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, , 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 80s 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. Fagan and Morton have, in part, made their names through the transformation of trauma into literature and film.
Fagan’s first novel, (2012), was about an abused girl growing up in care, and in 2013 she was on Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list. Other novels have followed, less directly coloured by her life, and half a dozen collections of brave, vulnerable and defiant poetry. Morton is an Oscar nominee twice over, who directed and co-wrote, with .