CCChat_The-Jess-Hill-Interview

A conversation with Jess Hill
I think that, for a lot of people, a
second isolating process comes
after either the abuse has
finished or the relationship has
ended and they may still be being
subjected to being controlled.
The second part of the isolation is
the social isolation that comes
from feeling like a freak. Feeling
like no-one could possibly
understand what’s happened to
you, you don’t even understand it
fully yourself, and you’ve done
things that you might even be
ashamed of, or that you wouldn’t
ordinarily have done, were you
not in that situation.
I think that people often get
rejected by their
friends, who might think it’s too
hard, or might side with the other
partner, but a lot of people pull
away from that social contact
because they don’t know how to
be in this world anymore.
The reason I wrote it, and it
changed and shape-shifted over
the time I was writing it, it took
about 4 years or so, was to give
back that language and that’s
why, I replicated, not the process
of coercive control, but certainly
the isolation and the otherwordliness
of it by completely
cutting off from social life.
Every time I sat down to write, it
was like trying to drill down
deeper and deeper into the
subconscious or even
unconscious feelings that
coercive control would trigger. I
wanted to make the reader,
whether they had experienced it
or not, feel it viscerally and for
survivors to read it and go ‘ that’s
my story, someone has finally
told my story.’
M : Your book really did that,
and it also make me think more
broadly, not just of my own
experiences, but what I have
heard from others.
J: I’m glad, because it was very
hard for me to know except that I
kept testing it with people I’d
speak to. I’d have a conversation,
like an interview. that would
maybe run for a couple of hours,
and I might not even have used
the interview itself, but they
would have said one little
important thing which would
have changed one line in the
book and that one line was
crucial.
It was incredibly important to get
it exactly, as close to right as one
can and to really interrogate
every single thing I was saying so
that it wasn’t too shallow, or too
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