of therapeutic exercise (and if I'd been through what she has, I'd probably want my side of the story to be as widely available as possible).
Unfortunately I don't think readers are nearly so well served.
Digesting Irena was a bit like reading someone's intimate diary. Even with permission, it still feels very uncomfortable.
www.wordonbooks.com
|
