*CONTENT WARNING- this article contains spoilers for the book ‘In At The Deep End’ by Kate Davies, and discusses emotional abuse and manipulation in relationships.*
At 2am this morning, I lay awake. Tossing and turning in my bed, unable to sleep, I’d read just under half a Beauvoir novel before my mind could no longer take any more French, but fatigue hadn’t quite hit me yet. So, I padded over to my sister’s room to pick out a book to send me to sleep. Her book collection (though largely composed of books she’s robbed from my room) tends to be rife with queer, feminist, or lesbian fiction- often my ideal genres- and I scoured the piles adorning her shelves. I needed something contemporary, modern, an easy read; preferably, I thought, something akin to a rom-com. Light and airy, just entertaining enough to prevent boredom and just unentertaining enough to make my eyes heavy. A bright blue cover jumped out at me, with flashy, intriguing, yellow text: ‘In At The Deep End’ by Kate Davies. Bleary, willing for fatigue to come, I grabbed it, presuming I’d be met with a cheerful romantic tale, and opened the book once I was cocooned in my covers. But I was shocked to find that this book held so much more than I initially presumed.
The book begins with the protagonist, Julia, a 26-year-old civil servant and ex-dancer (forced to quit as a result of a badly broken ankle), overhearing her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend having sex in their room in the flat that they all share, an event which prompts her to recall that she has not had sex in three years. She is encouraged to ‘get out there’, has unappealing sex with a man, and, shortly after, followed by a sexual encounter with a promiscuous artist named Jane, she realises that she is actually a lesbian. It’s a sudden and fairly surprising revelation; I was around 60 pages in when I started to wonder why I was being subjected to reading about a plain, indistinctive woman- and then the sexuality crisis occured and I paused as the real premise of the novel dawned on me. This wasn’t a novel about a straight woman having bad sex, this was a novel about a woman discovering her sexuality! (Though, spoiler alert, it isn’t entirely that, either.)
Call it bias, but after this, the story suddenly made sense to me. I had started off with a vague, dispassionate disinterest in Julia, but by the end of the novel I loved her character and felt all of her emotions with her. She enters this strange new world that she barely knew existed- the queer scene in London- and throws herself in at the deep end of her sexual awakening by joining a queer swing dancing class and starting to date. The date that sticks is the second woman she sleeps with: a masc lesbian called Sam, through whom Julia is introduced to the complexities of the lesbian friendship and dating scene in London and, arguably most importantly, BDSM, sexual exploration and polyamory. As the relationship progresses, however, it spirals, beyond the innocent first love that Julia thought it could be. It shifts into an emotionally abusive and manipulative relationship, with Julia gradually becoming more and more influenced, controlled, and emotionally broken by Sam.
The abusive relationship was something that was completely unexpected to me as a reader. I appreciate a novel that takes me by surprise as I have a habit of predicting plotlines (something which is incredibly annoying, both to me and anyone who recommends any form of media to me). The title suddenly seemed, in retrospect, far too apt- I initially thought that it was a reference to her lesbianism, then her involvement in BDSM and non-monogamy, then realised it applied to her relationship with Sam, too. The whole last third of this novel felt like a burgeoning panic attack, and I could hardly put it down. I was itching to know what would happen and the author did an incredible job of conveying the protagonist’s eternal sense of dread and anxiety, as there really was this feeling of being trapped, struggling to breathe underwater as I read about Julia’s life.
In the aftermath of ending this abusive relationship, her therapist says to her: ‘She made you feel like you had a purpose, didn’t she? But that was all an illusion, wasn’t it?’. It got me thinking (as the whole book did) about abusive relationships, ones that don’t necessarily fit the simple category, say, of someone physically hitting someone else, of someone outright cutting off someone’s expenses, or of someone explicitly saying ‘you cannot see these people anymore’. The more I thought about it the more I realised the quite obvious fact that there really aren’t any abusive relationships that do fit simply into this clear-cut, literal definition of abuse. There’s always multiple perspectives, there’s always the moments shared between the couple that the outside spectators- friends, family, colleagues- do not, can not, and will never be able to see; there’s always the justifications, there’s always the disbelief that it can really be considered abusive because it isn’t as simple and straightforward and defined as abusive relationships are ‘meant’ to be. I think some of the brilliance of this book is how much it caught me off guard, how little I expected it, and even how I ended the book with a slight uncertainty when calling the relationship abusive. I questioned myself with the protagonist’s voice, I wondered if it was that simple and tried briefly to justify the abuser. There’s a scene, a really powerful scene, in which Julia tells Sam to fuck off and Sam accuses Julia of abusing her. It’s entirely disconcerting; Kate Davies depicts Sam gaslighting Julia so incredibly well that it makes the reader question themselves and their understanding of this relationship, too.
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‘And they didn’t see the good things about Sam- the way she’d always bring me tea in bed in the morning, the adventures she took me on, the way she made me feel like I could do anything. As long as I was doing it with her.’
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Julia loses track of herself in the relationship, though this may be because she wasn’t sure who she was before entering into it; not only in the sense of sexual orientation and identity, as a freshly out and self-discovered lesbian, but due to the fact that she was working a low-paid, temporary, uncontracted job that she was generally dispassionate about. She is an ex-dancer, unable to dance en pointe following an ankle injury, and unsure of who she is outside of this talent. She’s from a middle-class background, her parents residing in Oxford where her father is a professor, and their conversations revolve around trivial and painfully middle-class shenanigans, such as Christmas decorations and work and the neighbours’ building developments being an eyesore. It’s the type of thing that can make your eyes roll at first, until you find yourself caring so deeply for this character: start to understand the authorial intention, start to feel the tenderness of her relationship with her parents, and start to comprehend that, though she begins a relatively plain, ordinary and generic protagonist, she ends as a strange mixture of much more than that, yet simultaneously nothing more. She feels excitement post-fear of discovering her lesbianism, for want of another identity and label and something to make her appear slightly more interesting. However, she comes to realise that, while an intricate and undeniable aspect of her life, her lesbianism cannot save her from inequality in relationships, cannot be the lifeline that links her to her own identity or defines who she is. It is partly because she is so unsure of herself and who she is that she is pursued by Sam, and why she doesn’t listen to her friends or family when told to leave the relationship: as her therapist said, it gave her purpose, it made her life interesting, it distracted her from things like job interviews or her redundancy or her purpose in society beyond the label of someone’s girlfriend. She’s a masochist, but she doesn’t want to be- the relationship is a twisted form of self harm, one in which she buries herself like an ostrich buries its head in the sand, acting as a pair of blinkers that shield her from the blinding emptiness and loneliness she feels in her life.
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‘She had padded out my days and nights and thoughts, like polystyrene, and I was rattling around without her. I needed to fill my life up again.’
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In an attempt to leave some of this article spoiler-free (though I promise, there is so much more to the book than the parts I’ve discussed), I won’t breach the contents of the ending, besides acknowledging Julia’s resolution to search for herself and her identity again. This book is stressful, heartbreaking, exciting, unlike so many other books I’ve read before. It is about sexuality, relationships, emotional manipulation, being a daughter, being a civil service worker, being a woman, being a lesbian; it is about failure and success and the winding roads you have to go down in search of yourself. It’s an intense book, one which I wouldn’t recommend lightly; but, for those who feel comfortable reading about these subjects, it is a truly moving and visceral read and you may end up, like me, holding Julia’s character close to your heart.