In The Bridge Inside, Gordon paints an immersive dreamscape with captivating prose and colorful verbiage, often leading the reader to question what Cara is experiencing in real life and what is she imagining.
Gordon began writing The Bridge Inside during the COVID-19 pandemic. She drew from the experiences of those around her, specifically her grandfather, who was a POW during the Vietnam War.
“He ended up actually escaping and saving someone,” says Gordon of her grandfather. “But growing up, he never seemed like he had PTSD to me. He always would come to my school and talk. And he would always talk to me about what happened over there.”
Gordon’s family cultivated her love of writing from the time she was a child. Gordon kept journals, where she wrote short stories and poems, as well as songs with her cousin. One of her poems, which she wrote at the age of 8, is still on display at her uncle’s barber shop: “When you go to the barber and sit in his chair / Don't squirm like a worm while he's cutting your hair / Don't wiggle, and squiggle and bounce up and down / Don't shuffle and act like a clown.”
As a child, Gordon grew up on the words of Stephen King. Though she was infatuated with the vivid thrillers of King’s literary catalog, she initially studied speech pathology at the University of Oklahoma. But writing was always in the back of her mind.
After a disagreement with a difficult physics professor (who equated her 89.4 numerical grade in his class to a B, instead of an A), she decided to switch her major to English.
“I was like, ‘F this, I’m going to become a novelist,’” she says, “like I always wanted.”
Around 2017, when Gordon started writing for the Dallas Observer, she came across a Vanity Fair article about people seeking psychedelic therapy for PTSD.
“[The article] followed this woman's journey, and her experience was super ethereal and out of body,” Gordon says. “The therapeutic practice is so intense — it's three 8-hour sessions with two psychotherapists — so she described her experience as an out-of-body, dream-like experience. She came back to accepting the traumatic experience that had happened to her, [understanding what] caused her mind to block off all these emotions. It was beautiful how she described it, and her story is kind of what inspired me, along with my experiences with my grandfather with PTSD.”
While writing The Bridge Inside, Gordon took a break from journalism, allowing her to revisit a more stylistic approach to writing as opposed to an objective structure. Many of the words on the pages came to Gordon by way of stream of consciousness, specifically as she was setting the scene for the dream sequences.
Describing a dream in real life can feel awkward, but Gordon found that allowing herself to feel the weirdness of it all helped her make Cara’s character all the more relatable.
“I was like, ‘F this, I’m going to become a novelist ... like I always wanted.” – Ryann Bee Gordon
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“Whenever you're having a dream and whenever you're narrating it, you have to write it as if it's just happening,” says Gordon. “There's nothing weird about it. You’re basically writing these regular situations as if you're in a dream and uncanny things are happening, but it's not unusual.”
Gordon says Cara is not based on herself, “because it's really easy to make a character based on ourselves and all the beautiful things we think about ourselves. But that's not a complex character. That's a really simple character.”
She has never experienced psychedelic therapy herself, but she has spent a lot of time researching various avenues of treatment to make the story as accurate as possible. The Bridge Inside took years to complete, and Gordon says she found herself experiencing a roller coaster of emotions all over again.
The author jokes that she never wants to re-read The Bridge Inside, but she plans to turn it into a screenplay someday and is currently working on a short film based on the book.
In the novel, Gordon explores the fluidity of the mind and how we, as humans, process traumatic events. It’s not uncommon to want to forget some of the seminal events in our lives, but Gordon found that true healing begins only when we accept the things — good and bad — that happen to each of us.
“The best thing that we can do is learn that trauma is always going to be there,” says Gordon. “It's in our brain, it's hidden in our mind and our psyche somewhere. So the best thing we can do is admit to ourselves what happened and remember what happened, and cherish all the strength we gained from it, and every emotion it put us through. Because as humans, the thing that makes us unique is our ability to have these complex emotions.”
