Room author Emma Donoghue on tackling tough topics with children
'If they feel safe at home ... kids can deal with a huge amount of fear about outside things'
Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue has thought a lot about how parents can discuss difficult topics with their children.
In her bestselling 2010 novel, Room, five-year-old Jack and his mother, Ma, are held captive in a small room after her kidnapping. Throughout, Ma must consider what she should — and shouldn't — share with him.
This year has forced many parents to confront challenging conversations with their children, the COVID-19 pandemic in particular.
Donoghue spoke with Cross Country Checkup guest host Rita Celli about how she has approached difficult discussions in her writing and with her own children.
Here is part of that conversation.
Do you want to tell the audience in your own words the heart of the story of Room, and why it's worth reflecting on this character, this mother, and how she handled such a terrible, scary situation?
Room is really a book about parenting. I just came up with a crime in order to put a kind of sharp, sharp spotlight on the mother-child bond. I was thinking, "How might you mother a child if there was nobody around to help you, but equally nothing to distract you from it?"
So Ma in Room decides to let Jack believe that this [room] is the entire world, 10 foot by 10 foot. She's raising him, you could say, not really in the 21st century because they don't have internet; they just have TV, so they're cut off from any other source of knowledge.
Obviously, it's almost a sort of fairy tale of parenting, because when they ... do get out into the outside world, then Ma has to explain all the realities of the world to Jack. So she has to do overnight what most of us do gradually, little by little, as we have those conversations. Say every Christmas, they might go from one version of Santa Claus through to another.
You might gradually talk about the harder stuff with your kids, but Ma has to do that overnight so that places all that emphasis on those decisions parents have to make about safety versus freedom for their kids.
And, yeah, I'm myself rethinking those more than ever this year.
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It's interesting because the book deals with the inside, and then there is an outside — kind of like when we're cooped up and not. I wonder if you could offer maybe an example or two of what Ma does to help her child smile, even though she's hurting and afraid.
One thing I found a lot in my research ... I was looking at what makes families successful and resilient, and it's not external markers of how many parents or which gender they are, or how much money they have.
It's things like having ritual activities, regular things you do once a week or once a month, and a feeling of agency to your days rather than just perceiving the events of the world as coming at you like firebombs. A feeling that you can make your life move in the right direction, at least.
So I really tried to give Ma that quality of not just filling Jack with enthusiasm for, you know, if it's Tuesday, we do laundry, but it's kind of wonderful reliability of certain things happening certain times of day or certain times in the week.
Also, a feeling that the things they do make a big difference. She's constantly telling him stories which had the subtext of, you know, you are the hero of your own story. There may be evil ogres, but you can outwit them. So without her ever saying to him, you know, we need to escape from a horrible villain, she's preparing him to be psychologically strong enough to go through all sorts of changes.
But if they feel safe at home — if they feel that your love is non-negotiable — I think kids can deal with a huge amount of fear about outside things.
The other thing the story demonstrates ... is we can take control of a little piece of the thing we can control; that this creates a bedrock when so much feels like it's shifty ground. I wonder, do you relate to Ma? Do you remember doing some pretending at some point yourself as a parent when you weren't so sure?
I once was on a panel with a psychologist and he was shocked that I told my children there was somebody called Santa Claus who came down the chimney.
But I said to him we're always, in a sense, lying or fictionalizing with small children because you have to radically simplify the story for them. We can't tell the full story of anything to a two-year-old. So even if you're putting it in childlike words, you're always giving them a simple version.
So I remember when we would, say, visit France when the kids were small, if we passed a place that was a historic marker, I would talk about the Nazis — but I would kind of wrap it up into a kind of comforting storyline with a happy ending. So I suppose that's the first version that I told them and then, you know, come Grade 10, my son is coming home from watching those Auschwitz videos.
So at that point I don't get to frame it, or mediate it, or make it safe, but I've let the story in little by little.
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Room starts with a quotation.... You went back to antiquities to frame this story, which I also think is interesting.
It's the myth of Perseus ... Basically, he was born to a captive, and then he and [his mother, Danaë] were floated on a little boat.
But this idea of the child born into the locked room — the kind of magical hero who springs out of a locked room situation — Rapunzel would be another version of that story.
I found it very powerful as an image — I mean, the womb is sort of a locked room. We all start in a very, very small world, a very protected world. And then [with] birth, the outside starts to come in and, little by little, your child moves towards the bigger world.
So in writing Room, I really just tried to encapsulate that move from small to big — from safe to dangerous — in a kind of powerful story. But all parents go through it. We have to gradually, gradually let them go, don't we?
Written by Jason Vermes. Produced by Steve Howard. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
