Queenie’s recurrent panic attacks

Queenie’s recurrent panic attacks make the pressures surrounding her visible in sudden, disruptive episodes: at a public swimming pool, during a birthday meal, in therapy, and outside her workplace. They are connected not to one isolated cause but to the accumulation of racial hostility, fear of rejection, and childhood experiences of being ignored or mistreated. The attacks interrupt daily life, while also bringing Queenie toward a clearer understanding of what she has been carrying and toward practical support from Janet and Darcy.

Patterns and Context

The novel places Queenie’s panic in settings where she feels exposed or unwelcome. At a gathering attended by James’s friends, she finds herself beside Sam, the only other Black guest. Sam has repeatedly pretended not to know her and publicly ridiculed things associated with Black culture. Queenie reads the encounter through the expectation that she must keep a low profile to avoid making white guests uncomfortable. At the Daily Read, she argues that Black Lives Matter responds to the historical and continuing failure to value Black lives. Rather than receiving support, she leaves a meeting feeling defeated and more alone. These scenes establish the social pressure surrounding her distress without reducing it to an individual failing.

Her conversations with Janet make that pressure explicit. Queenie describes the labels attached to her as a Black woman, including stereotypes that cast her as angry or aggressive and attention that treats her body as sexually available rather than recognizing her as a person. She tells Janet that such treatment has fed her fear that she will be rejected for being herself, and that intimacy has often seemed disconnected from love or care. The session becomes increasingly difficult as Queenie connects these experiences to her own relationships and to her longing for comfort. Her distress escalates into an attack that leaves her unable to speak or use her usual grounding strategies. The scene shows how a therapeutic conversation can bring painful material into the open without making its immediate effects easy to manage.

Childhood Experiences and Delayed Recognition

In therapy, Queenie initially minimizes what happened in her childhood. She recalls a home that was clean, had a garden, and included a good cook, but Janet redirects attention to the fact that Roy either screamed at her or ignored her. Queenie then describes a pattern of punishment and isolation: Roy broke her belongings, falsely accused her, and at times made her sleep in a car. He eventually sold the family’s small house and moved them into a home whose cleanliness he tightly controlled. As Queenie recounts these experiences, she also remembers how her mother increasingly stopped speaking with her except about daily routines.

The family’s living arrangements placed Queenie in a particularly vulnerable position. When she was eleven, Roy arranged for her and Sylvie to leave; before long, Sylvie had returned to Roy and Queenie was living in the flat alone. Queenie insists that this was preferable to remaining in Roy’s home, where she felt hated and believed he had turned her mother against her. Janet identifies the arrangement as dangerous for a child. That difference in perspective matters: Queenie had treated survival under those circumstances as proof that she was fine, while therapy begins to name the risks and developmental consequences she had minimized.

The weekly dinners at her grandparents’ home also recall the continuing power of Roy’s treatment of her and Sylvie. Roy used the meals to belittle them, and Queenie anticipated that one of them would become the focus of his criticism. When he turns the meal into an occasion to humiliate Sylvie, Queenie looks to her mother for a response but sees her withdraw. These memories help explain why feelings of exclusion and not being protected recur so forcefully in Queenie’s present-day crises.

Episodes in Public and Family Settings

At Brockwell Lido, Queenie feels that other families and strangers are watching her and do not want her there. A remark describing her as aggressive intensifies her sense of being judged. She leaves the pool, then becomes overwhelmed by the surrounding voices and her intrusive thoughts. Sitting on the grass, she calls Janet and struggles to explain her feeling that there is no place for her. Janet asks where she is and guides her toward remembering her breathing. The episode does not end with a simple resolution, but Queenie’s breathing eventually returns to normal, allowing her to continue the conversation.

During that call, Queenie considers whether the possibility of becoming a mother had brought her own childhood and her relationship with Sylvie back into focus. She begins to see her mother not only as the person who should have protected her but also as someone who endured substantial losses and hardship while living with Roy. Queenie connects her mother’s isolation and difficulty working with her own recent struggles, although she turns that recognition into harsh self-blame. Even so, the immediate dark thoughts quiet as the call ends. The scene marks a shift in perspective rather than a cure: Queenie can recognize more of her mother’s experience, but does not yet respond to herself with the same understanding.

A later birthday meal with her cousin Diana shows how an attack can be concealed in an everyday social setting. At twenty-six, Queenie compares her life with the stability and marriage she had expected to have by then. She fears that a panic attack would alarm Diana and bring renewed family judgment about therapy. When Diana notices that something is wrong, Queenie says she is fine and asks for the same dessert Diana plans to order. While Diana is away, Queenie tries to breathe slowly and recall Janet’s safe-space exercise. She imagines the attic room in her grandparents’ first house, a place she remembers as comforting. When Diana returns, Queenie is surprised to find that she can honestly say she is all right and rejoin the meal. The episode shows both her instinct to hide distress and the growing usefulness of a remembered place as a grounding tool.

Support, Coping, and Recurrence

Darcy helps Queenie prepare to return to the workplace by listing the strategies she can use if distress rises: deep breathing, the safe space, and counting colors. Darcy also offers practical companionship, promising to remind Queenie of the techniques if she forgets them and breaking the day into manageable intervals, with a treat at lunchtime. Her support makes coping concrete and shared rather than a test Queenie must pass alone. It also reflects the continuing presence of fear: returning to a familiar building still requires preparation and reassurance.

That reassurance does not prevent every recurrence. After encountering Ted in an elevator, Queenie rushes out of the building and sits away from him, trying to control the rising panic with a measured breathing pattern. Her legs and arms begin to shake, and the technique does not work as she hopes. When she opens her eyes, she sees Ted with a blonde woman; the sight holds her attention even as she tries to manage the attack. This episode contrasts with the birthday meal, where recalling the attic room helped her settle enough to continue. The same resources are not reliably effective in every circumstance, and an encounter with Ted can overwhelm the coping methods Darcy and Janet have helped her assemble.

Significance

Across these episodes, panic repeatedly gathers separate pressures into one immediate crisis: the expectation of racial judgment, the absence of dependable protection in childhood, the fear of being unwanted, and the effort to appear fine to other people. The novel links those pressures through Queenie’s own gradual disclosures, from initially minimizing her upbringing to naming the impact of being screamed at or ignored. Her insight at the Lido similarly emerges during recovery rather than before distress begins. The narrative therefore presents progress as uneven: Queenie sometimes finds a safe mental image, accepts help, or recognizes a pattern, but can still be overwhelmed in public or at work. The attacks matter both as interruptions to her daily life and as points where concealed histories become harder to dismiss.