Kathryn Heyman is a successful writer, novelist, scriptwriter, teacher. She speaks with rounded vowels, has straight teeth and expensive hair. In publicity shots she looks straight into the camera, exuding middle-class confidence.

It wasn’t always like this.

Kathryn Heyman once had another name, and things happened to her that she has never spoken about. Although in her fiction there has often been a sense of a phantom story, in her most recent novel, Storm and Grace, a forensic analysis of a controlling relationship between a man and a woman, the story consistently sheeted through. It was female fury.

Fury (Allen & Unwin) is memoir in which Heyman uses her own fury to navigate, sound, survey and finally reflect male sexuality in a world where female means prey. She uses real names. Heyman grew up in a small...