"The Woman Who Walked Into Doors" by Roddy Doyle in One Sentence
How to powerfully invoke your protagonist's most important relationships
I first read Roddy Doyle’s 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors almost two decades ago. It has stuck out in my mind ever since as a story that immediately plunges you into its powerful emotional vibes, then continues to precisely deliver and compellingly deepen these on every single page until the end of the book.
The first chapter, though only 524 words long, delivers so much emotional information.
Doyle is especially brilliant at introducing the two most important secondary characters, because he doesn’t just show us any old information about them. He deftly invokes the precise roles they are going to play in the main character’s journey.
(You can read the first chapter for free, in about 5 or 6 minutes, in the Amazon Kindle preview here if you want. But the full text is also reproduced as part of the close reading below. Make sure you’re not looking at the Paperback preview, where Chapter 1 blocked from the sample. Otherwise, without further ado….)
The Emotional Superstructure of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
A battered, alcoholic Dublin housewife must throw out the husband she desperately loved before he starts abusing their oldest daughter.
How to Powerfully Invoke Your Protagonist’s Most Important Relationships
Paula Spencer is the battered, alcoholic Dublin housewife whose head we’ll be in for this book. Who are the most important secondary characters? The answer is immediately clear from the superstructure: her husband and their eldest daughter. Her journey is to throw him out. Her daughter is what’s at stake.
Let’s see how Doyle introduces them, while unfurling so many other details that ground us strongly Paula’s world and mind.
I was told by a Guard who came to the door. He wasn’t one I’d seen before, one of the usual ones. He was only a young fella, skinny and with raw spots all over his neck.
—Missis Spencer?
He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He looked miserable.
—Missis Spencer?
We know right away that this is a woman who’s used to having the police at her door. Yet this time, something is different. The way she takes in the situation suggests empathy for the bearer of her — almost certainly bad — news.
I knew before he spoke. It clicked inside me when I opened the door. (For years opening that door scared the life out of me. I hated it; it terrified me. We had this screeching bell like an alarm that shook the walls when anyone rang it. It lifted me off the floor, the kids started bawling; it was fuckin’ dreadful. You were caught, snared, caught in the act. You looked around to whatever you’d been caught with, things that Charlo had left in the hall, things he’d robbed and left there. He changed the bell, after I chewed his ear and nearly wet myself five or six times a day.
Charlo is the first named character we meet, and we meet him as both a criminal and a dad. He’s got a house full of kids and he’s lazy about leaving stolen goods around it. We don’t explicitly know that he’s abusive and towards whom yet, but we could hardly be surprised to learn that next.
Still, he’s not so menacing that he can’t be harried by his wife into doing boring domestic chores, like changing the awful doorbell to a nice one. Whatever their dynamic, it’s been going on for many years.
Nicola, my oldest, wouldn’t come round the back to get into the house. She wanted to come through the front door; it was more grown up. She rang the bell ten times a minute.
—Forgot me jacket.
—Forgot me money.
—Don’t like these jeans on me.
I hit her — she was thirteen, or twelve, much too old to be smacked — the hundredth time she rang the bell one Saturday morning. I hit her the way a woman would hit another woman, smack in the face.
The next named character we meet is Nicola, their eldest daughter. She’s on the cusp of womanhood. She’s vulnerable to physical abuse, to being attacked like an adult. And to start with, her mother is not her protector.
This points to where the superstructure journey begins, with Paula having accepted her situation with her husband, whom she fell desperately in love with from the first night they met (Chapter 2 quickly elaborates on this important point).
The abuse might be bad, but she’s trapped, snared. She hasn’t yet found a way to protect herself, or to escape.
But that’s been during the period of her life when all their kids were small. Nicola becoming more of a grown-up raises the stakes.
Doyle is pointing us directly to the superstructure — as any strong story opening does — all while having Paula ostensibly tell us about the sound of her doorbell, and how different family members have interacted with it.
I was a bit drunk, I have to admit. I regretted it, tried to stop my hand after it had smashed her cheek. It was red where I’d got it. She was stunned; she hadn’t noticed me getting more annoyed. They never do at that age — at any age. I was sorry for her but she’d deserved it. I was sorry I was drunk, ashamed, angry; I usually made sure that no one noticed. I couldn’t cope; it was only a stupid bell. She said she hated me, slammed the door and ran off. I let her away with it.
Next we get an introduction to Paula’s alcoholism, also a key element of the story reflected in the superstructure. She’s the sort of person who might be drunk on a Saturday morning and think no one notices. But she’s not proud of it.
The new bell was a nice bing-bong one but it made no difference. I still died a bit whenever someone rang it. The Guards looking for Charlo, teachers looking for John Paul, men looking for money. It’s hard to hide in a house full of kids, to pretend there’s no one there. Bing-bong. Only bad news came through that door; my sister, my daddy, John Paul, Charlo. Bing-bong.)
Paula has plenty of other relationships, including her other children, and some of them will make for relevant subplots. But none of them are superstructure-level important, and so they don’t get quite the thoughtful and nuanced introduction that Charlo and Nicola do.
It clicked inside me when I opened the door and saw the Guard. It was his face that told me before I was ready to know it. He wasn’t looking for Charlo; it wasn’t the usual. He was scared and there was something he had to tell me. I felt sorry for the poor young fella, sent in to do the dirty work. The other wasters were out in the car, too lazy and cute to come in and tell me themselves. I asked him in for a cup of tea. He sat in the kitchen with his hat still on him. He told me all about his family.
Part of what makes The Woman Who Walked Into Doors so compelling is that Doyle never reduces Paula to any sort of stereotype of a battered housewife, an alcoholic, a bad mother, anything like that. He always renders her as a full and richly complicated and relatable human being.
And he rounds out the first chapter by promising us readers exactly that. Paula is about to get terrible news and someone should probably be taking care of her, but she’s feeling sorry for and looking after the policeman who’s about to deliver the blow.
Key Takeaway for Story Creators
If secondary characters are very important to your protagonist’s journey and/or what’s at stake, introduce them by capturing as much of that dynamic from the superstructure as possible.
Bonus: Of Book Covers and Superstructures
As I mentioned above, the frying pan image I chose for this post is a direct reference to the book’s cover: