©Bill Bradford

Driving from Bagni di Lucca in northern Italy to London recently, using my black labrador, Marmite, as a psychoanalyst (he is good—sparing with interpretation but a deeply thoughtful listener), I had two audiobooks on the go. In the first, Alice Hoffman’s Illumination Night, published in 1987, the main character Vonny becomes agoraphobic as her estranged father refuses to contribute to her son’s medical bills and her husband begins an affair with a teenager. Her agoraphobia, which she tries to hide by lying, is treated with long-distance therapy and she starts to make small journeys out, building up to longer drives and then ultimate freedom and plot-driven catastrophe.

In the second, Proust’s Swann’s Way, published in 1913, I was introduced to Aunt Léonie, a bedridden lady who “always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly.” But she also talks constantly “because she believed it was beneficial to her throat.” Though there clearly is something broken in her head, the family accept her as she is, pandering to her whims until she eventually dies.

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