The Story: The Woman in the Room
[Night Shift, 1978; Original to the publication]
Aaron: I said in the brief intro to this piece that The Woman in the Room represents a slight change of pace for our young blog, but now that I think about it, this is a larger gearshift than I initially thought. Not only are we skipping all the way to the end of the Night Shift collection (up until this point we had been more or less going in published order), but also we’re covering our first story to not feature any sign of the supernatural or fantastic. There are no demonic machines in The Woman in the Room, no rabid mutant vermin, and no apocalypses, unless you count the deeply personal, emotional kind. The tone here skews closest to the mood-piece that was Night Surf, but it lacks a hook as splashy as a humanity-destroying plague. Despite his evident love of the genre, not everything Stephen King has written has fit under the horror banner, and this stands out as an early example of his more conventional fiction.At this point I’d normally begin talking about when I first read this story, and what memories I have associated with it, but right now any tale I told would be a lie, because I literally have no memory of reading this story. I know I did read it, I know that for a fact, but as I was reading along nothing stirred my memory. For everything we’ve covered so far, events would unfold in my memory slightly ahead of me reading them, and yet everything in this story was brand new. That’s not entirely surprising, because once again we need to take into account the age at which I first read these stories. As I said in an earlier piece, I was around thirteen or fourteen years old at the time, and so the stories that really stuck with me were the more outrageous, gory, macabre, and vicious tales. I wasn’t really in the market for more mature meditations on death and loss, and so The Woman in the Room failed to make a huge impression on my younger self, and I just never revisited it over the years in the way I did with some of the other stories in this collection. I think that’s for the best, actually; I think I’ve rediscovered this story at an age where I can now fully appreciate its style and themes.
Before I go too much further, Rik, I’d like to hear your history with this story, if you have one. Did this one make any sort of impression on you when you first read it as a much younger man? Have you had occasion to revisit it over the years?
Rik: As I mentioned in our previous pieces on the stories that make up Night Shift, I have not read the collection in well over 25 years. So the answer would be, no, I have not revisited it at all. And frankly, apart from having seen Frank Darabont’s student film version of The Woman in the Room many years ago and keeping a nudging awareness of that short film’s presence in my more cinema-oriented mindset (despite my also not having seen in it in over a quarter century), I would have quite forgotten the story altogether.
This is not a critique of the King’s story, mind you; this is more of an admittance of my lack of interest in the subject at hand at the time of its publication. As an older teenager-slash-young adult, you feel immortal to a certain extent. Everything is ahead of you, and the common concerns of older people are simply not your worry. You, at such an age, bounce back from every type of pain, physical, mental, or emotional, and a big part of bouncing back seemingly scot-free is the ability to block out the drama around you. For me, this included what I considered to be “straight” drama, whether it was on TV, on the movie screen, or on the printed page. I had almost no interest in an Oscar-winning dramatic film like Robert Redford’s Ordinary People at the time, and a fully vested, 100% interest in a surrealistic nightmare like David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
In other words, a rather straight story that sinks deeply into the mind of a man obsessed with his mother’s impending death from cancer was just not in my wheelhouse at the time, and so it left little impression on me. Just as I then disdained what I considered to be normal dramatics, so I also chose the targets of my attention for their very weirdness in comparison to such normalcy. And I was definitely NOT reading King for depth of thought or the excellence he maintained in practicing his craft. No, I was reading him solely because he told better, scarier stories than anyone else that I had read at the time. He had the monsters that I craved, and the gruesomeness. I wanted sick, violent stories with last second twists or darkly comedic moments. While the notion of a man slowly feeding his mother an overdose of painkillers certainly ambles into “sick” territory on the measure of an episode of the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, it was not enough to capture my attention at the time that I read The Woman in the Room.
Thus, apart from the title (due to Darabont’s film), I had forgotten completely what the short story was even about, and it was only upon reading the opening paragraphs that the story and its style – as have other Night Shift stories – sprang back into my consciousness.
Before we continue to the story itself, I want to mention the title of the story briefly. The title The Woman in the Room never really struck me until I picked up the story to revisit recently. The starkness of the title suddenly revealed itself to me as efficiently cold; it suddenly became a description uttered by someone who is too numbed by tragic circumstances that wishes to distance oneself from the darkening and slowly tightening reality of such an unbearable situation.
Aaron: I’m right there with you on the title. The Woman in the Room. It’s evocative, to be sure, but it’s also nondescript and vague enough to give the reader no idea of what to expect. It certainly did me no favors as I tried to recall the plot of the story in advance of this piece. But then, in context of what the story actually is, the title becomes heartbreaking. The woman in the room, turns out to be Johnny’s mother, dying slowly and painfully of cancer in a hospital bed. That simple, impersonal noun in reference to the man’s clearly beloved mother is telling, as it reflects both the state “the woman” finds herself in, and the mental distancing the man goes through in order to do something he is deeply conflicted about. Johnny’s mother is no longer the mother he knew, she’s little more than a shell with periodic moments of lucidity, a shadow of her former self, and at times a near stranger. Johnny, in order to end her suffering, tries to redefine her as something other than the person who gave him life, and of course he can never be entirely successful in that regard.
The Woman in the Room is one of the most personal fictions I’ve ever read from Stephen King. The only other one that comes close, that I can recall, was Duma Key, in which a man’s recovery from a near-fatal vehicular accident through the aid of his art was intimately informed by King’s own recovery from the 1999 traffic accident that nearly killed him. I think he cuts a bit closer to the bone with this story, which was clearly inspired by the cancer-related death of King’s own mother in 1973. This story was never published anywhere prior to Night Shift in 1978, but it’s safe to assume the emotion was still fresh in King’s mind while he wrote this tale. While Stephen King may not have lovingly fed his mother an overdose of pain medication, it’s hard to read this story without imagining the flights of fancy King must have indulged in during, and after, his mother’s death.
One of the reasons you can tell this was a deeply personal story is the way King absolutely nails, through both words and technique, the way time passes when facing the imminent death of a loved one. The dazed manner in which events are processed, so that your life enters a dreamlike state, where scenes bleed into each other, punctuated by moments of clarity. I said up above that I rediscovered this story at the right age, because as a young teen I was completely unfamiliar with death as anything beyond a vague concept. Now, two decades on, I’ve lost a few friends, a few family members, and I’ve watched friends and family deal with the shocking fact of death. Several years ago, one of my uncles passed away from cancer, and it was impossible to not think of him while I read this story.
When I say one of my uncles, it should also be said that I grew up in constant contact with all of my aunts and uncles, as we all shared a large house with my grandparents for most of my childhood, and even when people moved away it was still within a near enough distance that we saw each other several times a week. And so we were all very close as I grew up, although that changed a bit over time, as my teenage years kicked in and people started families of their own. When my uncle got sick he was already fading out of my life, though I still saw him frequently. I remember visiting him, though, on the night he passed away, and being shocked at what I saw before me. This man, who had been such a huge part of my life, who had been a captain for a highly successful charter tour company that he started, who had taken me camping several times every summer of my childhood, who had taken me skiing and sledding and fishing countless times, and tried his best to impress a love of nature on his odd, bookworm nephew, was entirely unrecognizable. He was, almost literally, a skeleton, shrunken down to such a body mass that seems inconceivable that he could still be living, even with the expensive row of medical equipment aiding him in most bodily functions. He was more than just physically different, and it was hard to see him as the same man who had introduced me to Bruce Lee and Die Hard.
The other great insight Stephen King had in this story is the way that death can become, paradoxically, really fairly boring. When someone close to you is dying, there always comes a time when part of you just wants the horrible final act to just happen already. It’s maybe not the nicest thing to say, but it can be so much worse waiting for the other shoe to drop that you get the urge to tear the band-aid off and get into the business of grieving and moving on. The endless flow of incidents and events in your life become heightened in the mundanity, a string of awkward silences and interchangeable waiting rooms and repeated platitudes. The effect is numbing, and it can seem appealing to just get it over with, to get past the hard part. Because death is easy, it’s dying that’s hard. Especially on the living.
But hey, I fear I may have brought the tone down in a small wave of despair, allowing my often-maudlin nature to seep into my writing here (a cumulative side effect of my many sleepless nights recently), so I’ll throw it over to you. I’m assuming this story had it’s own newfound associations for you, as you revisited it as an adult with an entirely different set of priorities and emotional connections. How did you find the experience of revisiting this tale?
Rik: Wow. Given the heartache at the center of this story and the more obvious heartache which must have overwhelmed King during its writing, your reflections are entirely apt. For myself, the story doesn’t hit home quite as precisely for me, even a quarter of a century later. Now that I have slipped over to the farther side of middle age, and wrestled hard with the issue of my own self-destruction in recent years, the subject of mortality seems to be a recurring one in my life. I made the realization a couple of years ago that my life has been blessedly free of major tragedy. A grandparent dies of old age or the parents of close friends go a bit earlier than expected here and there. My wife (then my girlfriend) had a bout with cancer early on in our relationship, but that ship righted itself in short order (though I did lose a first cousin to cancer not long ago as well). Otherwise, all of my nearest, dearest, and closest are still kicking about in the world.
And that is the catch of making such a realization about the good fortune of your friends and family (and thus, yourself)… when does the onslaught of misery begin? When does life become an endless procession of funeral service after funeral service, or relentless visits to hospitals, or tragic phone calls in the middle of the night? Truthfully, while some might believe that my life has been largely blessed by avoiding major tragedy to this point, I see nothing but pain and woe ahead, and because I have not had to deal very harshly with the realities of life in this area, I am terribly unprepared for it. I had a hard enough time when my beloved dog died a while back, enough so that it added to my suicidal ideation and need for medical guidance and therapy.
Such concerns are the chief reason why I dove into fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the first place. While there may be real situations that inspired some of the stories, the element of the fantastical is so strong that one can divorce oneself from the reality behind it and just enjoy the tale being told. You may be well aware of the metaphorical thrust of the writing, but there is usually enough fantasy coating the proceedings that you can choose to ignore any of the more dramatic elements built into the piece.
Which is why The Woman in the Room is so hard-hitting today. I must have discounted it back then as unnecessary to my enjoyment of Night Shift, and thereby forgot about it in the process. I know that I read it, but because The Woman in the Room wasn’t all bloody and extreme in violence or had a serial killer hiding in a closet or a malevolent force hiding behind cornrows or a ravenous monster somewhere or other, I accepted it as too much of real life and not worthy of true attention at the time.
Reading it now, while it certainly doesn’t hit as close to home for me as it does for you (and is really not something I want to read even now, especially given that someone in my own life is going in for surgery soon, so I really want it to hit even further away from home than it already does), the story is staggering in its quiet intensity. The Woman in the Room is a gut-puncher. King really makes you wonder how you will do in such a situation (and odds are, such a situation will greet most of us in the future, near or far). The answer is, most of us will do OK, and we are going to make some small mistakes, and we will have some regrets of not saying this or that when we possibly should have, but in the end, it will be about making our loved one as comfortable in their exit as we can. I doubt most of us would ever go to the lengths as Johnny does in The Woman in the Room, and I would hope that I never have to do so.
When I first started reading the story on the Kindle on my iPhone, there was a strange break early on where the text leaves off after the word “She” and picks up again a few lines down with “is in the Central Maine Hospital”. At first, because Kindle does strange things with page layout -- I have had books with photos where the text completely realigns when going back and forth a few times -- I thought maybe it was just a problem with the file. But then I realized (because it had been so long since I actually held the book version) that it was a stylistic thing that King was attempting, providing short breaks in his story (almost like chapters) while reinforcing the feeling, at least for me, that because of the tragedy of the situation, Johnny was possibly having blackouts in his memory, or losing track of time or meaning in his life, or was simply blocking out as much as possibly to keep carrying forward. The abrupt breaks in the middle of the sentence were meant to amplify this mood, one of being utterly lost in one’s own circumstances, quite at sea as to what he should do. How do you feel about this?
Aaron: Before I answer your question, I feel the need to address something you said up above. You mention your reaction to the death of your dog as some sort of indicator that you will not handle loss well, and yet I beg to differ. Of all the losses in my life, I have never cried harder or mourned more deeply than when I had to put both of my cats, who I’d raised from kittenhood sixteen years earlier, to sleep within the same week. In fact, as callow as this may sound, I’ve never cried at the death of any person, no matter how deep the connection or close the relation. But my pets? Uncontrollable sobbing for hours, and a deep depression for weeks. But that makes sense in a way, as well. Animals are blank slates, in a way, informed more by the personalities we read into their actions or the bonds we impose upon them. The love and companionship is pure and unsullied, which can never be true for a human being, no matter how beloved they are. I think King acknowledges this in the story, where the only memory Johnny indulges in of his mother before her illness is one where he was punished fairly severely (at least by today’s standards of child-rearing). Our relationships with our families are so complicated by moments of comfort and joy and instances of profound anger and hurt. It’s a lot of emotion to process at once, and I’ve found that I have a pretty delayed reaction to the losses I’ve experienced; I feel saddened, but not shattered, and it’s only over time that the magnitude of what is missing reveals itself. My uncle and I had not been on good terms when he passed, and I never took the chance to make proper amends, although plenty of chances I was definitely given. At the time of his death I felt sad, but more for the people around me who were so clearly grieving. (As I said up above; death is hardest for the living.) But over the years I’ve had several dreams about him, and often I’ll say something in a tone of voice that I immediately recognize as his, and it’s at these times that I realize he’s gone, and, perhaps a bit selfishly, so is that part of my life.
I used to feel guilty about this lack of overwhelming sadness when faced with the death of a loved one. When my grandfather was killed by a drunk driver (again, he had been a constant presence in my life) I couldn’t get away from my family fast enough, and ran off to spend the day with friends. That I do feel bad about, but I was terrified of spending the day with people I would feel incapable of connecting with. All that grief, and me with no hope of mirroring it or easing it. I don’t want to give the impression that I am uncaring, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve come to understand my reaction to these circumstances a bit better. I, personally, find nothing to be sad about for the person who has passed. Whatever your personal belief structure, I think we can agree that whatever their problems had been, they’re over now. Instead I see grief at someone’s death not about the fact that they’ve died, but about the loss we will experience in our life. The dead are beyond it all, while the living will carry the memory. And I think that’s lovely. I see no reason to be sad when a person has died, beyond knowing that I won’t be able to hang out with them anymore. But the astronomical odds against two specific people occupying the same space and time in this universe make the simple fact of knowing and loving someone a cause for celebration. To spend my time depressed that it’s over seems… vain, somehow.
But to answer your question, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head, but I wouldn’t quite use the term “blackout” to describe what Johnny is going through. I think the elliptical nature of the passages, how each one leads into the next, while also starting and stopping in mid-sentence, letting paragraphs trail off unfinished, highlights the emotionally stunned headspace Johnny finds himself in. Johnny’s life is now a string of obligatory hospital visits, dutifully and lovingly made but unpleasant and depressing. There’s no real defining moment in his life right now beyond the approaching death of his mother, and everything else becomes a dissociated blur. But look then at what does make it through the haze: the way IV bags hang down, the water fountain in the hallway, the way the doctor looks at the ceiling tiles while he thinks. Utter mundanity. The things you’d normally ignore become bright and crystal clear, burned into your memory. Perhap that is just a coping mechanism, a way to focus on smaller things in order to avoid the larger issue at hand. Or perhaps it’s a way of preserving the moment, of taking in everything that you normally overlook and storing it away. It could be Johnny’s mind creating a sort of personal file for this experience, segmenting and compartmentalizing this moment away from the rest of his life while storing everything in this event in crystal clarity. THIS is important stuff. THIS is what you will remember for the rest of your life.
That story structure really impressed me on my first read through (technically second, but we’ll say first because I had no memory of the earlier reading), and then blew me away on my second. First, we have the elliptical nature of the segments, which combine two different statements and sentiments and still remain coherent, but then you have the combined effect of the segments themselves. Nothing in this story is presented in a strictly chronological order, and there’s really no attempt made to ground the reader in a specific time, or to delineate between the visits. Johnny arrives at the hospital room a couple of times, leaves a few more, and we’re never sure which visit is the climactic one and which were earlier on before the fateful decision was made. An oblique non sequitur will occur, and then a few pages later we’ll see the explanation for the reference. The reader is as untethered as Johnny, and yet the story still makes complete sense, and nothing is confusing or inscrutable by the end of the tale.
What makes this even more striking for me is the emotion at play in the story (though clearly I bring a lot of that emotion to the table myself). If I were to single out one complaint about Stephen King’s writing in general, it’s that he is not a very emotional writer. Not that he’s a callow robot; I believe he’s a warm and emotional person in his personal life, but in his books he never really succeeds at conveying the mystifying effects of love, loss, sadness, or joy. Needless to say, I did not find that the case with The Woman in the Room, which had such a depth of emotion in it that I find the prospect of picking it up again a little daunting. Despite its focus on the dull and commonplace, King was writing from a place of deep personal feeling, and that informed every page, paragraph, and sentence.
What say you? Am I alone in thinking King does not normally handle emotion with the skill he displays here?
Rik: First, some unfinished business. You differed with me on how I might handle personal loss in regards to my reaction when my dog died, believing that I might be OK, since you have cried more at the loss of pets over people in your experience. That’s the catch: your opinion on how I may handle such loss is based on your own reactions, and not on mine. In my sentence about my dog’s death, this is the key phrase: “that it added to my suicidal ideation and need for medical guidance and therapy.” Losing Isabelle didn’t cause my depression, anxiousness, eventual nervous breakdown, and urge towards self destruction. Her loss merely amplified my already long-existing depressive state and anxiety to a point where hospitalization was an eventuality. At no point in my previous text did I speak of my own physical reactions to the deaths of others, i.e. humans, in my personal circle. I just expressed my fear of them. Assuredly, I have cried quite robustly many times over the deaths of grandparents, my cousin, parents of friends with whom I had a close relationship, and even a few celebrities of whom I had no personal acquaintance at all, just deep worship of their talents. I am a veritable waterworks. I am a fountain for hire, if the pay is decent. (Hell, I can be rented cheaply these days.) In my spousal relationship, I am the emotional one. Compared to me, Jen is practically a Vulcan.
What I am saying is that I handle these things as poorly with humans as I do with animals. Sure, I cried rivers of tears over losing three dogs and a cat in the past decade or so, but what I really fear is losing my family and friends. And because my life to this point has been largely tragedy free, especially given how large my circle of friends is, it makes that fear almost untenable at times for me. I actually have sleepless nights mulling over it. As an example, Jen’s cancer scare was at the very beginning of our relationship; were it to occur now, I don’t know what I would do. Thankfully, she has been clear of further problems with it over the fifteen years since, but were it to reoccur, my world would be rocked. I am fairly certain that on most days, she is all that holds me from spinning out altogether.
Once more getting back to the point of this article (not that all of this musing on the morbidity of death isn’t the point), and to answer your question, I agree that this is probably is the most emotional I remember King being on paper. This is not to say that he is not emotional in other writings. It is hard, as a horror writer, to sell the terror of a situation if you not keyed in somehow to the feelings of your characters. But The Woman in the Room, as you stated in reference to the basis for the story, is probably the most nakedly emotional he has been. It is clear that this raw nerve that has been uncovered in the form of Johnny is really his raw nerve. Every thought, though perhaps altered for a fictional narrative, is drawn from a form of thought he probably had sitting up late nights bleary-eyed in an uncomfortable chair in the corner of a hospital room, hearing the repetitive click-clack-wheezing and blip-blip-bleeping of mechanical devices meant to prolong the life of someone who would rather just let go of the constant pain already.
I have to say, this story, while exceedingly intriguing and well-written, is a bit too painful to really for me to carry on about it much more. I would prefer that we skip over to Frank Darabont’s filmed Dollar Baby version of the story at this juncture.
Aaron: I certainly did not mean to imply that your emotional reactions are somehow “wrong” while mine are somehow “right”. Nobody reacts to anything the same way, and we all process emotions differently. Rather I meant to explain my viewpoint, and possibly a few words of support or comfort to anyone who has dealt with, or is currently dealing with, loss. In fact, for many years I felt there was something wrong in the way I reacted to the death of loved ones, and it left me feeling lonely, guilty, and excluded when I found myself unable to join in the healing, natural mourning process. This attitude I have today is the result of years of thought and emotional searching, and I’ve reached a place where I feel comfortable with the fact of death (though, like you, I am not immune to sleepless, worried nights, often related to my status as a father of two). If, through my words here, I can help someone in some small ways come to grips with this most universal, and most intensely personal of human experiences, then I would be overjoyed. Certainly that was part of what the original intention behind The Woman In The Room was; to work through grief while also, hopefully, helping readers to connect with the emotion in the story and in turn exorcise some of their own pain.
I’m with you; I think it may be time to move forward in our coverage. It’s funny, actually. I chose to cover this story as a way to bang out a quick edition of We Who Watch while we both deal with unpredictably busy summers, and yet it turned out to be a deeper commitment than I had expected. Certainly we’ve both gone deeper in our personal disclosures than ever before on this blog, and while I wouldn’t say it’s been draining or trying, I would say I’m ready to close the book (pun only partially intended) on this one.
So what say we pick this back up in a couple of days, with a discussion of Frank Darabont’s student film version of the story, and the birth of the Dollar Baby?
[To be continued in Part II on Friday, August 26...]
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