Room was easier to write than any of my other books partly because it was literally child's play: I borrowed much of its detail (games, idioms, observations, snatches of curious dialogue) from our son, who was five at the time I was drafting it. So I wouldn't have told Jack's story unless I thought his trip (from the lost domain of the cosy mother-baby bond, to the much bigger, crazier, lonelier universe outside) could stand for the journey we all have to make, though over decades rather than days. But don't all our childhoods have moments like that, on a smaller scale? (Santa parental flaws global warming all the awful facts of life.) Although I often write about freak cases – one of my collections is named after a woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits – it's because of what they reveal about the ordinary. Jack has to cope with the dizzying revelation that there's a world outside the door. I kept tinkering with the balance of sunshine and darkness. Might Ma's love just possibly be enough, at least in the early years? How much safety does a child need, and how much freedom? My goal was to avoid sentimentalising imprisonment, while exploring the ways some people do manage to rise above it. Room is also a reckoning in the accountancy sense – an attempt to calculate the pros and cons of Jack's upbringing in a soundproofed shed, with no company but one fiercely devoted parent.
The research I did on hidden and abused children was the most upsetting task I've ever set myself, and I only wish I could forget what I learned. Of course there's never been a real Jack – born into captivity but in perfect health, living in a best-case-scenario of confinement – so I had to research a weird variety of situations that I thought might overlap with his: not just kidnap survivors but prisoners in solitary confinement or mother-and-child prison units, refugees, hermits and mystics. A fiction so unstable in genre – sliding between fairy tale and naturalism, domestic comedy and the gothic, social satire and philosophical inquiry – that I still marvel at the fact that it ended up stacked high on tables in Walmart. Instead I decided to write something much more peculiar. (A hideous premise, I'd be the first to admit, so I don't blame some of my friends for refusing to read the book.) It could have made a decent thriller, if I'd ended it at the escape. I struck lucky with Room because it has a much meatier plot than any of my previous fiction: the kind of high-concept, high-stakes premise you can explain in a sentence. A reckoning can mean a narrative, an account.
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