Fatima Bhutto on her abusive relationship: ‘I thought it could never happen to me’ | Autobiography and memoir

Had Fatima Bhutto been left to her own devices, her devastating forthcoming memoir would have been almost entirely about her relationship with her dog, Coco. “I know it sounds nuts,” she laughs. And it’s true that being dog-crazy doesn’t quite track with the public perception of Bhutto as a writer, journalist, activist and member of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty. But the pandemic had forced something of a creative unravelling and when Bhutto took stock, she found herself only really able to write about Coco. Her agent politely suggested her memoir might need something more. A second draft was written, then abandoned.

“Until I thought, what if I just tell the truth? And then it fell out of me – it didn’t even pour, it fell.” In around three weeks Bhutto had reworked her draft and, in the process, revealed a shocking chapter of her life that she’d kept secret from everyone around her.

The resulting book, The Hour of the Wolf, is a raw, vulnerable account of an abusive, decade-long relationship that Bhutto endured, certain in her belief that this was love. It charts the painful realisation that this man (she only refers to him as The Man), who she writes is “unlike anyone that I have ever met: uninhibited, blazingly sure of himself … beautiful, rugged, old-school masculine … a free spirit”, had manipulated her into accepting that flashes of kindness and sporadic adventure were the real deal.

The two met in New York in 2011, when Bhutto was on tour with her sensational family memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. The book caused a major stir in Pakistan and beyond by re-evaluating the Kennedy-esque Bhutto dynasty; Fatima held her aunt, Benazir, partially responsible for her father’s murder. The grief was palpable.

Fatima embarked on a long-distance relationship with The Man, meeting around once a month over a period of 11 years. It suited her; she was often travelling for journalistic assignments or being invited to speak at literary events and festivals across the world. She wrote novels and essays. She was nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction. None of this was really of interest to The Man, who became controlling. His darker side was full of rage; he would treat her with abuse then silence, contempt and scorn. In Bhutto’s description, he would switch from dazzling to demonic without warning. He isolated her from her friends.

Her memoir is a short but astonishing account, articulated in such calm, quiet prose that it makes the burning cruelty of what Bhutto experienced all the more harrowing. Coco still features prominently. But mostly the book is a necessary reminder that being “strong”, accomplished, widely admired and fiercely clever doesn’t offer a protective shield. Frankly, none of these qualities offers a woman immunity from the psychological violence of a coercively controlling man.

“I didn’t really want to do it,” she says of writing about her relationship. “Because I felt ashamed, I felt embarrassed, I did feel all those kinds of things. But I also know that if I’d read something like this, it would have helped me.”

This is the first time Bhutto has spoken publicly about the book. The relationship ended in 2021 when, after years of her expressing a desire to have a family, to put down roots, even going through fertility preservation in Spain, Bhutto finally realised that The Man would never give her what she needed. She was 39. She left him, met her husband, Graham, in 2022 and had two babies within three years.

We are meeting in the Chelsea home of the friend, Allegra, who introduced them. Both women are present, along with Bhutto’s husband, their sons Mir and Caspian, and a babysitter, who is in the process of organising coats, boots and a pushchair for an outing to the park.

This is a home from home – the family largely live abroad but, for security reasons, Bhutto prefers not to specify where. “My toxic trait is that I think I can get through anything,” she says, when I ask, bluntly, how she put up with some of The Man’s most egregious behaviour. Not only did Bhutto endure it alone, but she recalls the delight he took in belittling her in front of an audience, routinely humiliating her in restaurants, in shops, on holiday. (There is one encounter in an electronics shop that I was willing to be the final straw, but their relationship continued for several more years.)

“I have a really high tolerance for stress or discomfort or whatever, and I just, for so long, had told myself this was the same thing.” Irrespective of the highs in their relationship, it’s awful to consider the extent to which Bhutto contorted her feelings or rationalised his. “The only way to survive 11 years of that is to think of it as a love story,” she says, almost with a shrug. “And you think it’s toughening you up for, you know, the great success that awaits you. You think that it’s hardening you up for life. And I did tell myself that. And also, because I didn’t tell anyone else anything, no one turned around to me and said: ‘What are you talking about?’”

Bhutto has always guarded her privacy – which makes her account all the more difficult and exposing – but that she didn’t tell any of her many friends that she had a boyfriend, let alone what their relationship was like, is hard to reconcile. This, of course, was due to the nature of the “love” The Man had manufactured between them: he insisted they had to remain a secret, they weren’t to indulge in “normal” behaviour such as meeting each other’s friends or family, living in the same city, let alone the same home.

“I had read stories and seen things throughout my life about women who’d been put in dangerous situations by men. I just never thought I was one of them because it hadn’t been physical, you know?” (She says this, though in the book she recounts that he once bit her finger so hard, it gave her nerve damage.) “So I just thought that that would never happen to me, that it could never happen. All the while it was happening, and happening, and happening, and I hadn’t connected it. I just thought the cliche was too obvious. You know, that someone wants to break a strong woman?” Bhutto projects poise, even when she’s being wry. “I mean, I was not young enough for this to be excusable.”

Was there a part of her, in the years she spent independently travelling and living all over the world, establishing her career, that thought this relationship was all she deserved?

“That’s the amazing thing,” she says, trying to reconcile her solid self-esteem against what she was put through. “There was no part of me that thought that. It was the opposite. I used to say to him: ‘If I hadn’t had the father I had, you would have damaged me. You know, if I had an absent father, if I had a father that was cruel, or if I had a father that never told me I was clever or smart or strong, you would have done harm to me.’ And he didn’t break me in the end.” On this she is clear. “I felt damaged by him, but I know that the damage he wanted to do was total.”

Bhutto’s father, Murtaza Bhutto, was the eldest son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of Pakistan People’s party (PPP) and prime minister of the country in the 1970s. The story of the Bhuttos is in many ways the story of Pakistan. Their family history is the nation’s history, and it is under the weight of immense scrutiny and violence that Fatima has lived her whole life.

Her grandfather Zulfikar was overthrown by a military coup and executed in 1979, in circumstances that sent shockwaves around the world. Three years later his youngest son, Shahnawaz Bhutto, a young radical fighting to overthrow the military dictatorship that killed his father, was found dead in Nice at 26 years old. The family have long believed he was poisoned.

Fatima was born in 1982, and spent her early years in her grandfather’s vast Karachi residence. She was close to her father, who retained sole parental custody after divorcing her mother when she was a toddler. After Shahnawaz’s death, the two of them spent the rest of her childhood living together – in exile – in Syria. Plainly, Fatima adored him and wrote Songs of Blood and Sword largely as a righteous biography of her father.

“This will sound disjointed,” she begins, “because this is the first time I’m thinking about it out loud. But I don’t think I had properly – to use a word that I find oof – ‘healed’ from my life, really. Not until after this relationship, because so much of what had traumatised me had been part of my life. The fear I had growing up really played in beautifully to this whole thing [with The Man]. The need for secrets? I understood that because I have had to live like that, even until now.” Being a Bhutto comes with significant baggage around security, which may partly explain why Fatima has lived such a peripatetic existence.

She recalls being told to pack a bag by her father and being whisked “on an adventure” countless times, upping and leaving with a moment’s notice. Of being really chatty as a young girl on the phone and then being told by her father not to talk to those calling the house. Not to give away any detail of where they were. “I adored my father because he adored me,” she says. “He would make it fun, so it wasn’t like you were holed up in some scary place. But you still understand, something’s not right.”

Political activism was a central tenet of family life, with all its associated danger. “The adults in my family never really hid anything from us. They didn’t ever say, ‘leave the room, children, because we have to talk about something’. That’s just how they talked.”

“I used to struggle with it because my father sometimes would say things like, ‘You know, when they kill me …’. And when I was much younger, I’d get really upset at these family lunches where they casually talked like that. He would never treat it as …” She pauses. “There was never any ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean that.’ That’s just how it was.”

Fatima and her father returned to Karachi in 1993. By then her aunt Benazir had assumed the role as head of the PPP and, at 35, served as the world’s youngest female prime minister, between 1988 to 1990. Despite a bitter feud with her brother about her right to lead the party, Benazir began her second term in 1993. Murtaza publicly accused his sister and her husband of political corruption and revived a breakaway faction of the PPP. Three years later, Murtaza was dead, killed by Karachi police in a brutal shoot-out outside the family home. Fatima was 14.

Fatima was left with her stepmother Ghinwa and her baby brother, Zulfikar Jr. For a while, the siblings lived secretly in Syria, for their own safety. “Again, they didn’t hide any of the stuff from us,” she says, trying to explain a childhood layered with contradictions, a collision of fear, privilege, violence and grief. “It was: ‘We’re sending you to Damascus on a flight at midnight. Don’t tell anyone that you’re going. Yes, keep the plan to see your friends tomorrow, nothing out of the ordinary, but you’re going to be gone by midnight.’ And so I asked: ‘Why do we have to go to Damascus?’ And I was told: ‘Well, we don’t know if they’re going to kill the children next.’” Bhutto recounts all of this flatly matter of fact. “Whether they intended to or not, they definitely traumatised us in this way.”

In 2007, Benazir was assassinated on the campaign trail while fighting to win her third term in office. Fatima bears a striking resemblance to her aunt. Their relationship was complicated, especially given the circumstances of her father’s death, but to this day the Bhutto family’s legacy can be seen in Pakistan; Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir’s widely reviled husband, is sitting his second term as president, and has assumed co-chairmanship of the PPP with his son, Bilawal.

Fatima remains deeply politicised. “It’s made me uncomfortable around power though, rather than craving it,” she explains. “I’m very well aware of the dangers of power. I’m not stupid enough to think, ‘Oh, if I went into politics, I’d be different’. I know no one is different.”

The question of whether she would follow in the family tradition receded a long time ago. But the urge to do something worthwhile still remains.

“There are moments when I feel in a rage about the world, that I think maybe there is a duty to be more involved, because maybe you can’t do anything from outside. Maybe you can’t do anything from writing. But there’s no appeal for me. I never think, ‘Oh, what I’d like right now is to surrender what dregs I have of privacy’. No.”

A passing glance at her writing and social media accounts for the past two years and more shows Bhutto to have been almost completely dedicated to Gaza, amplifying and giving voice to the horrors inflicted on Palestinians. She has continued this work through two pregnancies, culminating in the blistering book of essays she edited, Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, which was published last October.

“I couldn’t help thinking throughout the experience that, you know, when I was in labour, I was in a hospital. I had anaesthesia, I had an epidural, I had doctors, I wasn’t being bombed. I could reliably be left there and no one would have to worry for my safety.”

Bhutto has processed so much, in such a short time span, I wonder how she’s managed to stay sane and keep her composure. “You’ve got to, I don’t know, exist in this otherworldly kind of space where this isn’t happening.” “This” being anything from documenting Israeli war crimes to excavating her own personal history, all the while with a baby on her hip, husband and dogs in tow.

“I thought I was a fairly compassionate, sensitive person beforehand, but it just kind of rips you open in a new way.”