Kidnapped: Fact and Fiction

Yesterday I began writing an introduction similar to this one by Jon Michaud.. 

Since the news from Cleveland broke earlier this week, I have been thinking about Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. Published in the autumn of 2010, Room is narrated by a five-year-old boy named Jack who, along with his twenty-six-year-old mother—“Ma”—is imprisoned in a one-room structure by a man referred to only as Old Nick. Jack is the product of rape, but his mother strives to keep the truth of their situation from him, maintaining the illusion that their eleven-foot-by-eleven-foot prison is the extent of the real world and that everything else is TV.  

I imagine anyone who has read Room, has thought of Donaghue's novel as the painful details of the kidnapping in Cleveland emerge.  I read Room fairly recently, and the novel is a bizarre shadow to the Cleveland story.  Even though the novel is a story of a horrifying situation, it is told so as to leave the reader with hope.  I even found some of the scenes between Ma and Jack rather beautiful.  However, Ma's adjustment to freedom is quite painful.  I can’t imagine what the three Cleveland women are going through right now.  The similarities between fiction and reality are curious and unsettling.