Behind Closed Doors
Behind Closed Doors
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B.A. Paris on Behind Closed Doors
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A friend’s marriage and a pattern she couldn’t nameThe book began not with a plot idea but with a sustained, low-level unease about a real person in her life. She had met the husband once, found him charming, but over years of ordinary conversation came to sense something was being managed just out of view.
Some years ago, I knew a couple whose relationship seemed perfect on the outside but a couple of little incidents made me wonder if things were different when they were on their own. It gave me the idea for a story and Behind Closed Doors was born.
thebookreviewcafe.wordpress.com, “**Author Interview** Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris | The book review café”What turned a private suspicion into a subject worth writing about was discovering that newspapers had documented exactly this pattern at scale. She went looking for accounts of women who had been controlled to the point where escape felt impossible, and found case after case.
My story was also inspired by some articles I read about women who were controlled by their partners to such an extent that they felt incapable of functioning without them.
The feature of this kind of abuse that most demanded her attention was precisely what made it so difficult for its victims to get help. Unlike physical violence, it leaves no evidence a third party can point to.
The problem with psychological abuse is that there are no physical signs, so it is even harder to talk about than physical abuse, simply because it’s harder to prove.
That observation sits at the center of the whole novel: a woman in danger, surrounded by people who see only a perfect marriage.
How she wrote it
Characters who arrived uninvited and took the penShe did not plot the book in advance. She had a beginning and an ending in mind; the middle she found through writing it. When the story went somewhere darker than she had expected, she turned to research to understand whether the extremes she was imagining had any basis in reality.
As soon as I knew the sort of story that I wanted to write, I searched the internet for stories of people that had been controlled by their partners and who had eventually got away. I wanted to understand several things – what has pushed them to finally escape, how they had done it and why they hadn’t tried before.
Some of the cases she found in that research went far beyond what she had conceived for the novel. She used the most extreme to test her own imagination’s limits, but they also followed her home.
One woman was kept in a pit – not a room, just a hole dug under the house – and her captor would throw food down to her, as if she were an animal.
One structural problem threatened the whole novel. If Grace, the wife at the center of the book, had no specific reason she could not walk out the door, readers would dismiss the premise. The solution arrived without being planned.
In the beginning there were only Jack and Grace; it was their relationship I wanted to explore. But I knew that if Grace didn’t have something to anchor her into the relationship – a reason why she couldn’t leave – people would say that it wasn’t a believable situation. I don’t remember consciously creating the character of Millie, she was just suddenly there, writing herself into the story!
Jack, the novel’s villain, gave her the most trouble of any character she has written. She would finish a day’s writing and read it back the next morning not quite recognizing herself in what she had produced.
When I sat down to write Behind Closed Doors, I never expected Jack to turn out how he did. But when I was writing, it was like Jack took over. Sometimes when I read back what I’d written the day before, I’d be really shocked and wonder how could I have written something like that.
In the Surrey Police interview she pushed the description further, reaching for the only language that seemed to fit. The passage covering Jack’s childhood was so difficult that she read it only twice before publication: once when she wrote it, and once in final proofs.
I almost felt sometimes as if it was the characters writing it... especially Jack, because I couldn’t have imagined what he’d be like [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The book she wrote for no one but herselfShe came to fiction late, beginning to write seriously only after she turned fifty. That timing shaped the conditions under which this first book was made: with no publishing contract, no agent expecting a draft, and no genre to satisfy.
I never set out to write a psychological thriller, I just wrote what I wanted to write. No-one was more surprised than me when Behind Closed Doors was classed as a psychological thriller. I’d never thought about its genre and if anyone had asked, I would have said that a psychological thriller was the last thing I would write.
She has written several novels since, but this one holds a specific place. The freedom that came from having nothing to lose produced something she has not been able to replicate in the same way.
My favourite book is Behind Closed Doors because it was the book that changed my life. I never thought it would be published, so I wasn’t under any pressure to write it for anyone but myself.
What she wants us to sit with
Recognition as the only real endingShe has said the book’s purpose was never to entertain alone. When asked directly what she hopes stays with a reader after the last page, she named awareness and action, in that order.
I would like them to take away an awareness that this type of mental and psychological abuse does exist and to hopefully recognize the signs so that if they have any worries about someone close to them, they can reach out to them. Or if they are going through something similar themselves, to ask for help.
The reader mail she received confirmed that the novel found the people it was written for. She was not prepared for how directly some letters described their own lives.
About 25 have written to me, saying, ‘This is my story.’ They say thank you for writing, for bringing the idea of psychological control into the open because it’s very hard to prove, as there are no bruises. It’s just damaging your brain.
Those letters reframe what the book is. It is a thriller in form, but for a portion of its readers it functioned as something closer to a mirror: proof that what they were living had a name.