With props to stabilise their instability – walking sticks, headphones, gloves, sunglasses, bags, dogs and wheelchairs – they come over sympathetically. Two thirds of Caveney’s support group are women. It is only recently that agoraphobia has been recognised as a predominantly female complaint. There’s a chapter on Sigmund Freud and honourable mention of Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal, a pioneering specialist in the field. Two American writers are of particular interest to him: Emily Dickinson (the words “house” and “home” appear in 210 of her poems) and the novelist Shirley Jackson.
Shrinks may not have helped (“At the last count I have seen: ten psychiatrists, a score of counsellors, two dozen therapists”) but imaginative literature amplifies his insights: Proust, Kafka, Ford Madox Ford, Anne Tyler, Sue Townsend, Helen Dunmore and many more.
His book isn’t a bland tale of how-I-got-cured it’s intellectually curious, emotionally bracing and immensely erudite. These days Caveney is sober, does yoga, is part of a support group, and makes a point of going out even on days he doesn’t feel like it. Later, for two decades, came booze: where psychiatry failed, alcohol came to the rescue, a coping strategy that “can work right up until the moment it kills you”. Growing up in a tight-knit Lancashire community, so his partner Emma jokes, was a factor too: his phobia was small-mindedness writ large. Now in his 50s, he seeks to understand its origins.īeing sexually abused by his head teacher as a teenager – as described in his 2017 memoir, The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness – undoubtedly played a part: after his body was invaded, he distrusted boundaries. But to the dismay of his parents, with whom he moved back in after graduating, the condition persisted (“at my most agoraphobic, everywhere outside my front door can feel like that original motorway”). He survived the next three years by staying on campus and living within a 50-yard radius. But this was new: primal fear – heart hammering, blood pounding, body in revolt. An only child, brought up in working-class Accrington, he had always been a little dyspraxic, or “cack-handed” as it was called.
At 19, travelling home from university for Christmas by coach, he had a panic attack on the M6, his world dismantled by the “horrifying symmetry” of the motorway. He writes with inside knowledge, as an agoraphobe not a doctor. In fact “agoraphobia”, Caveney tells us, “is not so much a fear of going out as a fear of something dreadful happening whilst being out”. Those who experience it are caricatured as horrified by the spaciousness beyond the window. But the condition is thought of as modern, or as a terror of modern amplitude. In Greek, agora means marketplace and phobos means fear. T he term is treacherous and sometimes unkind Graham Caveney imagines taking revenge on it by writing “agoraphobia” in the middle of a page, surrounded by scary white space.