On the Craft of Writing a Claustrophobic Novel
When I decided to take my experience of being bed-bound for several months with Long Covid as a starting point for a novel, I knew I was creating an enormous narrative challenge for myself.
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My experience of chronic sickness had been, in some ways, the most explosive and revelatory of my life. But it also consisted of long hours spent in bed; days and nights that seemed to lose all sense of time and meaning. How to create a sense of being trapped, without making the character or story feel stagnant or too claustrophobic? Was it possible to come up with a story about being stuck that was still a page-turner? The time I spent sick in bed had felt like Groundhog Day, but disentangling myself from it felt part detective story, part jailbreak as I began to realize how bound up both body and mind, past and present, had become in my illness. Could I find a way of building a story and cast that conveyed all this richness and feed it through a gripping story?
I started by making Vita, my narrator, as trapped and submerged as possible. I stuck her not just in bed, but in a basement flat, her only view of the outside world through a sunken window where she looks out at the shoes of people passing by. When the novel starts, she has already been in bed for 126 days, tossing and turning with muscle pains and migraines, in and out of a semi-hallucinatory state of pain and despair that she calls The Pit. And she is more or less alone: Her fiancé works long hours, leaving Vita in the company only of her fantail goldfish, Whitney Houston, who swims round and round the bowl at the end of her bed, also a victim to her confinement and circular existence.
With Vita constricted geographically, I began to build layers in space and time. I created an upstairs apartment with two neighbours, a potential love interest for Vita and a charismatic old lady who’s own tragic past will have a huge effect on Vita’s. I developed a backstory for Vita that showed just how alive and dynamic she’d been in her recent past: whizzing around Italy on a vespa, galloping down windy beaches on donkeys with her sister Gracie who is mysteriously absent in the present timeline and around whom a dramatic narrative is beginning to unlock. In other words, I found ways of injecting dynamic scenes and storylines, while losing little of the claustrophobia and stasis of Vita’s present circumstances.
Then I took my biggest narrative risk of all: I exploded both time and space with the introduction of a visitor from sixteenth century Italy. A vain, comedic ghost called Luigi da Porto, who arrives from pre-Shakespearean times with a bone to pick with Vita, strong views on her love life, and his own historical heartbreak with which he has yet to come to terms.
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Having filled Vita’s world with intrigue, conflict, potential romance, and just enough comedy and magic realism to convey the surrealness and gallows humor of chronic illness, I just needed a trigger event, a way of introducing the upstairs neighbors into the story. Vita spends most of her day flat on her back staring up at the ceiling. So, I thought, what if there is a flood? What if water starts dripping through from their world into hers, and she has to get out of bed to address it? With the help of my meddling ghost, Luigi, I could then force her up the stairs and into a new set of dynamics and problems.
The confinement of women who are either sick, mad, or deemed to be in some ways breaking from social norms (self-imposed or otherwise) has been a running theme in literature. Think of the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre; the bed-bound narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short masterpiece, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Jane Graham in The L-Shaped Room who, dispatched from her middle class life in 1960 for the sin of getting pregnant outside marriage hides in the dingy upstairs room of boarding house; and, more recently, the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation who, dosed up with grief, despair and prescription medication, attempts to sleep through an entire year.
This is no coincidence. The experience of being a woman with a chronic illness revealed to me how black-and-white thinking is around women and health, both in the medical establishment and beyond. How quickly the nuance of the mind-body connection collapses into aspersions that her symptoms are “all in her head.” How often the establishment intimates these kinds of conditions are born of neuroses and are best kept hidden away, rather than letting its messy, challenging reality into the open air. For generations, women in such positions have either been shut up or shut away.
But the idea of confinement actually becoming a story of liberation is too easy, too neat. Most people do not experience chronic illness or some kind of enforced rupture from their lives and escape both unscathed and enriched. So I made sure that Vita’s story, while trending towards self-discovery and release, is not too smooth and final.
Every reader has their own version of The Pit. Being human means experiencing some of the feelings of being stuck, trapped, riddled with doubt and despair that gets switched up during a period of sickness. Part of recovery is about understanding that the period of confinement may be over, but that your own frailty accompanies you out of the front door when you can finally walk free. Writing a claustrophobic novel that you want to read is about taking bold creative steps to ventilate your novel while staying true to the nightmarish feeling of the walls closing in.
Check out Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Her here:
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