Review by Lee Wright of "On Agoraphobia" by Graham Caveney

 

Memoirs rarely make deliberate use of space on the page, but the large areas of emptiness in Graham Caveney’s On Agoraphobia (2022) evoke a sense of unease that mirrors the author’s fear of open spaces, motorways, and crowds. As someone intimately familiar with the vulnerability of vast, public environments, Caveney conveys in his second memoir a sense of being throttled by a thousand invisible hands, each chapter strengthening the grip. The narrative is a belt tightening around the chest, each notch drawing one step closer to madness. 

There is a fraught relationship between the writer and the agoraphobic. Caveney recalls Shirley Jackson—once cruelly dubbed Virginia Werewolf—and her anxiety attack in a New York shopping mall: "She stayed inside. Something new and unpleasant had begun to happen every time she tried to leave the house." 

Art and agoraphobia demand a retreat from the world. Art is created out of a desire to fix, reinterpret, or reimagine the world. The more the world is fixed on the page or canvas, the more jarring and unpleasant the real world may feel to the artist upon stepping outside. Caveney has been battling his condition for thirty-plus years, calling it "a neurotic two-step." His agoraphobia began at the University of Warwick. Mine started while waiting for a bus outside a college in a Warwickshire town. 

He quotes Elizabeth Bowen: "Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?" I have been that person, and I know others who carry that presence within them. But never before has there been such a deeply personal journey into the empty room as in Caveney’s account. 

To proceed, he has to turn back: "I grew up with a whole mythology of nerves. They had their own poetics. Bad with his nerves, a bundle of nerves, a nervous wreck. Nerves were a site of catastrophe." This anxious life, marked by more than its fair share of catastrophe, has provided Caveney with the material to write books that deeply resonate with readers. We can only hope that Shirley Jackson was right when she closed her diary with the repeated phrase: "laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible." 

About the reviewer
Lee Wright is currently pursuing a PhD. His subjects are memoir, people and place. His work has been published in Fairlight Books, époque press, and Cigarette Fire Literary Magazine.