Even though I’ve been married to someone with OCD for nearly thirty years and our grown son has battled OCD since he was four, my learning curve continues. In fact, while working on this story, my son and I did some intense exposure response prevention (ERP) therapy—a refresher course we both needed. Like any chronic illness, OCD demands constant management. Lapses are common because stress and certain lifestyle choices can retrigger it. Ignore OCD, or get lazy with the techniques, and it rebuilds into a superstorm.
Much like Katie, I’ve also rethought my own mental health history through my child’s. I never developed full-blown OCD, but I can identify two specific OCD fears I battled as a teenager. I never told anyone, and I dealt with them accidentally through repeated exposure. I’ve also been fascinated by harm OCD for years. Until recently I struggled with touching knives—anything bigger than a vegetable knife—because a little part of my brain would want to show me how I could stab someone. That’s the real reason I wanted to create a character with postpartum OCD (which often manifests as violent images and thoughts): I can’t imagine being a young mother trapped in horrific images of hurting her baby. To me that’s a circle of hell.
Was it a challenge to fictionalize OCD in two different characters?
Given how much I know about life with OCD, it should have been easy. (A doddle, as we would say in England.) However, everything about OCD is intensely personal, and our family deals with OCD as an intruder—a separate entity—which isn’t accurate. The OCD voice is not a third-person voice, as with schizophrenia. It’s a relentless, unwanted thought, but it’s still your thought. We all have intrusive thoughts, but most of us dismiss them. We don’t assign them meaning. The OCD brain does the opposite: demands proof that, for example, you’re not a bad person for entertaining unsettling thoughts. The hard part is learning how to process those thoughts without reacting to them. The thoughts are not the problem; it’s how we deal with them.
As I excavated Katie’s OCD, I was also riddled with my own intrusive doubts: Was I screwing up? Was it coming across as authentic? And why the hell did I think I could write a novel about anxiety and shame? After much angst and many conversations with my son, I treated the OCD differently from the way I did in The Unfinished Garden. I wanted it to present as accessible to readers, but I also wanted to remove the bumpers. To achieve that, I kept returning to something my son said: “If it’s making you uncomfortable, you’re on the right path.” Because here’s the truth: OCD is total and absolute shit twenty-four seven. Katie nailed it with that phrase.
What advice do you have for someone who is beginning his or her journey with OCD?
Go to the International OCD Foundation website before you do anything else. The IOCDF has a wealth of information and lists regional therapists who specialize in treating OCD, as well as local support groups. Therapy is painful for everyone in the family, and reaching out to others, especially for carers, can be lifesaving. My son’s OCD returned full force in high school, and I could not have coped without my local support group. If you don’t have a support group in your area, look online. Facebook is a wonderful resource.
Educate yourself and keep educating yourself, because OCD can adapt. Two books that have helped me enormously in the last year are When a Family Member Has OCD by Jon Hershfield and The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD by Jon Hershfield and Tom Corboy. I also recommend The Imp of the Mind by Lee Baer and the OCD page on the A2A Alliance website: http://a2aalliance.org/arc/ocd. Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts by Karen Kleiman (of the Postpartum Stress Center) and Amy Wenzel is a great resource for postpartum OCD, as is the group Postpartum Support International.
Tell us a little about the research for this novel, and the real people behind the story.
My characters are fictional, but I find them through interviews with real people. Obviously, there were many tough conversations behind this story. I remember talking to Angie Alexander about her journey with violent intrusive thoughts, and suddenly we were both in tears. Angie works tirelessly to reach out to other mothers who are suffering with anxiety, but her own story was hard to hear.
Other interviews were just plain fun. I had a blast learning about acting techniques from Melissa Lozoff of Movie Makers, and a riot discussing Star Wars, math, and sleepovers with a ten-year-old, Annabeth Lundberg. Maisie’s favorite word, causation, came out of my interview with Annabeth, as did Maisie’s line about pocket money. And my husband, the Prof, was an incredible resource for figuring out Callum’s and Lilah’s academic lives. But the best part of working on this manuscript was entering the world of welding.
Jackie MacLeod and the other artists at Liberty Arts were so welcoming and gracious. I made three trips out to the studio to shadow Jackie as she worked, but she also answered endless questions via email and text, and insisted I experience welding firsthand. I’m a total wuss, so I tried to say no, but she persisted. Thank goodness! The moment that auto-darkening helmet came down and I saw the green light, everything in my head went quiet. I understood how and why welding had become Katie’s therapy.
Interviewing local metal artist Mike Roig gave me a different perspective and helped me understand why welding is a cursing medium. If you check out Jackie and Mike’s websites*, you’ll see how much they inspired me. Jackie was working on a piece called That Perfect Moment when I interviewed her one day, and Mike creates huge, mesmerizing steel sculptures that dance in the wind. (I may also have stolen his motorbike for Ben.)
*http://www.mikeroig.com, http://jackiemacleod.com
What did this manuscript teach you?
I have good instincts as a person, but as a writer I second-guess everything, especially my ability to plot. My favorite freak-out follows the line of “Wait! My thing is crafting pretty sentences about flowers and light through the trees, and I don’t have enough of those.” But each manuscript has its own song, and I found this one by putting aside doubt and listening to instinct.
While working on the novel, I was slammed with a number of personal crises. Each crisis demanded my full attention, my emotional energy, and much of my writing time. As my deadline tightened around my neck, I allowed the story to flow the way it wanted to flow—through dialogue—and I became a ruthless editor.
I can’t outline, but because I write to contract, I’ve trained myself to build road maps to avoid getting lost. These road maps are storyboards written to movie beats. I don’t always stick to the details on the boards, but the framework—constructed around the beats—doesn’t change. With this one, however, I veered way off course. Discombobulated, I started a second storyboard, which I abandoned halfway through. This novel, more than any of my others, took on a life of its own. What I learned was to let that happen.
For example, in the first and second drafts, I was convinced Katie’s relationship with her support group was the B-story. But during one of my biannual trips to England to see my mother, I woke up early to write before breakfast and thought, No. I don’t want to work on the chapter with the support group. I want to stick with Katie and Jake. Without a second thought, I bounced that chapter into the last act, and several months later, bounced it—plus a few other chapters—out completely. That gut instinct in England had told me the real B-story: Katie’s relationship with Jake. It just took me a while to listen.
You often include a listening guide with your novels. Why is that, and can you tell us about the music behind The Promise Between Us?
I started building my writing career as a full-time mother in a high-maintenance family, and I’m part of the sandwich generation. That means something—or someone—is usually tugging at me for attention. Music has always been my escape from the stress of real life, and it allows me to block out everything beyond my characters’ emotional lives. With music, I can write pretty much anywhere and through any distraction. My favorite writing retreat is on the direct flight home from London, which I take regularly. I remember pounding out one beloved scene while huddled in coach with my laptop, m
y iPod, and a glass of red wine. (Okay, so maybe it was two glasses.)
I can’t feel my characters until I’ve found their music, and a soundtrack evolves naturally for each manuscript. I didn’t publish the listening guide for Echoes of Family, because it followed Marianne’s zany thought process and jumped all over the place. However, listening guides for all my other novels, including this one, are on my website.
My writing music has always included songs from the Airborne Toxic Event, My Chemical Romance, U2, and my son’s band, the Arcadian Project, and this novel was no exception. However, I branched out in some unusual directions, including Marilyn Manson. Callum’s song is “Creep” by Radiohead, Maisie’s song is “Scarecrow” by My Chemical Romance (Jake introduced her to that one), and Katie’s song is “Hourglass” by the Arcadian Project. Katie and Maisie’s song is the amazing “Dear Alyssa,” which my son wrote when he was sixteen as a prayer for anyone battling mental illness.
There’s always one song that represents each novel for me, and for The Promise Between Us, that song is Mumford & Sons and Baaba Maal’s “There Will Be Time.”
Why do you tell this story from five viewpoints?
I had assumed I would be writing through the voices of Katie, Callum, and Lilah. But Jake’s story drives much of the plot, and at some point it became obvious that Maisie needed a few chapters. When you strip everything away, this is a simple story about a small group of good people trapped in a bad situation. As with everything else in this novel, they’re coming at the same problem from different angles. The writer and reader in me finds that intriguing.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Promise Between Us?
That motherhood, like most things in life, is not black and white; that OCD is a highly individualized anxiety disorder and can manifest in many different ways; that anxiety is a beast we should never underestimate; and that our health insurance system often fails to provide access to mental health professionals. And, of course, that we all battle our own monsters and should never make assumptions about what goes on in another person’s head. Phew. That’s a lot, but here’s the bottom line: I hope it’s a good read. I certainly had fun writing it. Enjoy, y’all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 KM Photography
Bestselling author Barbara Claypole White creates hopeful family drama with a healthy dose of mental illness. Originally from England, she writes and gardens in the forests of North Carolina, where she lives with her beloved OCD family. Her previous novels include The Unfinished Garden, The In-Between Hour, The Perfect Son, and Echoes of Family. She is also an OCD Advocate for the A2A Alliance, a nonprofit group that promotes advocacy over adversity. To connect with Barbara, please visit www.barbaraclaypolewhite.com or follow her on Facebook. She’s always on Facebook.
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