Cynthia Banham’s revelation (The Sydney Morning Herald)
The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 2018
For a long time, Cynthia Banham could not speak about the plane crash. Even now, after 11 years, her voice catches. "I somehow fell out of that burning aircraft," she says. "If I hadn't, I would have died. I was nearly dead anyway."
Banham and I are drinking coffee on a warm Sydney morning. On the table between us lies A Certain Light, the book publishers started urging her to write almost as soon as she emerged from the wreckage. She says she abandoned tentative earlier attempts to tell her story because she found the process too painful. It wasn't easy this time, either. At her desk, she listened to music in an attempt to lessen her anxiety. "My heart was going crazy in my chest as I sat there at night," she says. But once the words started to flow, she knew writing the book was the right thing to do. It felt like "a kind of liberation".
