Now that I have an audience hanging on my words, anxious to hear about these issues that have preoccupied me for the last two years, I hardly know where to begin. I feel my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I ask myself if this is really happening, if I will allow it to happen. Will I really blow my chance to be understood, to express everything that has been boiling inside my brain?

“I never accepted Coetzee’s narrative in the first place,” I say. I hear scratching sounds as Jacob takes notes. “I was never that woman—fiction-Lucy. I was never her. I don’t believe any woman is her. She is the product of male fantasy. The angelic victim who accepts her rape as a natural part of the order of things. Who takes the punishment for colonialism upon her own body and happily bears the child that results from it. Who chooses to live amid her assailants and share her life with them.”

Jacob makes interested noises.

“If the message of atonement and reconciliation had been framed in any other way, I could have accepted it. If it had been represented in any other way besides the rape of a woman. That’s what places it beyond the pale. And the fact that he used my own rape as his template for this message makes it even worse. No woman’s rape should be appropriated and used as a metaphor. It’s completely unacceptable.”

“A valid argument,” mutters Jacob. “And yet Coetzee’s book has been well received, hasn’t it? It has gained considerable traction as the final word on the reconciliation narrative. It is unlikely that there will be another text of sufficient stature to replace it. It straddles our literature like a colossus.”

“I like to think my own narrative has the power to unseat it. Especially now that the waters have been muddied with evidence of my father’s involvement in the rape. It has become just another incident of family violence. I think when people see that Coetzee got the whole story wrong, it will undermine his credibility.”

There is a sound like air being squeezed out of a cushion. It is Jacob laughing. “I’m afraid I can’t see that happening. If you want your own rape to become the dominant narrative, you will have to tell it yourself. And in such a way that it eclipses his. That’s not very likely, is it?”

“It has to happen. It has to. I will make it happen.”

“What do you want from John Coetzee, Ms. Lurie? Really, when you come right down to it, what do you want from him?”

“I want him to sit opposite me while I explain why he shouldn’t have used my rape in his book. Then I want him to look me in the eye while he apologises and acknowledges that he was wrong.”