About how you long to give your growing kid freedom while somehow, impossibly, keeping them perfectly safe. About how a mother is her baby’s captor and prisoner, sometimes both at the same time. About what a huge gap separates an adult and a small child, with only curiosity, humour and love to bridge it. Only when I got the idea for Room did I realise that I had three and a half years’ worth of things to say. I was a youngest-of-eight who had never had a job that required set hours or responsibility, and motherhood broke and remade me. From day one – or middle-of-the-night one, rather – I found child-rearing fascinating. To tone down some of the horror, and distance Jack’s story from Felix’s, I made him a well-nourished only child, the captor a stranger rather than his ma’s father, their home a locked shed with a skylight and ventilation somewhere in the US.īut the novel really started years earlier, when I gave birth to the first of our two kids. By the time I parked, and grabbed a napkin to scribble down my thoughts, I knew my novel had to be from the child’s point of view, would begin on his fifth birthday and be split into two halves by the escape, and would be called (in an echo of womb) Room. I got the notion to write Room in 2008 when I was driving to a book event and mulling over a news story from a few days before about a five-year-old called Felix Fritzl, rescued from the Austrian dungeon where his mother had raised him and his siblings.
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