Life with Robert Fisk: I realised I would not be at peace until I wrote this book

In a new memoir, journalist Lara Marlowe recalls the life she shared with her former husband

Lara Marlowe

When the British journalist Robert Fisk died of a stroke at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on October 30th, 2020, we had been divorced for 11 years and separated much longer. In the year since Robert’s death, I have virtually lived with him again, almost as intensely as during our years together.

I wrote the first draft of Love in a Time of War in Howth, Co Dublin, in 3½ months last winter, during the Covid lockdown. My memoir was prompted not by the pandemic but by Robert’s passing. It has been a long journey.

This is how it happened. After Robert was buried at Kilternan cemetery, Co Dublin, the Weekend Review of The Irish Times published an article I wrote. My agent, Jonathan Williams, rang to say that Neil Belton, the Irish publisher of Head of Zeus in London, and the Irish book distributor Simon Hess, were interested in a memoir along similar lines. I initially said no; I was profoundly affected by Robert’s death and thought it would be too painful.

But on early morning walks in the Tuileries Gardens, I found myself composing the book in my head. I realised that I would not be at peace until I wrote it. I rang Jonathan back, then spent weeks amassing diaries, Robert’s and my books and correspondence, photographs, and the articles I wrote between 1988 and 2003, the years when Robert and I worked together.

I flew from Paris to Dublin with 50kg of archives, which I then sorted into chronological order. The structure of the book, which begins with Robert’s death and ends with my last, chance meeting with him in 2019, was self-evident to me. Fourteen stacks of documents piled up on the bed in my guest room: prologue, epilogue and 12 chapters recapping our lives as journalists and lovers in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and the former Yugoslavia.

My first meeting with Robert in Damascus occurred nearly four decades ago. I am not usually one to dwell on the past, but writing this book made me appreciate the truth of William Faulkner’s maxim: the past is not dead. It isn’t even past.

I had merely to look at the cartoons which Robert left on my desk, the cash register chit for the “adulterous hat” he bought for me in Rome in 1987, the receipt for my wedding bouquet in Knightsbridge 10 years later… It all washed over me again, with undiminished power.

Robert’s letters had remained untouched in my cellar for decades. Re-reading them carried me back to Manhattan in 1987, to Paris in the early 2000s. If a writer is someone whose life is destined to end up in a book, the experience transformed me into a writer….

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/life-with-robert-fisk-i-realised-i-would-not-be-at-peace-until-i-wrote-this-book-1.4705520

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