WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
Therapist took her own advice and finally published a novel
A Good Enough Mother Bev Thomas Random House Canada
Bev Thomas can now see the irony and smile about it. After all, her debut novel, A Good Enough Mother, has just been published to rapturous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. But the book, a mesmerizing excursion into the world of psychiatry, was a long time coming — and that was because of its author’s reluctance to write about the field she knew best.
“I’d always been interested in writing,” Thomas says over coffee in a Bloomsbury hotel.
In fact she joined her first writers’ group nearly two decades ago. “I loved being a part of it and listening to each other’s work.”
But she felt blocked when it came to the stories she really wanted to tell.
An attempt at historical fiction led her up one blind alley. “I couldn’t get it right,” she says, recalling her frustration at the time. But then after further stumbles, she faced up to the real problem. “I was trying everything — except writing about a world I knew very well.”
Thomas, for many years a clinical psychologist with Britain’s National Health Service, thinks it was almost an “unconscious” decision initially to avoid writing about anything set in her workplace. Her own professional concerns were at play: her patients came first and she worried that drawing on her own background might raise issues of confidentiality.
And then, after finally bowing to her need to write about this world, she wasn’t certain how to proceed.
Thomas knew she didn’t want a patient as her central character. So she settled on the idea of making a therapist her protagonist — a woman who is at a difficult place in her own life where she is emotionally fragile and, as it turns out, dangerously fallible in her judgments.
“I was interested in exploring the fact that people in the caring profession are human beings,” Thomas says. “They suffer bereavement and loss, and experience marriage breakups, just like anybody else.” And, Thomas adds, they are expected to turn to other therapists or supervisors when in need — an obligation shunned by the central figure in this story.
The novel, published in Canada by Random House, is a page-turner, guaranteed to keep the reader on tenterhooks over what happens next.
But is it really a thriller, as some marketing campaigns suggest?
Thomas happily reports that five publishing houses ended up bidding for the rights, so she figures that she can live with the thriller label.
“But if anyone asks my opinion, I would say it’s a psychological drama in which a very bad thing happens. I don’t think it’s a straightforward psychological thriller, but I did read one very interesting review that calls it ‘genre-defying’ and not easy to place in any category.”
Meanwhile, Thomas has one big hope — that she has succeeded in humanizing a world in which she has worked for so long, and that readers will empathize with the book’s beleaguered narrator.
She is London psychotherapist Ruth Hartland, the director of one of Britain’s top trauma therapy units.
Despite her sterling professional reputation, her private life is in shambles: her marriage has collapsed, she’s estranged from her daughter and — most painfully — her teenage son, Tom, has been missing for 18 months.
Ruth has been managing to keep her two worlds apart until the moment when she takes on a new patient named Dan, a traumatized adolescent with an uncanny resemblance to her missing son.
Ruth’s immediate emotional connection with Dan, who emerges as a seriously disturbed youth with a simmering potential for violence, blinds her to the necessity of referring him to another therapist. She sees him as a surrogate for the son she has lost, so she keeps him as a patient, and as her professional judgment falters further, she will make a decision that has devastating consequences.
“While Ruth is looking for a son, Dan is looking for a mother, and a perfect storm is building,” Thomas says.
But in fashioning this narrative, she was always concerned that her novel would be authentic in background and that it would offer genuine insight into the world of psychotherapy. And yes, she suggests, there is an element of mystery in it all.
“Freud’s case studies — they’re like detective stories,” she says. “And there’s a mirroring of sorts in therapy: people come to you with a problem and by virtue of coming, you unravel something together. So I was always trying to write something where the boundaries of the profession frame the plot in a way.
“Ruth’s misjudgment is that she shouldn’t have started seeing Dan in the first place. But she’s also grieving — and grief can be so powerful that it does have people making decisions that aren’t the best for them.”
The book’s central dilemma has its roots in an actual moment in Thomas’s own past when she was coming out of a broken relationship and found herself dealing with a client in distress over a similar upheaval in her life. Thomas found herself empathizing with this young woman.
As she explained in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, she had never before encountered “a client whose life resonated so profoundly with mine.” Thomas desperately wanted to be her therapist, but her professional caution took over.
“I felt my own feelings and emotions being nudged into play, and very quickly any objectivity became murky.”
So Thomas’s “therapist brain” kicked in and told her to seek counsel from her supervisor. Something snapped in Thomas when they sat down to talk and she dissolved into tears. Her supervisor was sympathetic but firm — she could not continue therapy with this young woman.
Thomas says this was a formative experience that made her a better practitioner. But, she would ask herself years later at her writing table, what if a more “seismic” challenge loomed? What if a grieving psychotherapist encountered a new patient with an uncanny resemblance to her vanished son?
It’s the familiar “what if ” question — one of the most durable of narrative springboards. And it has produced a debut novel that the often finicky Publishers Weekly calls exceptional.
“What’s the very worst thing that can happen to a therapist and mother whose 17-year-old son has gone missing?” Thomas asks.
“It’s seeing somebody who looks exactly like her son. So we’re looking at two layers here — her role as a therapist and her role as a mother — and then they absolutely collide.”
What’s the very worst thing that can happen to a therapist and mother whose 17-year-old son has gone missing? It’s seeing somebody who looks exactly like her son.