When I was 28 years old, I met a man who gave me a dark gift. I had just published a book about my father’s life and murder. I was 14 when my father, a politician whom I adored more than anyone on earth, was assassinated outside our home in Pakistan. My brother and I were inside and heard everything. I knew I would not get justice in my country, perhaps ever, but I believed that memory was a form of fighting power and its relentless violence, so more than a decade after my father’s assassination, I went from country to country with my book to tell the story of how my heart had been broken.
Every day standing at a podium, I relived the worst moments of my life. I could calmly recount the tragedy of losing my beloved father day after day. I would, however, collapse and weep if I couldn’t find my phone charger in the hotel later. My body often shut down and I was overcome with anxiety and depression, unable to eat or sleep, hiding away in a dark room for days until the pain lifted. I suffered panic attacks for a long time and was unable to shift the grief that overwhelmed me.
And then, I met a mesmerizing older man. My sorrow was etched all over my face, he told me. He had been watching me and wondered how I hadn’t seen that I could free myself and be forever liberated from pain. He could show me, he said; he could take my grief away—this was the gift he gave me. All I had to do was believe him—that was the darkness. I was hypnotized by the man’s promise. He spoke to me gently then, and he wasn’t impressed by my “act”—as he called it—of being smart and tough. The man did help me. He taught me new ways of observing my thoughts and of transforming my worries and cut the cyclical loop of my anxiety and heartache. I was spellbound.
The man wasn’t intimidated by me. He didn’t think what I was doing was very impressive at all. I wasn’t that smart, he let me know, and surely, I didn’t really believe all those things people said about me being brave, did I? When he saw my bookshelves, grown over a lifetime of faithful reading, he told me that I should give the books away. They were just props in my ruse to fool people into thinking I was intelligent. I looked ridiculous with make-up on, he said—who was I trying to impress? You need to be free of these attachments, he expounded. He had none of the delusions I did, he was attached to nothing and no one, not even me, because he understood the truth of the world in a way I did not. Attachment breeds suffering. I thought he was very wise and clever.
The man spoke with expert authority about everything, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome and dashing. There was nothing he hadn’t done—skydiving? Yes, several times. Marathons? Sure. Flying a plane? It was like driving a car, just easier. Cooking? He knew more than a Cordon Bleu chef. Genius? Well, many people had said as much about him, he confessed nonchalantly before looking off into the horizon.
The man had never married. He had never settled down because no one had understood him, no one until me—he would have married me immediately, he told me quite early on, but he knew we wouldn’t work out. It ached to hear him say this and I vowed to prove him wrong. I was his soulmate, he admitted, and I had come into his life at exactly the right time. That was fate, and who on earth can stand against fate? This, I would later learn, is called love-bombing (his version was special because it was undercut with reliable lashings of meanness). But I was too swept away to notice any of the enormous red flags the man unfurled before my eyes.
Ours was a secret relationship and our universes were very much separate. The man didn’t want to join lives—he had his life and I had mine. In this private, secure space, he explained, there was us. Guard it jealously, he instructed me, it was a special thing we had. That was what was important, not whether I met his friends or whether mine even knew about him. When I tried to broach the topic—I loved my friends and felt horrid saying nothing—the man got angry, so I learned to let it go. But he got angry often. If I were out and didn’t reply to his text messages immediately, if he rang and I didn’t pick up the call because I was at a dinner (if I did pick up, he would chat away, suggesting that I leave the dinner to speak to him), if I told him something he didn’t like (it was hard to know what he would and wouldn’t like), if I planned a trip away with friends, if I disagreed with him. In the early days, he would call me on the phone and go silent, testing me, saying nothing, waiting to see how long I would wait. I never put down the phone. He often stormed out of restaurants, threw tantrums and left me alone in strange cities and gave me the silent treatment for days.
Once he surprised me by turning up in town unexpectedly. I was working on a script with Michael Radford, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter, a great friend. We were adapting one of my novels and it took me 17 minutes to apologize to Michael and leave. I know how long it was because when I called the man and said I had managed to get out, he screamed at me for making him wait so long, slammed the phone on my face and didn’t see me or talk to me for the rest of the day. More than once, getting out of a taxi with the man, cabbies turned to me and said, “What are you doing, love? He doesn’t treat you right.” But they didn’t know him like I did. He was in a bad mood. He was stressed. I made many excuses for the man. He had to shout, he would explain sadly, because I didn’t listen otherwise.
Why did I stay? Honestly, I don’t know. I loved him. I felt alone in the world and the man had helped my grief. I thought he had magic in him and could fix what hurt me, even as he wounded me himself. I wanted to build a life and settle down. But most of all, I wanted to be a mother. Obviously, the man wanted children too—why was I painting him to be a monster? It just wasn’t the right time. It was too soon to settle down, he wasn’t ready, his life was demanding, why was I nagging him? If you’re not happy, just leave.
I turned 30 and then 32 and then 35 and then 37 and through all those years, the right time never appeared. For a while this disjointed relationship, where I maintained my independence and the man essentially remained a bachelor, was fine. I wrote my books, I traveled around the world giving talks, and we would meet every few months. It was exciting and spontaneous, but it was not the life I wanted. I wanted a family. I wanted to have children and raise them. As the years passed, I shrunk into a tiny version of myself. I lost weight, I hid too many secrets from my friends to be close to them in any meaningful way, and felt more and more isolated. I was a stranger in my own life, unrecognizable to myself and unable to ask for help because I didn’t understand that this sort of thing could happen to a woman like me. I was strong-minded and independent and took no prisoners in any other part of my life, so how could I be in a coercive relationship?
If you want children so badly and don’t want to run out of time, go find someone else. Do you even know if you can have children? Why don’t you check? You have plenty of time to have babies, you’re only 39. Maybe next year we can talk about it. “Maybe” doesn’t mean “yes.” Why don’t you freeze your eggs if you’re so worried? Plenty of women have babies in their 40s.
The man was inexhaustible. He gaslit me constantly, put me down whenever he could—every slight a purposeful chip at my sense of self and strength—all the while assuring me that he did want children… Just not yet. Every month I would get my period and sob, a reminder that I would never have the one thing I wanted with all my heart, I would never be a mother.
And then one day, I got my youngest brother a dog. I had promised him a little companion and he, 10 years old at the time, had named the imaginary dog and decided it should be a girl and that it would sleep at the foot of his bed. He waited patiently for me to fulfil my oath. But the problem was, in the time that it took me to fly Coco, a three-month-old Jack Russell terrier with pointy ears, to Pakistan, I had fallen in love with her. It was only two days, but it was love. Pure, life-affirming love. Coco was a little firecracker. She was a barker—yapping tirelessly at other dogs, people, and children, whom she especially hated. She hid bones under my pillow. She whined and whimpered when faced with stairs but tried to fight mastiffs, and she slept nuzzling my face and neck, sighing contentedly as she drifted to sleep.
It was Coco who brought me back to joy and tenderness. She was not a baby, but that didn’t stop me from treating her like one. I took her everywhere, I ate my meals and worked with her curled up on my lap, I spoke to her all day long and recorded every bark and trick on my phone. Coco gave me the roots I so desperately wanted. I could no longer drop everything at a moment’s notice to travel for a talk, nor could I base my schedule around the man and his whims. Together, we made our own little family.
Animals return us to a state of wonder and remind us of innocence. For all her massive personality and snarling charm, Coco relied on me for everything: food, assurance, company, love. Caring for Coco gave me respite from the near-constant cruelty of the man. Because she was vulnerable, she reminded me that we choose how to deal with someone who needs us—we can be kind and loving or we can be merciless and cold. We can resent love or we can adore it.
One afternoon, after a fight with the man, sitting on the floor and wiping away tears, I chanced upon a video of Maya Angelou speaking. “There’s a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine, clean, so that nobody has the right to curse you or treat you badly,” she intoned in that beautiful, warm voice of hers. “Because that may be the place you go to when you meet God… And when the person comes with rude language to you or invasive language to you, you have to be able to say, ‘Back up, not me you don’t. Don’t you know I’m a child of God?’” It shamed me to acknowledge that I had forgotten this about myself. Certain types of men take an independent woman as a challenge. I think the man was testing a theory to both himself and me: you think you’re strong? I can break that idea. I can defeat you. I believe his sense of self depended on it.
I spent my 30s showing him that he couldn’t. He ran out of excuses eventually. We ended things and I was happy. I stopped having debilitating stomach aches, no longer cried; I was liberated and ecstatic. The man couldn’t have that. He came back with more promises and swore he was different. But I didn’t respect him and he knew that and soon the dark glitter behind his mask was not just apparent, but pulsating and bright. People change! He swore to me, believe me! But though he swore marriage and children and kindness, he couldn’t even play the role. His cruelty was magnified, petulant and constant. I left and never spoke to him or saw him again.
Looking back, it feels as though I spent a decade with a stranger, a ghost. I feel angry that I let anyone trespass against me so crudely and ashamed at how long I accepted the man’s appalling behavior. Worst of all, he had robbed me of my time. I was 41. How would I have the children I had dreamt of all my life? I promised myself that I would not let those years be for naught. I would learn from every single one of my mistakes and I would sit in the discomfort of my choices until I fully understood them. The man would not defeat me.
Four months later, I went out for dinner with my best friend and was telling her about my plans to adopt a fourth dog (Coco had puppies, long story). Please don’t, she begged me. How will you ever meet anyone who wants to live with four dogs? I had three already, she reminded me, and they were insane. Behind us, a traveling American sat down. Graham swears he didn’t hear our conversation. When we got married, four months later, as part of his vows he promised me we could adopt a fourth dog. We haven’t had time yet though. We have two babies, two sons. Mir is almost two years old and Caspian is teething. It is a dream. Her tail wagging, Coco kissed Caspian yesterday, delighting me with her excitement to lick his little hands—until I realized he had food on them.
I know that I would not have the life I prayed for were it not for the lessons learned along the way. I learned so much about the humiliation that allows secrets to thrive, about the type of man who needs someone else’s pain to feel alive, about narcissists, whichever kind the man is (malignant, for sure).
I learned how shockingly common this is, how many women are subjected to emotional abuse. I wish we spoke about it more. We might save each other. And if not save, heal each other’s hurt softly, with grace, through sharing our stories without shame.
The Hour of the Wolf: A Memoir is out now from Scribner.