Graham Caveney

This is a coming-of-age memoir focused on adolescent sexual abuse and its aftermath, set in 70s and 80s, a northern England working class neighborhood, and the music and culture of those decades. The cultural markers, especially the pop music ones, are humorous and sometimes viciously rendered for how they contributed to a climate of adult permissiveness and adolescent sexual confusion. A Catholic school's abusive manipulative headmaster, much-beloved and respected in the community, is the antagonist, a creepily-wrought villain--or is the antagonist the narrator's still-perplexed feelings and residual anger? The narrator offers much meta-food for thought. Though formally interesting in its juggernaught handling of details (each chapter titled "Next") and courageous and smartly written, the story is heavy reading despite truly funny episodes. The book's heaviness lies in its tone of residual petulance, although how could any reader who is truly listening demand its tone to be joyful?… (mehr)

“Agoraphobia is a fundamentalist form of belief. If it was a religion I would be scared of it. Agoraphobes are zealots, crazed clairvoyants; we can predict the future. Terrifying things will happen when we go out, because terrifying things always happen when we go out. Just wait and see.”

Graham Caveney’s memoir is an unconventional one. It is brief, aphoristic, and surprisingly funny at times. It seems to deal with others more than himself. It is short on autobiographical details and even facts about the causes of and treatment for agoraphobia, and longer on the history of the condition, famous creative individuals who suffered from it, and its representation in the visual arts, film, and literature. Ford Madox Ford, Emily Dickinson, Shirley Jackson, and Edvard Munch are a few of the famous agoraphobes Caveney writes about, and Miss Havisham and Boo Radley are among the many fictional characters who also make an appearance in the book.

Caveney doesn’t focus much on biological aspects of the phobia, beyond stating that the internal clocks of agoraphobics are damaged. Receptors that are supposed to respond to the external world don’t work properly, and the malfunctions impact hormone production, brainwave activity, eating and sleeping patterns, and more. According to him, a single event typically gets the ball rolling, and once rolling, the phobia is mightily resistant to treatment. In fact, in the late 1960s and early 70s, modified lobotomies were performed on those with intractable agoraphobia. It was apparently easier to desensitize an agoraphobe once part of his prefrontal cortex was destroyed.

The condition was observed in antiquity by Hippocrates, but it came to the fore in the nineteenth century when all manner of phobias, neuroses, and psychoses were being catalogued by clinicians. In 1871, German neurologist Karl Westphal coined the term “agoraphobia” for the fear of large, open spaces. It was initially considered a phobia that primarily afflicted men, but Caveney says that as many as two-thirds of today’s agoraphobic patients are female. Freud was even a sufferer as a young man and opined that “the agoraphobic is always afraid of his impulses in connection with temptations aroused in him by meeting people on the street . . . In his phobia he makes a displacement and is now afraid of an external situation.” Some nineteenth-century clinicians linked the emergence of agoraphobia to industrialization and urbanization.

The details the author provides about his own life are disappointingly limited and vague. He appears to be aware of this, acknowledging that “agoraphobia insists it has always been there. It has a scorched-earth policy towards personal history.” The author recalls walks in nature with his father but admits that “the more pastoral aspects” of his early life don’t easily come to mind. Born in Lancashire to working-class parents who doted on him, in time he became a puzzle to them. Looking back, he sees himself as a sickly, awkward child. Since he had no siblings, he did not learn to negotiate for personal space and was “unschooled in [resolving] boundary disputes”. Quiet and retiring, he liked being indoors rather than outside and preferred reading over engaging with other children, whom he disliked. Intellectually gifted, he won a place at a Roman Catholic grammar school. There, as a young teenager, he was groomed and sexually abused for two years by the priest/headmaster of the school. It’s an experience that obviously contributed to his developing agoraphobia.

Caveney’s agoraphobia grew out of a panic attack he experienced at age 19 while riding by coach to Warwick University, where he was a student. He could not escape the vehicle when panic suddenly gripped him. The bus made a scheduled stop in Manchester, and Caveney sobbed for 20 minutes in a bathroom cubicle, believing something terrible had happened.

Back at school after that episode he turned down offers of rides and outings; motorways had now become a source of fear. He also had more panic attacks. Caveney says it’s not panic attacks themselves that lead to agoraphobia: “The fear of them recurring does. Agoraphobia is a meta-fear, a pre-emptive strike against the fear yet to come.” The fear of going out isn’t the problem either; rather, it’s the “fear of something dreadful happening whilst being out.” By age 20, Caveney’s fear of travel broadened to include bridges, parks and open ground. He routinely made detours to avoid them. At the time of writing, Caveney hadn’t been on a motorway for 36 years.

By age 21, the author’s world had shrunk. He returned from university to his childhood home, confining himself to his bedroom. Eventually—the details are unclear—he seems to have moved out of the house. (How he managed to form a relationship with his partner, Emma, and how he gained employment as a writing instructor remain great mysteries.)

Not long after his diagnosis, Caveney turned to alcohol to try to calm his anxiety. It only made matters worse. By the age of 23, he was fully alcoholic. He explains that he cycled in and out of rehabilitation facilities for years. By age 44, he was a non-functioning alcoholic. Only in his fifth decade did the treatments and therapy finally take, and he has maintained sobriety ever since.

Caveney eschews a linear approach to memoir writing. One might even say he’s averse to to a form that requires him to be the main character. Readers are called upon to figure out who he is not by what he remembers about his own life but by what he chooses to report about the lives of others and the facts that seem to interest him. The author’s style is also unusual and idiosyncratic. Chapters and paragraphs are short. There’s a staccato, fragmented feel to the prose.

Having finished the book, I wish I had a better sense of how the author’s agoraphobia progressed, what he thought was going on, how he tried to cope . . . before resorting to alcohol, that is. My guess is that Caveney believed that attempts to reconstruct his experience (as memoirists typically do) would be dishonest or inaccurate. He says that over the course of his life, he’s seen ten psychiatrists, a score of counsellors, and two dozen psychotherapists. He has chosen to say little or nothing about those experiences here. He’s been prescribed various pharmaceuticals (one class of which— benzodiazepines—he became addicted to). He’s equally mum on whether any of these medications helped. Ditto on the herbal and vitamin supplements he’s tried. But what of the cognitive behavioural, desensitization, and biofeedback therapies? He does not say. It’s evident that his life has become more manageable and fulfilling in recent years. It sure would have been interesting to learn how that was achieved.… (mehr)