Writing Emotional Abuse

Second novel & the importance of naming violence

If ever you’ve written a book, or if ever you find yourself writing a book, I can guarantee that there will be one question – once you’ve made your way through all the stages of drafting, writing, editing, redrafting, polishing – that will lodge itself in your mind for a long time after all of that work is done. The question: why should anybody care?

This story that you’ve crafted and moulded, your particular take on an experience or set of experiences, that you’ve decided to put out into the world, to take up precious ink and paper and attention. You will find yourself asking why on earth it should matter.

There is an answer to that question, and if you have the clarity and the courage, you’ll find it. It matters because there were once a set of conflicts and questions that lodged themselves so firmly in your mind that you didn’t know how to carry on with your daily life without creating characters and worlds and stories through which to live them out. You didn’t know how to understand the world without living inside those questions for, at the very least, as long as it took to get to the end of that novel.

Lots of you know already my first book was about sexual violence: a single, traumatic event that shatters a life apart. My second book, The Orange Room, is about a different kind of violence. Slow, more subtle, and more insidious: the kind that makes a person question her sense of self, her sense of reality, and her ability to exist safely in the world.

Lots of you will also know that I wrote my first novel because I was trying to make sense of my own experience of sexual assault, which I’d spent many years not speaking about. When I experienced sexual violence, it was so hard for me to name because my perception of what had happened to me had been so heavily influenced by the person who inflicted that violence upon me. The violence was not just in the act, it was in the story that was told: before, during and after. It was a story that erased the violence from this encounter, and made it impossible for me to see my own experience clearly. I couldn’t trust my intuition and I couldn’t trust my body, not then, and not for many years afterwards.

Naming, putting language to my experience, was how I found my way back to myself. But it took more a novel’s worth. I found, once I had finished my first novel, that I needed to write the story again, in a different way. I needed to write about the stories around that single act of violence, about the erosion of my sense of reality which made it impossible for me to see clearly what had happened to me, about how gestures of what looked like generosity — affection and vulnerability and touch — were in fact functioning as a means of control. I needed to write about the violence that was imperceptible.

Emotional abuse is very difficult to write. On a practical level, it’s difficult, because nothing really seems to be happening. A person who is experiencing emotional abuse will find that everything is just below the surface of what is visible, what might accurately and recognisably be called violence. Emotional abuse is about slowly eroding a person’s confidence, a person’s sense of reality, their right to take up space in the world. It can be so small it is almost imperceptible, but over time, this kind of insidious, creeping abuse can leave a person totally unmoored and isolated, feeling lost and unloved, and entirely without agency, so that really, by this point, physical violence isn’t even really necessary in order to maintain control.

In my novel, I wrote about a woman whose confidence is already shaken when she enters into a relationship that promises to sweep her up, resolve all her fears and tend to her vulnerabilities. And to begin with, she does feel seen, she does feel cared for. The man she falls for is perceptive and socially intelligent, who is able to observe clearly the things that people need and to provide them just at the right moment. And there’s a power in this, a power, which — once he starts to fear that she might also begin to see him properly: his flaws, his weaknesses and vulnerabilities — he begins to manipulate.

All the things that he loved about her begin to be the things that he seems to despise. She begins to feel that she can’t do anything right, and when she tries to address what is happening, he flips the narrative: it’s her who’s the problem, it’s her who is causing the harm, because she has brought all the baggage from her past and laid it at his feet.

I always pulled away from more explosive kinds of physical violence in this book because I wanted to examine the mechanics of how, precisely it is possible that a person can find themselves entirely imprisoned in a relationship when there are no physical barriers to them leaving. What violence has to be done to a person’s self, their sense of reality, that they feel unable to free themselves from bonds that do not even physically exist?

It matters so much to me to be able to write about this topic, and particularly to write about it in the novel form, which, I think, is unique in its ability to hold many conflicting truths all at once. It matters because it is so important to name the forces and dynamics and power structures that shape us: particularly those which are buried, which never quite seem to surface. We live in an era where our ability to discern what is true and what is real is highly compromised: by our politicians, by social media, by technology. It is so important to try to uncover truths, to express the realities of our experience, however insignificant or inconsequential they may seem to other people.

In the time that has passed since I wrote my first novel, conversations around sexual violence have changed, it is possible to talk about these topics with less shame, less fear of being disbelieved. But the work isn’t done, many of those old, damaging power dynamics have just been pushed further out of sight, woven more tightly and imperceptibly into our interactions, our exchanges of power, slipping past unnamed. That’s why it matters to bring them into the light, to name them.

Something I’ve realised, over the course of finishing these two novels, and of writing a third book, is that we don’t just name things once. We need to keep on naming them, over and again. So that’s what I’m doing, until the words are worn and tired and I don’t need them anymore.