‘The hardest thing is to forgive yourself’: actor Samantha Morton and writer Jenni Fagan on the trauma of growing up in care

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, Ootlin, 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, The Panopticon (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 Tony Grisoni, the TV film The Unloved (2009), about a girl growing up in a care home, which drew an audience of 2 million. In 2023, she completed an eerily lyrical reverie of an album, Daffodils & Dirt, her songs growing out of her past with an abusive father and as a ward of state. Earlier this year, she dedicated her Bafta fellowship to “kids in care” and told them: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Now Morton wishes to alert us, in her likably forthcoming way, to her sense of herself as a free-range talker. She explains that, though recovered from a potentially catastrophic stroke at 30, she lives with “dysfluency” – and might hijack our conversation or go off on a verbal hike without warning. But about Fagan’s memoir she is movingly spot-on: “When I read Jenni’s book, I felt as if we were twins. I didn’t realise there was another human being who had had an almost identical childhood to mine, and not only survived but become formidable against the odds. The similarities between us are bizarre; it was like when you do a butterfly drawing at school, then fold it – there is Jenni in Scotland and there is Sam in Nottingham… and we’re the same age.” “I’m a bit older,” says Fagan. “I’m still 46,” says Morton. “I’m 47,” Fagan says.

Both women spent years in children’s homes and foster care. Morton had 12 foster placements and Fagan 27 by the time she was 16 (with two unsuccessful adoption placements). Each had mothers who suffered poor mental health. Fagan never knew hers, whereas Morton’s mother, who died in 2017, is a known presence in her story. Morton’s father was intermittently violent and spent spells in prison. Both Fagan and Morton suffered abuse, got into drugs for a while, and had periods of homelessness.

That’s a beautiful image – the butterfly drawing, I say. “It’s gorgeous,” says Fagan, softly. I am struck by the difference between their voices: Fagan’s is gentle, Scottish and, ironically, reassuring – as if she had never suffered, as if consolation had always been at hand. Morton’s voice is brittle, higher-pitched and compelling – you understand why she would stand out in an audition: there is urgency there; you need to hear what she has to say. She insists that Fagan’s book transcends its subject: “It doesn’t sit in the category of a kids-in-care memoir because it is extraordinarily spiritual in its own way – it takes you somewhere else. So, regardless of the subject, which is special, important, relevant and necessary, the writing itself is so beautiful.” (Ootlin, by the way, translated from the Scottish vernacular, means someone who “never belonged, an outsider who did not want to be in”.)

Fagan is sitting there, looking awkward and gratified with her back very straight, like a quiet queen, in the face of this torrent of approval. “I feel a bit weepy,” she says. Listening to them, I say, so do I, adding: we are not having any weeping here. Instead, I want to know whether the book was as compulsive to write as it is to read? Apparently, it was. Fagan would write for 12- or 16-hour stretches and “leave it only for short periods. I’d go over and over it and feel like I was in the space I was creating”. The book was completed during the pandemic but she began it 20 years earlier – as a suicide note.

“I first wrote it in my early 20s. I was trying to write a suicide note, but it seemed very short and there weren’t many people to read it. I thought: is that it? That’s not very much to leave…” She kept on writing. “I put the book in a suitcase and didn’t look at it again for another 20 years.” She had resisted opening that suitcase because she knew – and Morton agrees – there is something visceral about revisiting a traumatic past. Fagan understood that her decision to “fully feel all of it in chronological order” was likely to “create physical ill health”. When you process trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk’s bestseller has it: the body keeps score. And she did become unwell during the pandemic – she even thought she might die. “Writing this book is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” she says.

Ootlin begins before the beginning. Fagan imagines herself pre-birth: her mother was traumatised, suffering from psychosis. Fagan vividly describes the Victorian psychiatric hospital in which she was born, picturing it with a crescent moon above it – describing doctors, noise and her unborn self: “I was so far from wanted. Still, I wasn’t leaving… I came from the underworld but would say nothing of what went on there.” She doesn’t shy away from the gothic in her tour de force of an opening. And she has a bravado that never fails her. In passing, she notes: “One of my great-grandmothers had been the most famous drunk in Glasgow.” (Her father was an absentee ex-boyfriend of her mother’s, also rumoured to have a drink problem. The hospital authorities’ verdict was that he was “no use to anyone”.) But severance was to be immediate. Her mother was too ill to be a mother: “I was out in the world without her on the very first day I was born.”

Halfway into our conversation, Morton offers a parallel tale. “My mum was going to abort me, but I kicked for the first time when she was actually on the operating table and they were putting the cannula in. Dad didn’t want her to do it. And the point was that I kicked, and that was the first time she went: ‘I’m not going through with the abortion.’ I was always a fighter, I wanted to be here.”

And you are a fighter too, Jenni? “Yup,” she says.

They each record a will to live in extremis. What image first comes to mind when they think of their childhoods? Morton replies unhesitatingly – and I note the uncharacteristic nothing-further-to-add brevity of her response: “My dad beating me.” For Fagan, more loquaciously, it is Edinburgh’s “caravan park – a strange space” in which she lived for six years and its “smell of generational poverty” and sense of “a cycle of despair continued”. That image is fused with the image of the old Bilston Glen pit, which became the city dump: “You weren’t allowed in there, you had to sneak past the tractors. There was something magical but scary and horrid about it: you’d see people’s old prescriptions, somebody’s shoes – all the rubbish of life in there.” And that dump is where she recalls her long-ago self: “feeling like the most unexotic, bare, raw-to-the-bone version of a child”.

Ootlin has a huge cast of characters, some of whom seem to have stepped out of an abusive fairytale; women who should never have been entrusted to look after children. No wonder Fagan, as she reveals, looked to fairytales for the rules of life. And, as though in a shapeshifting story, her first name kept being changed – as if no one could be bothered to help fix her identity. But not all her foster parents were bad news. One, although not ideal – in violent clashes with her husband – Fagan describes as a “mum kind of mum” because, along with her ever-flowing supply of Lucozade she gave Fagan “pure love and didn’t want anything back from it”. This mum sheds sunlight on the story until Fagan is, against her will, moved on. There was sometimes a reason to be expelled: usually petty, sometimes mysterious, often inexplicable. In the book she records this exchange with a social worker:

“This current family are a bit like tomato soup, Jenni, and you are ice-cream.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Both are nice but they don’t go together.”

“Kids know when they are devalued,” she comments now, “not seen as the person they are. The harm is that they then view themselves that way.” In her book she goes further: “I suffered from severe anxiety and a devastating loss of self that came from lifelong brainwashing telling me I was the problem.” The worst rejection was after her suicide attempt aged 12 – after she was raped at the same age. Recovering in hospital, a kind nurse is obliged to tell Fagan that her adoptive mother will not be visiting, or taking her back, on the grounds that she did not want to “encourage the behaviour”. You look at sweet, ordinary black-and-white photos of Jenni growing up in the book and a lurching adjustment has to be made: a child can be in hell yet forced to smile for the camera.

* * *

Morton also had a bewildering miscellany of foster parents: “I had born-again Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, black, white, people who did not speak very good English, I had the absolute gamut… But I could never be fostered for more than two years at a time because my dad owned the rights to me – I make it sound like a movie script,” she laughs. “But then, after the Children’s Act of 1989, I was made a ward of court. I was never going to live with my dad because he was so unwell.”

If they were to pool their experiences, what quality would they say foster parents need most? “Love,” Morton says immediately, with an upward tilt of the voice, like a small shrug. “Consistency,” Fagan adds, more levelly. “That you’re not going to get kicked out because you did something wrong on a Tuesday.” She adds: “The thing we miss about children in care is that they are just children. If only we could lead with that.”

They see today’s care system as “corrupt” and “broken”. Figures from Ofsted’s annual reports show the number of places in council-run children’s homes fell from around 3,250 in 2012 to 2,087 in 2023. But over the past eight years, the number of children in privately run homes has risen by 63%. Both women lament privatisation. Morton says: “Times have changed, but not for the better. After 14 years of austerity, the system is not fit for purpose. It wasn’t fit before but should certainly never have been privatised: the minute you adopt the American model, you’re monetising children’s trauma and grief. Anyone can set up a private children’s home now. And Ofsted are not monitoring some of these homes.”

Fagan points out that the system is not broken only for the children: “Foster carers need more investment. They are often left without contact, training or support from social work departments. That’s why people who should never have been allowed to become carers can sometimes navigate the system.” In terms of what the system needs, she is unambiguous: “If you know it’s not good enough for your child, it is not good enough for a child in care.”

After the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, both women were able to access their files from the 1980s. Fagan stumbled across statements from social workers such as: “We don’t have any expectation that the child will have intelligence.” Or: “We have deep concerns that the child will be a thief.” She pauses. “I was four at the time.” I am wondering now whether the childhood experience of moving from one alien household to the next made it harder to settle as an adult? Both women are mothers: Fagan has a son and is based in Edinburgh. Morton has three children in Derbyshire.

“My profession is like being in a circus,” Morton says, “I live out of a suitcase. I love it. But is that part of my spirit? Or is it because of my conditioning of moving around as a kid? Who knows? In my spirit I’ll always be a traveller.” Fagan admits: “I struggle with this a lot. I’ve lived in 47 places now. In the last 12 years I’ve moved 10 or 11 times. I feel at home in certain books and in certain friendships, but there is no actual place I think of as home. When I write, I feel I am visiting my oldest home. I get to go to a place that never turned me away.”

Fagan left school at 15 without any qualifications, enrolled on a television and film course at 18, wrote her first short story at 21. She later went to university and gained a BA in creative writing, and was later taught by Andrew Motion for an MA at Royal Holloway in London. The novelist Ali Smith was one of her earliest champions; she described herself as “reeling” after reading Panopticon. For Morton, too, words were a “salvation”. Both women were avid readers. Morton used to help herself to crappy pens from the local bookie’s to scribble: “I was the hero of my own story, even writing on a napkin. Maybe it was narcissism, but it made me feel important.” Fagan insists: “It’s not narcissism. What you write is an anchor – it allows you to stay put.”

Listening back to our conversation, I am amazed at how often questions about language surface, and recognise how much it matters to both women that words should not let them down. But finding the right words is not always easy, even if it is what Fagan does brilliantly in the book. “The word ‘care’ is complicated,” they suggest. They scorn euphemisms that have blown in more recently: children in care are now “looked-after children”, which Morton finds “ridiculous”, and there are now “corporate parents”. Fagan was recently asked by a young person growing up in the system: “Why don’t you identify as care experienced?” She replied: “I would not describe what I grew up with as an ‘experience’. Disney World is an experience. People don’t describe themselves as ‘childhood experienced’.”

* * *

When I first use the word “trauma” a look passes between them: complicit, friendly, illegible. Trauma, I suggest, tends to be recognised only in retrospect. How have they survived their trauma? Morton declares she was born with a positive temperament yet was always “removed from a situation”. Keeping yourself at a distance is, they agree, a natural survival mechanism. But you cannot rely on it. Morton recounts how, when her mother died of lung cancer, distance suddenly disappeared and trauma came crashing through the barriers. “I was her palliative carer. It was very painful – I was alone with her and the priest came in and she died in my arms and it was – how can I put it…” She tries to explain how the past came close: “You might know it factually, but to feel it truly, that’s a different thing.”

What do they do with the anger I assume them to feel? Fagan sees anger as “a form of knowledge” and adds: “As you get older and see more of the world, it sharpens in a way that is, hopefully, more eloquent and useful.” Morton says: “I was angry from the ages of 12 to 16 and thought: if I hold on to this anger, I’m going to get sick. Anger is like a disease. But it can be healthy, provided you know how to work with it. I didn’t want to lose it completely and so, yes, I’m angry about the abuse of children and the fact that it is still legal to hit children in England and that children are let down by social media companies. And I’m angry about the monetisation of trauma. I’m angry, but in a way that doesn’t consume me.”

We go on to talk about the “kindness of strangers” (to borrow Tennessee Williams’s phrase). Fagan and Morton will not let misery win over kindness. They champion all the people who made a difference. Morton says that at the home where she suffered abuse, the Red Tiles children’s home in Bulwell, Nottingham, the majority of social workers were “fantastic”. And Fagan singles out Billy, a social worker who took her to the zoo, and her teacher, Mrs Kite, who told the class: “I feel sure one day I’m going to walk into a shop and buy a book with Jenni Fagan’s name on the cover.” Her words were a gift: “I held on to them… when I was up in front of a children’s court [charged for absconding from a children’s home and wasting police resources] and they told me I’d end up going to prison…” She goes on to express “eternal gratitude” to “every person who has been nice to me and did not require anything from me”.

To be grateful is one thing, to forgive another. Is it possible to forgive cruelty and the parents who did not know how to be parents? Fagan has been working on this with “an amazing shaman, Cláudia Goncalves” in Edinburgh. “I’ve said to her: ‘I’m really struggling with forgiveness.’ A friend told me he’d forgiven everybody, and after that I stopped speaking to him.” And now she arrives at the crux of it: “I don’t think it is my job to have to forgive. Some of these people were entities I still don’t understand.”

Related: ‘This book kept me alive’: Jenni Fagan on writing a memoir of her childhood in care

Fagan has found a powerful way to remove the sting: “What’s important is to be able to disconnect a stranger’s journey from your own. I was 16 when I realised: anyone could have been treated the way I was. It wasn’t about me, it was about them.” She has learned to look away, to lean towards the light. She sees Morton’s “extraordinary” talent as a manifestation of light. Fagan tells her readers: “Always look for beauty, especially in the hardest moments.” This is not sentimental, it is an imperative. Her hope is that her book will be a “lighthouse”, that it will reach the people who need it.

“But ultimately,” – Morton is returning to the question of forgiveness – “it’s about loving yourself – and I don’t mean in a narcissistic fashion. It’s about not hating yourself because of the things that have happened to you. Forgiving others is easy because you were part of their whirlwind – they were the tornado you just got caught up in it. But the hardest thing is to forgive yourself.”

“And forgiving yourself – that’s a radical act, a political act,” Fagan says, “to choose to learn to care for yourself properly.” She allows the word “care” its real meaning. And they stand up. “Let’s have a hug,” Morton says.

• Jenni Fagan’s memoir, Ootlin, is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99) on 22 August. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• Samantha Morton’s album Daffodils & Dirt is out now on XL Recordings

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html