As varied as our OCD stories can be, it always amazes me when I relate with someone’s story as much as I have with that of today’s guest, Claire Ross Dunn. We both have a thing with the number eight, we both have obsessions around a fear of fire, and we both put our book drafts in a drawer for several years before we finally got them published. And I am so glad Claire wrote her book, At Last Count! (Stay tuned for a review in a few weeks.) Read more about Claire’s inspiration for the book, how she navigated OCD before resources were widely available, and how she’s doing now. Thank you, Claire!
You recently published your first book, At Last Count, a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist has OCD. What inspired you to write At Last Count?
I did not set out to write a book about OCD. I started a writers’ circle with two friends around 2005 to create a space where I could just write for pleasure. The world of film and television, which is where I predominantly make my living, can be quite high stress, and I was glad to find a space for writing just for the joy of it. I started writing a short story about an introvert who falls in love with a bookseller at a very famous bookstore in Toronto, that is now closed, called the Albert Britnell Book Shop. It was a classic bookstore with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves with ladders, and very knowledgeable staff; a dreamy place. So I was working on this short story, and two arts council literature grant deadlines to write books came up. We challenged each other to submit, and I received both of them. Suddenly I realized I had to write a novel, even though I didn’t know how. That’s how At Last Count started.
It wasn’t until many drafts and two fiction writing courses later, after I had submitted to three publishers and had been very gently rejected, that I realized suddenly that I was writing a book about OCD, and about my own experience in my youth with OCD. So ultimately, even though I didn’t know it, I guess my own OCD was the inspiration. But it took a very roundabout course. I think I had to coax my own brain into it.
Writing a book (and getting it published, no less!) is no small feat. Writing a book about a disorder that caused you so much personal pain even more so. Can you tell us about the writing experience? Did you question your decision?
Did I question that decision? Absolutely—only about a hundred times. I felt tremendous levels of stress submitting the book to publishers. That would have been around 2012. I knew the book was good enough to submit, because I had worked with several editors and mentors, all of whom I trusted. And so I was surprised at the level of stress I was feeling, given how often I pitch to producers and broadcasters in my life in television. What was up with all the stress? I literally couldn’t breathe.
After all three publishers said no thank you, and they all were very kind about it—they liked the book, but it wasn’t right for them—I felt tremendous relief. It was in that moment that I suddenly realized I had written about my OCD experience. I had conceived a book that was entirely fictional about a woman and her complex love affair with a childhood nemesis, but I’d actually written it from this very true place of having suffered from this OCD as a young person. And I just wasn’t sure what to do with any of it.
On a practical level, I was afraid that people in TV would find out that I had struggled so much with this anxiety disorder as a youth. I was probably through the worst of it by my mid-20s, but I will admit that I still have shadows of it to this day. There are things I will and won’t do, things that I know to stay away from because they are triggers, and just a general higher level of anxiety than the regular person.
So when those three publishers said no thank you in 2012, I shoved the book in a drawer for eight years. I told myself that trying to publish a book was folly—I’ve read that the rate of people getting their book published lies somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, so the chances of it happening are really low. I told myself that I had a successful career in television, and didn’t need to publish a book.
I didn’t really think about the book again until 2020, when COVID struck. The Canada Council for the Arts came out with a $5,000 grant to digitally pivot any project artists had on deck—a brilliant way they were trying to sustain the artist community that had been so badly affected by the pandemic—so I decided to apply. I couldn’t think of anything I could do for $5,000 in television, but suddenly I had this brainwave: I could record an audiobook of At Last Count. That, I felt I could do for $5,000.
Even then, I thought: I don’t have to admit to anybody that the book is inspired by my own experience with OCD. It will just be a small COVID project, no one will know, and it will keep me artistically occupied during the pandemic. But as luck would have it, I hired a wonderful and very experienced editor, Alex Schultz, who I thought should kick the tires on the book before I hired actors and an audiobook director. And he loved the book so much, he offered to submit it to a publisher, Invisible Publishing. Of course I was overjoyed, but I was also suddenly plunged right back into the dilemma that I’d had before, which was that if a publisher were to like it and want it, I would likely have to talk about the OCD. So I crossed my fingers and toes hoping that that wouldn’t be the case, but right before Alex passed it to the publisher, he called me and said, “I have to ask you about the OCD. Is this your personal experience?” My knees literally shook during that phone call, even though Alex is as lovely as can be. I was just terrified to talk about it.
So for the first time in my life, I had to admit to someone I didn’t know very well that I had OCD. It was scary, but I got through it. I’m so glad I did. I had the same conversation with the publisher when they offered to publish it, and even though that was scary, too, my knees shook less. Each time I have the conversation, I get a bit more used to talking about it. Still, as we went through the pre-publication process, which takes about a year and a half, I started to wonder if I’d made the right choice. Of course I knew I had, on a very deep level, because there’s truly nothing more joyful for a writer than publishing a novel, and I adore my publishers.
What do you hope readers will walk away with after reading At Last Count? Do you think they’ll be surprised by the depiction of OCD in the book—at least if they don’t know much beyond the surface?
I hope readers will come away with a few different things.
One, empathy about the internal experience of OCD. There is not one thing that is fun about it, to put it mildly. It’s a terrible, awful thing, something you wouldn’t wish on anybody. I struggled with it alone when I was young, because it was the 70s, and because there was no Internet where I could do research myself, or join an online organization, and I was an only child, and honestly, a good secret keeper. No one knew I was having trouble, and so I was terribly alone in it. I’ve had amazing responses from readers—both those who have struggled with OCD, and those who have known very little about it before reading the book. In fact, recently, the publisher has begun selling the book to high schools, which of course thrills me because it means the book gets exposed to two different sets of readers—adults, and teens—and I spoke about it to a conference of psychologists for a school board who were very happy to have good, fictional reading material available for their students that accurately depicts the internal experience of OCD.
The second thing I hope readers come away with is the notion that you don’t have to believe everything your brain tells you. OCD, to me, is a very talented trickster. It tells you things that sound like absolutes. It wants you to believe them to feed its engine. The more you give in to the rituals, the more believable and vital they seem. And it’s a moving target, so if you manage to get out of one set of compulsions, it looks for another to keep you in check. It took me a long time to figure out that those are just thoughts, not facts.
The last thing I hope readers come away with is the power in asking for help. In the book, Paisley finally gets help with her love interest Garnet, even though she’s kept her secret so long, and it’s just what she needed. As I mentioned before, I struggled with OCD in the ’70s and ’80s, when there was no internet, and it wasn’t possible to find resources online. There might have been an OCD organization somewhere, but if there was, I had no way of knowing about it. Now it’s so different.
During the pandemic, after I knew that the book was going to be published, I thought that I had better read up on OCD, because I had had the very strange experience of having struggled with it, at its worst, for probably 20 years, but knowing very little about it. I went online and found the IOCDF (the International OCD Foundation, based out of the US). They did an amazing job of pivoting during the pandemic, bringing so much of what they do online, in livestream interviews with knowledgeable guests, webinars, and virtual conferences. I had the remarkable experience of listening to others talk about OCD, both experts and those who struggle with it, and realizing that I was not alone. It was an epiphany for me: people were using the exact words that had come out of my mouth, the exact same thought patterns that I had struggled with. It was just shocking and revelatory, in that I finally realized how not alone I was.
What makes me happiest is that the book can be read on two levels—yes, to get a real picture of what having OCD is like—but also, it can be read purely for the story: this complex, layered, intense love affair between two people who manage to help each other out of a tough place. The book is uplifting (I won’t say more for fear of spoilers), but people who love a good page-turner romance can easily read the book for that alone. Much of the feedback I’ve received has been that while I wrote about something that is very hard, I also wrote a joyful book that has hope at the end. That seems to have been recognized as an achievement. And that was an important thing for me: to give people hope. Because I live a pretty great life. I am married to a prince of a husband, we’ve been married for 31 years, we have two wonderful children, and I have a good career, doing the thing I most love to do, which is writing. All of these things are possible, even for someone with OCD.
How long have you had OCD? Can you share some of your symptoms with us?
I figure it was since about the age of seven or eight or so. I can’t be sure, but I do remember certain points of my life when I was definitely struggling with it. It was worst until my mid 20s. And although I think there is no magic bullet for such a thing, my OCD really abated after I got together with my husband, Kirk, who is calm and kind and was a big stabilizer in my life. After Kirk proposed to me and we’d set a date for the wedding, I immediately found a therapist and said, I have a year and a half to get myself sorted. Ready, set, go. (Nothing like a concrete goal like a wedding to motivate you.) OCD was a big piece of what we worked on together.
My dominant OCD symptom was counting and checking. My number was eight (because this you could conveniently count on two hands, thumbs to the tip of each finger), and I counted lots of things eight times, over and over. I had a massive fear of fire, so I got into patterns when I was young, checking the stove, every light fixture and electrical outlet in the house eight times. When things were very bad, I would do the whole sequence of checks eight times. You can imagine, it was pretty time-consuming. Uncertainty about these things spun off into other areas, like false memory (I didn’t cook, but I’m worried the stove is on, so maybe I did cook and don’t remember?), and scrupulosity—needing to feel very clean about everything I do, dot the i’s, finish a task perfectly. And asking for reassurance or apologizing for the most simple things over and over. It’s exhausting and can trigger all sorts of feelings of self-loathing. Why can’t I beat these thought patterns? What’s wrong with me?
The other way OCD manifested was extreme feelings of responsibility and concern about the safety of others. This was a deep spiral and repetitive cycle of concern for me.
I still struggle with negative thought patterns, and a concern about people’s safety, but I live a very high-functioning life. I no longer count. I am never relegated to the house, unable to leave because of fear of fire. One of the really important concepts I learned from attending these IOCDF webinars was the notion of approximation. OCD tells us that every aspect of our lives must be perfect: I must be 110 percent sure I didn’t leave the stove on, and if I have to check it eight times, then that’s a good thing.
But where we want to get to is the idea that good enough is the gold standard. I can check the oven once before I leave the house, I know it’s off, and even if I doubt it, I can walk out the door and go to my appointment. OCD tells us that the more we check, the more clarity we’ll get, but instead it creates confusion, and we become less clear. And OCD is always happy to offer the solution: check again. It’s okay. You’ll feel better. It takes some training to believe that that feeling of imperfection is okay. And the more I practice living in that imperfection, the healthier I am.
Once you knew what you’d been experiencing was OCD, did you tell anyone—family, friends, strangers? How did they receive the information?
By the time the book published, I would say maybe five or six people all told knew that I had OCD. I honestly have no recollection of the earliest people I told. I don’t think I would have even had a term for it back then. So it must have been when I was much older that I realized what the diagnosis was. I remember seeing a book on psychology on my brother-in-law‘s shelf, and in it was a chapter on OCD with an OCD questionnaire, which I took standing there, trying to act all nonchalant as I read this book. And of course I passed with flying colors. So that was a lightbulb moment. But, for example, I didn’t tell my children until the book was about to be published. That was a big moment. And they were awesome about it. By that time they were both in their 20s. So they listened to my story and then said, you rock, Mum. You got through this hard thing. Amazing. And that time, my knees didn’t shake.
If you could offer just one piece of advice to someone with OCD, what would it be?
It would be that thing I spoke about above: you don’t have to believe everything your brain tells you. Thoughts aren’t necessarily facts. And if we can discern the difference, get evidence-based help by qualified professionals, and tell OCD that it has no place in our life, then we can get on with having our awesome, good-enough lives. Maybe we can’t get rid of OCD 100 percent. But we can tell it firmly that while it can come along for the ride, it doesn’t get to drive.
Alison Dotson 