# data[].attributes.body
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/9585076-room

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear."
― Emma Donoghue,

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything.

# data[].attributes.body
https://player.slideplayer.com/32/9951812/#

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.mindmeister.com/1793900371/cultural-context-room-setting?fullscreen=1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"there's Room, there's outer space, then all the TV planets, then heaven"(creates separate worlds for him) intangible- imaginary worlds- not real- never experi...

# data[].attributes.headline
Comparative 'Room' vs 'ADH' vs 'Unforgiven'

# data[].attributes.subject
Comparative 'Room' vs 'ADH' vs 'Unforgiven'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultural Context World of Room vs World of ADH (2)

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/room-emma-donoghue/themes/family

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Family

Barney the purple dinosaur sang, "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family," which implies that any two people (or dinosaurs, or people in dinosaur suits) who love each other can be a family. This is true, especially for young Jack in Room-and not just because he watches Barney. Jack loves everyone in Room: Plant, Chair, Wardrobe, Skylight. Even though these things aren't even human, Jack loves them, and they are part of his family.

When Jack gets out of Room, he learns he has other family members: Grandma, Grandpa, Steppa, Paul, and more. That's all sweet, but we can't forget about Ma. Room is above all a story about the unbreakable bond between mother and son.

Questions About Family

1. Who is Jack's family when he's inside Room? Who is his family Outside?

2. How does Ma's family change while she's inside Room?

3. How do you think Jack would define the word "family"?

Chew on This

Jack thinks that Ma is the only true family he has. As a result, he has trouble learning to trust other people.

Ma knows that she has other family outside of Room, but they're not all there for her when she gets out. She learns that the only family member she can alwaystrust is Jack.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Family Barney the purple dinosaur sang, "I love you. You love me.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/room-emma-donoghue/themes/freedom-and-confinement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Freedom and Confinement

Even if we could choose a Room, say a room with a never-ending chocolate fountain or a room with a floor-to-ceiling TV screen equipped with all the channels and video game consoles known to man, we wouldn't want to stay in it all the time. Although Jack thinks that Room is the whole world, Ma knows it isn't. She's been inside that 11x11 box for seven years. We can't imagine being anywhere for seven years, especially not a place where we could spit from one wall to the other.

While we get to see Ma and Jack escape Room, Ma finds herself less free than she'd hoped (being pursued by paparazzi will do that to a gal), and Jack finds himself more free than he ever wanted. We've heard that freedom is never free. In Room, what is the price?

Questions About Freedom and Confinement

1. Was Ma ever comfortable inside Room, or did she always want to get out?

2. What unexpected issues does Ma encounter after achieving freedom from Room?

3. Why would Jack rather be inside Room than be "free"?

4. Ma mentions that people other than her are locked up in all sorts of ways every day. What does she mean by this?

Chew on This

Jack is comfortable inside of Room, so he doesn't want to be "free." He'd rather stay inside, whether in Room, the Clinic, or Grandma's house.

Freedom is too much for Ma, so she tries to commit suicide. She later realizes that a little confinement is good, and she rents a small apartment for just her and Jack.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/room-emma-donoghue/quotes/society-and-class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Society and Class

Ma

"Uh-oh, hitting's not allowed." [...] "Actually, boxing... it's nasty but it's a game, it's kind of allowed if they have those special gloves on." (1.381, 1.386)

Ma tries to explain the way society works, with all its weird exceptions, even though Jack's trapped inside Room. She wants to teach him good morals -like don't hit people-but she also wants him to understand that sometimes people do hit people, and in certain contexts, it's okay. How can anyone keep all these rules straight?

Part 5: Living
Grandma and Steppa

"For Pete's sake, we're only talking about a minor sunburn and a bee sting," [Grandma] says. "I raised two children, don't give me acceptable standard of care." (5.370)

When Jack transitions from Room to the Clinic, he feels like he's part of the real world. He's still separated from society in a way, though. He's still protected inside the Clinic, but in the real world, everyone gets hurt at some point. Dr. Clay still wants to protect Jack from sunburns and bee stings, but Grandma thinks that's just a way of life. Who is right?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Society and Class Ma "Uh-oh, hitting's not allowed." [...] "Actually, boxing...

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/room-emma-donoghue/themes/family

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Family

Barney the purple dinosaur sang, "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family," which implies that any two people (or dinosaurs, or people in dinosaur suits) who love each other can be a family. This is true, especially for young Jack in Room-and not just because he watches Barney. Jack loves everyone in Room: Plant, Chair, Wardrobe, Skylight. Even though these things aren't even human, Jack loves them, and they are part of his family.

When Jack gets out of Room, he learns he has other family members: Grandma, Grandpa, Steppa, Paul, and more. That's all sweet, but we can't forget about Ma. Room is above all a story about the unbreakable bond between mother and son.

Questions About Family

1. Who is Jack's family when he's inside Room? Who is his family Outside?

2. How does Ma's family change while she's inside Room?

3. How do you think Jack would define the word "family"?

Chew on This

Jack thinks that Ma is the only true family he has. As a result, he has trouble learning to trust other people.

Ma knows that she has other family outside of Room, but they're not all there for her when she gets out. She learns that the only family member she can alwaystrust is Jack.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Family Barney the purple dinosaur sang, "I love you. You love me.

# data[].attributes.body
http://msdeasynotes.weebly.com/room-emma-donoghue.html

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/room-emma-donoghue/themes/society-and-class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Society and Class

Society is governed by so many different rules that it's hard to keep track. We have laws, customs, codes, etiquette, guidelines, regulations, and common courtesies that we have to keep track of and abide by every day. Many aren't written down, and even the ones that are written down are hard to find, hard to understand, or both. We're looking at you, IRS.

In Room, the rules Ma sets for Jack are much simpler: Don't watch too much TV. Take care of yourself and all of your things. Love each other. We almost feel that if everyone lived their lives by these three simple rules, the world would be a better place. But as Jack finds out, people get hung up on all the other rules and conventions, like boys shouldn't have long hair and you shouldn't steal from the mall. Oh, those silly short-haired law-abiding citizens...

Questions About Society and Class

1. Do you think Jack understands the difference between a rule and a convention? What is the difference between the two?

2. What customs and manners are totally new to Jack in the Outside? What has he already learned?

3. Which social norms do Ma and Jack find ridiculous after their return to the Outside? Which do they abide by anyway? Which do they rebel against, and how?

4. Which social norms do Grandma and the rest of Jack's family try to enforce? Would Ma agree with the things they are teaching her son?

Chew on This

Living in the Outside totally sucks. Jack has to compromise some of his beliefs and behaviors in order to fit into the real world, like cutting his long hair and not giving hugs to strangers.

Or, living in the Outside totally rocks. It'll be hard at first, but Jack is going to become an even better person after he learns all the rules and customs of the Outside.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about Society and Class in Shmoop’s free Room study guide. We’ll have you laughing and learning at the same time!

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.npr.org/2010/09/27/130143360/in-donoghue-s-room-a-child-s-world-of-his-own?t=1652246384843

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It isn't easy to talk about Room without giving too much away. The captivating novel by Irish writer Emma Donoghue is matter-of-factly narrated by a 5-year-old named Jack. The setting is an 11-by-11-foot room where he lives with his mother -- and when the book begins, it is the only world he has ever known.

"What Jack discovers early on -- which is a complete shock to him -- is that Room is not all there is," Donoghue tells NPR's Melissa Block. "He's spent five years thinking that he's in this world with his mother, and that outside there's outer space with stars and planets zooming around."

Jack thinks that he and his mother are the only two real humans, and Old Nick -- the man who visits every couple of nights -- is perhaps borderline human. In fact, Old Nick is their captor -- he kidnapped Jack's mother when she was 19. All that Jack reads in books and all he sees on TV he thinks is pure fiction. His discovery that they are prisoners shatters his worldview.
'A Tribe Of Two'
The Room itself is a character of its own in the novel -- it's capitalized, as is everything it contains -- Lamp, Toothpaste, Table. Donoghue says she did not want it to feel as though Jack and his mother were living a "stunted version" of the American lifestyle.

"I wanted to almost think of them as a tribe of two," Donoghue explains. "Room has a perfectly valid existence to Jack as a world. It doesn't seem small to him, because he's never experienced anything bigger. The Bath, the Bed, the Wardrobe, Under the Bed -- these are all separate sort of sub-landscapes for him, and every object in the room is his friend."

There are 10 books in the Room, of which five are children's books. Jack loves when his mother reads to him -- and makes sense of the world described in the book in this way:

Ma nearly always chooses The Runaway Bunny, because of how the mother bunny catches the baby bunny in the end and says, "Have a carrot." Bunnies are TV, but carrots are real, I like their loudness. My favorite picture is the baby bunny turned into a rock on the mountain and the mother bunny has to climb up up up to find him. Mountains are too big to be real, I saw one in TV that has a woman hanging on it by ropes. Women aren't real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either. Men aren't real except Old Nick, and I'm not actually sure if he's real for real. Maybe half? He brings groceries and Sunday treat and disappears the trash, but he's not human like us. He only happens in the night, like bats. Maybe Door makes them up with a beep beep and the air changes. I think Ma doesn't like to talk about him in case he gets realer.

'In The Position Of Their Captor'
Donoghue says that her own 5-year-old son, Finn, was a great help to her in finding the voice of her young narrator. Though Jack is a "very peculiar version of a 5-year-old," Donoghue wanted his speech to line up with the speech of any 5-year-old boy learning language in the real world.

"I charted my son's language," Donoghue explains. "I followed him around like an anthropologist -- writing down his strange grammar. And then I chose just a few of those classic 5-year-old traits to give to his speech. For instance, I love the way 5-year-olds try to make the past tense regular -- they all say, 'I eated! I winned!' "

Jack at 5 is unusually verbal because his mother has worked hard to teach him in spite of their extremely deprived circumstances. One game -- called "Parrot" -- shows how Ma makes creative use of the television as an educational tool.

"Ma has very mixed feelings about television," Donoghue says. "I sort of agonized over whether to allow them television or not. I was often in the position of their captor -- working out what they would be allowed to have and what they wouldn't."

Donoghue decided that Ma -- like many parents -- would allow TV, but would use it carefully, limited to just two shows a day. And she uses it as a linguistic coach for Jack.

"She will let him watch TV," Donoghue says, "and she'll suddenly press mute, and she'll ask him to repeat back the last sentence he's heard ... She wants him to be able to understand and repeat back words by someone who isn't her."

Ma coaches Jack on reading and writing, and even gets him to do yoga exercises -- "Preparing him for a world that she prays he will someday get to enter for real," Donoghue says.
'The Cruel Truth Of The World'
As Jack gets older, Ma gradually reveals to him more about the truth of their condition -- an experience that will ring familiar for any parent with young kids. Donoghue says most parents find themselves in the position of having to re-explain the Easter Bunny and other untruths to their children as they grow older.

"Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid," Donoghue says. "But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older."

Donoghue recalls the time her young son pointed to a horrific picture in a magazine that showed six people hanged by the neck. "What's that?" he asked. "Puppets," she answered.

There are moments as a parent, Donoghue says, when you simply cannot bear to tell your children the "cruel truth of the world" -- and Ma is a "concentrated version" of that. She does not want Jack to grow up thinking that he's a prisoner -- and yet to keep that information from him is a betrayal. She has lied to him his whole life.

Like many of her characters, Donoghue says Jack lives inside her -- and now memories of her own relationship with her children are also woven into the book.

"I tried to take the common or garden experience of parenting," Donoghue explains, "and just by isolating it under a spotlight, I tried to bring out the true, crazy drama of parenting."

The parent-child bond, she says, is "the most unstable, unpredictable kind of love story -- and it's asymmetrical in that you will always worry for them, and they won't necessarily worry for you."

Parent-child relationships are often written in "banal and sentimental" ways, she says. "With Room, I was trying to capture the essential drama of parenting."

When she spits the second time it's my go with Toothbrush, I scrub each my teeth all the way around. Ma's spit in Sink doesn't look a bit like me, mine doesn't either. I wash them away and make a vampire smile.

"Argh." Ma covers her eyes. "Your teeth are so clean, they're dazzling me."

Her ones are pretty rotted because she forgetted to brush them, she's sorry and she doesn't forget anymore but they're still rotted.

I flat the chairs and put them beside Door against Clothes Horse. He always grumbles and says there's no room but there's plenty if he stands up really straight. I can fold up flat too but not quite as flat because of my muscles, from being alive. Door's made of shiny magic metal, he goes beep beep after nine when I'm meant to be switched off in Wardrobe.

God's yellow face isn't coming in today, Ma says he's having trouble squeezing through the snow.

"What snow?"

"See," she says, pointing up.

There's a little bit of light at Skylight's top, the rest of her is all dark. TV snow's white but the real isn't, that's weird. "Why it doesn't fall on us?"

"Because it's on the outside."

"In Outer Space? I wish it was inside so I can play with it."

"Ah, but then it would melt, because it's nice and warm in here." She starts humming, I guess right away it's "Let It Snow." I sing the second verse. Then I do "Winter Wonderland" and Ma joins in higher. We have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back on her saucer on Dresser. Plant used to live on Table but God's face burned a leaf of her off. She has nine left, they're the wide of my hand with furriness all over, like Ma says dogs are. But dogs are only TV. I don't like nine. I find a tiny leaf coming, I've seen her two times, that counts as ten.

Spider's real. I look for her now but there's only a web between Table's leg and her flat. Table balances good, that's pretty tricky, when I go on one leg I can do it for ages but then I always fall over. I don't tell Ma about Spider. She brushes webs away, she says they're dirty but they look like extra-thin silver to me. Ma likes the animals that run around eating each other on the wildlife planet, but not real ones. When I was four I was watching ants walking up Stove and she ran and splatted them all so they wouldn't eat our food. One minute they were alive and the next minute they were dirt. I cried so my eyes nearly melted off. Also another time there was a thing in the night nnnnng nnnnng nnnnng biting me and Ma banged him against Door Wall below Shelf, he was a mosquito. The mark is still there on the cork even though she scrubbed, it was my blood the mosquito was stealing, like a teeny vampire. That's the only time my blood ever came out of me.

Ma takes her pill from the silver pack that has twenty-eight little spaceships and I take a vitamin from the bottle with the boy doing a handstand and she takes one from the big bottle with a picture of a woman doing Tennis. Vitamins are medicine for not getting sick and going back to Heaven yet. I never want to go, I don't like dying but Ma says it might be OK when we're a hundred and tired of playing. Also she takes a killer. Sometimes she takes two, never more than two, because some things are good for us but too much is suddenly bad.

"Is it Bad Tooth?" I ask. He's on the top near the back of her mouth, he's the worst.

Ma nods.

"Why you don't take two killers all the bits of every day?"

She makes a face. "Then I'd be hooked."

"What's --?"

"Like stuck on a hook, because I'd need them all the time. Actually I might need more and more."

"What's wrong with needing?"

"It's hard to explain."

Ma knows everything except the things she doesn't remember right, or sometimes she says I'm too young for her to explain a thing.

"My teeth feel a bit better if I stop thinking about them," she tells me.

"How come?"

"It's called mind over matter. If we don't mind, it doesn't matter."

When a bit of me hurts, I always mind. Ma's rubbing my shoulder but my shoulder's not hurting, I like it anyway.

I still don't tell her about the web. It's weird to have something that's mine-not-Ma's. Everything else is both of ours. I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of her cells so I'm kind of hers. Also when I tell her what I'm thinking and she tells me what she's thinking, our each ideas jump into our other's head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

Excerpted from Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue. Copyright 2010 by Emma Donoghue. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Co.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Donoghue's 'Room,' A Child Makes A World Of His Own

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Emma Donoghue's captivating novel Room is narrated by a 5-year-old boy named Jack. The setting is an 11-by-11-foot room where he lives with his mother - and when the book begins, it is the only world he has ever known.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/01/room-emma-donoghue-review-fritzl

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Much hyped on acquisition and by its publisher since (and longlisted for the Booker prize last week), Room is set to be one of the big literary hits of the year. Certainly it is Emma Donoghue's breakout novel, but, seemingly "inspired" by Josef Fritzl's incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth, and the cases of Natascha Kampusch and Sabine Dardenne, it's hard not to feel wary: what is such potentially lurid and voyeuristic material doing in the hands of a novelist known for quirky, stylish literary fiction?

It is a brave act for a writer, but happily one that Donoghue, still only 40 but on her seventh novel, has the talent to pull off. For Room is in many ways what its publisher claims it to be: a novel like no other. The first half takes place entirely within the 12-foot-square room in which a young woman has spent her last seven years since being abducted aged 19. Raped repeatedly, she now has a five-year-old boy, Jack, and it is with his voice that Donoghue tells their story.

And what a voice it is. "Ma" has clearly spent his five years devoting every scrap of mental energy to teaching, nurturing and entertaining her boy, preserving her own sanity in the process. To read this book is to stumble on a completely private world. Every family unit has its own language of codes and in-jokes, and Donoghue captures this exquisitely. Ma has created characters out of all aspects of their room - Wardrobe, Rug, Plant, Meltedy Spoon. They have a TV and Jack loves Dora the Explorer, but Ma limits the time they are allowed to watch it for fear of turning their brains to mush. They do "phys ed" every morning, keep to strict mealtimes, make up poems, sing Lady Gaga and Kylie, and most importantly, Ma has a seemingly endless supply of stories - from the Berlin Wall and Princess Di ("Should have worn her seatbelt," says Jack) to fairytales like Hansel and Gretel to hybrids in which Jack becomes Prince Jackerjack, Gullijack in Lilliput: his mother's own fairytale hero. And really, what is a story of a kidnapped girl locked in a shed with her long-haired innocently precocious boy if not the realisation of the most macabre fairytale?

Donoghue has not been so crass as to make light of their plight: at times it's almost impossible not to turn away in horror. When Ma's kidnapper comes to the room in the evening, she makes Jack hide in the wardrobe, where he listens as they get into bed: "I always have to count till he makes that gaspy sound and stops." Ma has days where she is "gone" to blank-eyed depression and Jack, left to his own devices, reveals: "Mostly I just sit." But the grotesque is consistently balanced with the uplifting and there is a moment, halfway through the novel, where you feel you would fight anyone who tried to wrestle it from your grasp with the same ferocity that Ma fights for Jack, such is the author's power to make out of the most vile circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful.

Thereafter, the setting moved to "Outside", the relationship diluted by alternative voices, by the number of new things with which Jack has to deal, the novel loses some of its intensity and has the more familiar feel of the naive child narratives of Roddy Doyle and Mark Haddon. Jack's introduction to the confusing world of freedom is handled with incredible skill and delicacy - as is his first separation from Ma. But the novel, like Jack, now has to follow a more logical and straightforward path.

For me, the rhythm of Ma and Jack's speech bears traces of the author's native Irish brogue, though the second half reveals the setting to be America (Donoghue now lives in Canada). But this only adds to the strange, dislocating appeal of Room. In the hands of this audacious novelist, Jack's tale is more than a victim-and-survivor story: it works as a study of child development, shows the power of language and storytelling, and is a kind of sustained poem in praise of motherhood and parental love.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Much hyped on acquisition and by its publisher since (and longlisted for the Booker prize last week), Room is set to be one of the big literary hits of the year.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/emma-donoghue-room-book-club
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/01/room-emma-donoghue-review-fritzl

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
hat inspired Room? The shock of motherhood. Back in 2008 when I heard about Elizabeth Fritzl and her children emerging from their Austrian dungeon, our kids were four and one. My first thought was: how did she do that, how did she manage to mother - and mother well - in a locked room? But my second thought was: aren't there moments for every parent, and every child too, when that intimate bond feels like a locked room?

Having his verses misunderstood, Touchstone jests in Shakespeare's As You Like It, "strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room". That's what I wanted Room to be, a great reckoning in a little room. A story of childlike simplicity that would pose the big questions. An existential drama played out in the most confined and pedestrian of settings.

A reckoning can mean a narrative, an account. 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 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. Instead I decided to write something much more peculiar. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. I kept tinkering with the balance of sunshine and darkness.

Jack has to cope with the dizzying revelation that there's a world outside the door. 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. 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.

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. I suppose I could have written about motherhood without having lived it - Lionel Shriver is eerily accurate about its mindgames in We Need to Talk About Kevin - but I suspect that it would have taken me 10 years instead of one.

The constraints of Room made it easier too. Limits are a relief, because they concentrate the drama and free the writer from the torture of choice, as Aristotle knew when he advised playwrights to preserve "the unities" by telling one story in one place over a single day. Not only did I have just one narrator, but Jack was a child. Of course that's tricky when it comes to getting the voice right. (By right I don't mean exactly like a real five-year-old, but a voice that has the ring of childhood yet can hold the attention of the adult reader.) However, having a child narrator is very helpful in terms of point of view, because children are little Martians who see everything afresh and askew. The real technical challenge of the novel was representing Ma as a three-dimensional character, through Jack's lens, which is a very limited one not only because of his age but because she constantly tells him comforting lies.

The strangest effect writing Room had on me was that it put me in the position of the kidnapper. Choosing Ma and Jack's shabby furniture online, picking the total of 10 books I would grant them, I realised that the novelist is always the tyrannical puppet-master who furnishes and soundproofs the cell before she locks her characters in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What inspired Room? The shock of motherhood. Back in 2008 when I heard about Elizabeth Fritzl and her children emerging from their Austrian dungeon, our kids were four and one. My first thought was: how did she do that, how did she manage to mother - and mother well - in a locked room?