Trauma Top Five, by Catriona

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction.

Well, well, well. This little gem of a question has been sitting here like a troll under a bridge, hasn't it?

But how real to get? Here on a blog where I most often go for funny. 

[Writes and deletes multiple paragraphs]

On reflection . . . nope. Not doing that. All I'm going to say is that the three novels of mine where I've pulled most from my childhood are The Day She Died, A Gingerbread House and now The Dead Room. Fun fun fun.

All the details here

Instead of that, I've compiled a list of my top-five fictional childhood-trauma-and-its-aftermath (or otherwise) stories. Two novels, two films and one novel that's a film too.

1. Marnie

Hitchcock's first collaboration with Tippi Hedren (although that's probably not the best way to describe how he worked with his leading ladies) struck me as clever to the point of genius when I watched it as a kid, but man it's clunky now. SPOILER ALERT. Marnie Edgar, you see, is scared of the colour red, thunderstorms and sex. Because when she was a kid she killed one of her sex-worker mother's clients with a poker, there was a lot of blood, and it happened during a storm. No loose ends there, right? The poster is a masterpiece of subtlety too.

2. Spellbound

Nearly twenty years earlier, Hitchcock had made a much more subtle film about PTSD, though. In Spellbound, Gregory Peck is a psychologist who has a phobia about dark lines on a white background. He's triggered by someone dragging a fork across a tablecloth, for instance. SPOILER ALERT. Ingrid Bergman, his colleague, eventually traces the fear to a murder on a ski-slope. Get it? But this memory has actually been masking another, earlier, trauma and even more guilt and misery. So, all round, a more sophisticated treatment about what a mind can do to protect itself. And Gregory Peck gets the girl too. I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

3. To Kill A Mockingbird

There's a shedload of things this novel exemplifies. Today I'm looking at Boo Radley. SPOILER ALERT. After a run-of-the-mill scrape as a high-spirited boy, young Arthur Radley is placed under life-long house arrest by his overbearing and sanctimonious family and becomes a recluse. (He always put me in mind of the women in Ireland who were incarcerated for having sex and spent their whole lives locked up until they were thoroughly institutionalised.) Harper Lee's portrayal of Boo is magnificent - and magnificently modern. We're still, today, getting fiction and news about mentally fragile people being dangerous. And here's Lee in 1960 showing a man who's villified by the ignorant or immature, recognised by the virtuous (Atticus!), and who remains benign to all but himself.

Isn't my edition gorgeous?

4. Dark Ride

I hesitate to call Lou Berney's Dark Ride feel-good. It's devastating, actually. But in this one particular it's a refreshing change from the tropes of childhood trauma and its aftermath. In it, stoner scare-actor Hardy Reed witnesses undeniable evidence of the physical abuse of two kids he crosses paths with. He doesn't know them but he pretty much immediately up-ends his laidback routine to save them from where their little lives are headed. Splendid stuff.

5. It's a Wonderful Life

And finally . . . or otherwise. George Bailey. He suffered a traumatic incident in childhood when his brother fell through the ice and looked to be drowning. Then there was the clump in the head, hard enough to leave him deaf in one ear, when the drunk chemist was about to kill a patient. And being passed over for adventure. Being in the shadow of his younger brother. Being becalmed in Bedford Falls and beset with chidlren. He should really have run amok with a machete, instead of giving that finial post a hard stare and saving the town.

the only photo I've got of IAWL - look closely

Cx