FEATURE
Night thoughts First-time author Madeleine Ryan’s novel A Room Called Earth is a sensitive, humorous and lively exploration of neurodiversity, belonging, family and identity. Katinka Smit speaks with her.
In her debut novel, Madeleine Ryan has constructed a character believable and flawed, a study of human complexity. The story, spanning one night, is narrated by a young single woman firmly in touch with her own reality, and how it interrelates with the people and world around her in every moment and interaction. The publicity announces the author’s neurodiversity as though indivisible from the story, and Ryan herself freely admits to a ‘dance’ between her own sensibilities and the character’s. ‘I brought my own structure of how I process people and experiences, how I reflect on memories, the order in which that happens, and the shape in which that happens,’ she says. She acknowledges the natural storytelling qualities inherent in that diversity of perception, ‘which is very much about illuminating how we work – different sensitivities and patterns of behaviour – that neurodiverse people magnify’. She notes that the ‘obsessive attention to detail or heightened emotions’ often associated with neurodiversity can be a powerful way to examine things that ‘everyone is grappling with’. Our heroine is acutely and accurately grappling with her particular place in history and life: as a woman, daughter, girlfriend, thinker, and physical, emotional and spiritual being – as an Australian. It’s a heady mix of self-awareness, skilfully narrated through the events of what could be a superficial story – an evening before, during and after a party in a fairly ‘white Australian’ cultural experience. What makes this young woman’s experience (and this novel) so exceptional though, is not only her neurodiversity. What we are witnessing is a complex and traumatised psyche in hyper-healing mode. Psychologists recognise that trauma affects sensitive people more intensely. Highly sensitive people hear, see and know what other people don’t, empathically feeling abuse and manipulation more deeply. Children who 18 | WINTER 2021 northerly
are like this need more love, recognition and support. Those who don’t receive it are more likely to feel the effects of trauma more intensely and for much longer. Our unnamed protagonist has, we find out, suffered a sudden trauma too, compounding her childhood, yet it has offered her an obvious and necessary vehicle for healing. She obsesses with self-care through her inner and outer actions. She cannot let any dishonesty go unchallenged, in herself or others, even if it’s socially awkward and makes people uncomfortable. Her honesty is all-encompassing, at once physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, existential. We traverse her mind, the micro and macro view. We follow her focus from objects, people or events happening around her to the thoughts they provoke, from flippant to irreverent to caustic, through the philosophical and deeply awed. Our heroine plucks and weaves separate threads together, her life a loom. In one scene, her thoughts slide from the books she is reading to the existential conundrum of being born in Australia on the blanket background of dispossession, genocide and the oldest continuing human civilisation on Earth, yet being nourished from this same land, then on to her untameable hair and how she is dressed to encounter the world out there, different from her world at home, which she possesses and creates in complete control. ‘I was just surrendering to being guided by her, to committing to the space created by her. As that opened up, I started to see where it might go, but it was really about following where she was going in each moment, where she was choosing to put her attention. And it does create its own logic and structure. It’s very true to how our minds work.’ Recurring motifs shape the protagonist’s mind. Triggered by events of the night and the people present, she loops back to ex-boyfriends, her father, her parents’ relationship. Relationship dynamics and conversations
