'I wasn't entirely honest about the subject of my book. And then the messages started.'

He grabbed both of my hands with his and he pushed them down into my lap. 

“Stop clapping so loudly,” he said. “Why do you have to clap so much louder than everyone else?” 

I didn’t. Did I? Maybe I did.

Certainly everything I was doing seemed to be wrong, lately. I was too loud, or too quiet. Always in the way. Always doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong thing.

Resting on my jeans, my fingers twisted around each other. Stupid loud clapping hands. I swallowed hard, let out a small, involuntary sigh, and his eyes flicked towards me and back to the stage with intense irritation. 

We were at a spoken-word poetry night, at a small club in an obscure laneway in the centre of Sydney. It is not a place I would have chosen, or even known about, but it was where he wanted to come, that night. It was inevitable that I would irritate him, in a setting where I was so out of place. I ordered a drink when I wasn’t supposed to - ‘This isn’t a pub’ - my stomach grumbled because I’d misjudged when we might eat - ‘You always want a meal out, don't you?’ and I was definitely over-dressed, with the rest of the crowd younger, looser, cooler, than I. 

It wasn’t an unusual night, or an unusual feeling, at that time in my life, in that relationship. 

But the hands on the hands, the critique of my enthusiastic applause (the poetry I would never have chosen to watch was, actually, electric), it ended up being a defining moment, in a way. 

Because as I looked at my stupid loud hands in the dark that night I tried to remember the last time I got anything right. 

I really couldn’t. And that seemingly-small criticism was the beginning of the end.

"I am decades from being a young, vulnerable woman, but I can still feel it." Holly in her late 20s. Image: Supplied.

That gesture, and the too-loud clapping, made it into a scene in a book I would write more than a decade later.

The Couple Upstairs is a novel about... well, to be entirely honest, I've done some fibbing on what it's about.

I have said, when asked, that it is about obsession, infatuation. And it is.

I said it was about the fine line between consuming love, and control. It is.

I said it was about re-examining your past relationships, and coming to terms with fading passion. Yes, it is. 

But really, as many readers have pointed out to me, the book is about coercive control.

In The Couple Upstairs, a newly-single mum becomes obsessed with the young people who live in the flat above. She can’t help but see the man as her own ex, who changed her life almost 20 years before. And she can’t help but want to stop the young woman walking into the same wonderful-terrible trap she did: Living with a man who can make her feel like a goddess or an ant, entirely dependent on his mood.

It's twisty, and it's a bit mysterious. It's by far the most ambitious of my four novels, and the one I was most nervous about showing the world.

Since its release, some readers have written to thank me for writing about this issue. And other readers have messaged me to say that the book should come with a trigger warning. Some have said they wouldn’t have picked it up if they’d have known that, behind the colourful stripes on the cover, it dealt with dark themes. They were glad they did, they said, but they wouldn't have, if they knew.

This is a complicated point. Many, many women are carrying scars from the 'dark themes' in their own lives - abuse and bereavement and relationship breakdowns primary among them - and they don't want those scars ripped open without ample warning. 

But also, fiction relies on suspense and surprise, to a point, and also on an agreement of whether everyone's definition of "dark" is the same. 

In broad strokes, I don’t consider the theme of difficult relationships to be dark. I think it's relevant to almost every woman I know, and we don’t all live in darkness. We see these stories, these experiences, as part of the light and shade of our complicated lives and if - IF - we extricated ourselves from those relationships without ruin or injury (literal or otherwise), women conspiratorily consider ourselves lucky, and warned.

The Couple Upstairs by Holly Wainwright, you can buy it here. Image: Pac Macmillan Australia.

The genre known as "commerical women's fiction" is often packaged and treated as light fodder when it's anything but. Books by giants of the genre - Liane Moriarty, Marian Keyes, Jodie Piccoult - routinely deal with topics far from fluff. Topics like addiction, family violence and terminal illness, all sitting inside colourful graphic covers that more "literary" readers might dismiss as a 'beach read' or an an 'airport novel'. What they don't know is what women want to read on beaches and on planes, and anywhere at all, really, are stories that reflect their lives back at them. And even the most mundane female life is often quietly seething with these so called 'dark themes'. 

But back to the clapping hands and to coercive control and the story that ended up in The Couple Upstairs.

When you write fiction, everyone wants to know which parts are true. The achievement of getting a reader to lose sight of you and find themselves only in the story is the goal of a novelist.

But experience seeps in, no question. Yours, and others, and when I wanted to find to the explicit, specific examples of relationships that verge on abusive without raised fists, they came easily.

The dizzying effects of intense sexual attraction. The deep satisfaction of having a desired person's eyes only on you. The push-pull of wanting to please, wanting to stay in favour, and needing to hold on to a sense of yourself. The fear that begins to build in that space. The instinct not to make waves. The ability to excuse callous acts as symptoms of your partner's personal issues, not their contempt for you. The addictive nature of drama. 

By the time I was considering myself done with the clap-shusher, my friends were tired of seeing me shrink away from them. Of listening to me make excuses, make plans to leave, only to renege on those plans, and stay. 

They were sick of the version of me that had to leave by 9, had to be escorted home, the one who was becoming more ashamed of herself at every meeting. They were sick of not seeing me, of my excuses not to come to birthday dinners, baby showers, work drinks. I knew that the explanation of attending those things, and the arguments afterwards, made the emotional toll too heavy, the cost too great.

That long-ago relationship helped me write the relationships in The Couple Upstairs, but it was hardly the only thing.

One of the key questions in the book is whether relationships like that one - that could be termed toxic, I suppose - are fading away across the generations, and being replaced by more respectful models. 

The news cycle - and my research - suggests not. 

Coercive control isn't a term that existed when my hands were being pulled into my lap. The definition offered by Relationships Victoria is: A pattern of controlling and manipulative behaviours within a relationship.

Broad, yes? And cynics might say that there are few relationships that don't contain a modicum of manipulation. That we are trying to legislate for human nature and that efforts should be firmly aimed at the life-and-death end of violence and abuse. There are women losing their lives, after all, in stubborn numbers here in Australia, every month.

But many experts in the field say Coercive Control is where it all begins, even if it doesn't all end where the most horrendous of family violence stories do, on the front pages in cases like the unthinkable murder of Hannah Clarke and her children, or unspoken and unreported, like those of the Indigenous women who are 34 times more likely than their white counterparts to be hosptalised due to violence.

We don't need to worry that the law-changes being proposed in NSW, are going to "overeach", as that's one of their very first stated aims. The legal shift to outlaw coercive control will focus only on “only the most serious” forms of abuse. 

And that’s as it should be, because the job of establishing decency and respect in relationships is not the business of the courts, but protecting the most at-risk is. 

This is why the stories are important. Obsessive, consuming relationships can be intoxicating for women and men alike. But the steps described in The Couple Upstairs between small humiliations - being bumped off a knee and ridiculed in front of a group of friends - and actual crimes - the faded blue imprints of fingerprints around throats - are familiar and instructive to many. 

I won't pretend impartiality. A great fury rises within me when I hear the words being flung at a young woman in a Canberra court room this very week. When I read, last year, the accounts of the young girls documenting their abuse at the hands of privileged peers in consent campaigner Chanel Contos's petition. When I see, over and again, the vile, relentless abuse aimed at women who attempt to speak up against powerful men they once loved. 

I am decades from being a young, vulnerable woman, treated as disposable, reckless, my very existence provocative, but I can still reach out and touch how it feels: the powerlessness, the confusion, the self-doubt and the fear. I have been in those places, more than once. 

I wanted to write about all that. But also, I wanted to write about love. Because this issue is complicated. I loved the man who hated my loudness. He was not the devil, and we were mismatched. It took long bouts of miserable anger to untangle ourselves from that relationship, but we did it. I wanted to write about the the muddle and murkiness of how we all behave when we are down in that mess, in love or in lust, or just in the intensity of needing someone to see us, to care, to hold us above others. 

Like my book, relationships can begin with the bright seduction of colourful stripes, before their insides expose something darker. 

Now, in midlife, I've had all kinds of relationships. On balance, they've been more good than bad. But I’ve had some that have left scars, too. Many of us have. 

And I've had one, in particular, that I think about every time I clap my hands.

The Couple Upstairs is published by Pan Macmillan. You can read the first chapter, here. And you can buy it,  here. 

Feature Image: Instagram @wainwrightholly.