Kathryn Bonella on how she helped Schapelle find her voice
The Australian author entrusted by Schapelle Corby to tell her story reveals how the pair first made contact just six months into Corby’s 20-year sentence. Kathryn Bonella says despite her predicament, Corby “had me laughing with her quick wit”.
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Six months after being sentenced to 20-years in jail, Schapelle started working on her autobiography. She wanted a voice.
Her book was it. Sitting together on the Hotel K visiting room floor, inmates having sex all around us, we did interview, day after day.
Incredibly, she often had me laughing with her quick wit. She cried a lot too.
When ‘My Story’ was released in 2006, her story was still exploding all around her. In 2008 she sank. All hope gone, she was mentally ill and suicidal.
I saw her virtually unable to speak and staring at cracks in a hospital wall. Her sibling Mercedes was told by a psychiatrist that she may never get her old sister back.
In 2014, on the day of her release from Kerobokan, we sat chatting in a Bali villa with a sparkling pool in front of us.
But she felt far from free.
READ THE EXPLOSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SCHAPELLE CORBY HERE
She was focused on the blocked toilet in her cell, and with choppers flying above and a media scrum at the front gate, she said it still felt like jail — just more luxurious.
She spent much of those first three weeks sitting fully clothed in a bath.
Confinement felt safe and normal — after living in a cramped cell, and often spending nights huddled in the jail’s roof cavity.
Returning home in 2017, she was facing mental demons, and also public scrutiny every time she went out. But she was happy to back in the bosom of her family and with the love or her life, Ben, just a video chat away in Bali.
This time around we did our interviews at beachfront cafes.
That quick wit was back, seeing the funny, absurd side in everyday moments, but she possessed a deep trauma, that came out as she talked.
She’s complex; strong headed, feisty, and determined, sometimes deeply philosophical, and nowadays an avid reader.
She also loves a beer and a practical joke.
She can also be vulnerable, timid, and little girl like. But she’s sharp as a tack.
She knew what she wanted to say in her book and despite it sometimes being a struggle to go back to dark places, she did so to give readers a searing portrait of the years since 2006.