‘A paving stone in your stomach’: how it feels to have agoraphobia
‘My world,” writes Graham Caveney, “was dismantled in the space of 40 minutes.” Caveney was a 19-year-old student, travelling on a coach back to Warwick University after spending Christmas with his family in Accrington, when he suffered a panic attack. “The fear descended the same way the mist falls on Scafell Pike – as though it had been there all along, waiting in ambush.”
Thereafter any venture out of doors was liable to bring on another attack, and when his studies ended he returned home, to his parents’ baffled dismay, as a full-blown hermit. Eventually – “I heard the word and realised it was being used about me” – he was diagnosed with agoraphobia.
In the 40 years since his first attack, Caveney has managed to make a name for himself as a critic and biographer, and he has at least conditioned himself to be able to leave the house these days; nevertheless, his has been a circumscribed life. “I try not to take a reckoning, avoid tormenting myself with the missed funerals, unattended weddings, jobs turned down.” He is a recovering alcoholic as well as an agoraphobic, but has taken the decision to concentrate on the latter condition in this memoir. One senses that, for Caveney, the acts of humiliating over-indulgence and horrific alcohol-induced illnesses that he mentions in passing – the sort of juicy stuff that gets a memoir of addiction into the bestseller lists – would make his life a bit too easy if he were to write about them in depth.
He is a writer who prefers to excite his readers by his use of words rather than his subject matter; and so this book is a crabwise, impressionistic evocation of an unspectacular condition that grinds on day in, day out without generating much in the way of anecdote. Connoisseurs of the misery memoir may be dissatisfied – Caveney makes passing allusions to the deterioration of his relationship with
his father (“this man who loves but can no longer bear me”) but never treats us to anything as dramatic as a description of one of the rows they must have had.
But Caveney is never less than completely absorbing, simply because he is such a nimble, exact writer, able to move swiftly but unjarringly between daft jokes and serious points. His descriptions of the toll the condition takes on his mental health are horrifying in their precision, but that precision makes them beautiful at the same time (“I used to think the word ‘deadened’ simply meant feeling nothing, an emotional blank. That was before I became deadened … It is to have a paving stone in your stomach. It is mourning. Grief for the loss of yourself.”)
The book also doubles as an examination of the way agoraphobia has been dealt with in literature, from Miss Havisham to Boo Radley, and an account of how physicians have tried to explain it. Freud, inevitably, suggested that his agoraphobic women
patients had unconscious doubts about their mothers’ morals and were preventing themselves from replicating their street-walking habits.
Caveney’s condition could be as neatly accounted for, if he had a mind to. As he revealed in a 2018 memoir, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness, he was sexually abused by the headmaster of his Catholic grammar school. “I can see the emotional rationale. My most intimate boundaries were violated and thus do I mistrust boundaries,” he writes. And yet: “Agoraphobia is not a crossword. Attempting to fill in the blanks tells me nothing about them other than that they are impossible to fill.”
He and the other agoraphobes in his support group – “two-thirds are women, all of us white (extremely white, complexions the colour of putty)” – are at least ahead of the game when lockdown is introduced. Although at the start Caveney observes that most people can easily sympathise with claustrophobes but are bewildered by agoraphobes, I suspect that may no longer be the case after so many of us have been institutionalised in our own homes; so the book has the merit of timeliness, in addition to its eloquence and refreshing sense of being totally unconfected.
Caveney is never less than completely absorbing – he is such a nimble, exact writer
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