Should authors warn about difficult content?

 In Through my Eyes. Again. the protagonist, Will, has been  physically abused by his father since he was six years old. It is clear  that whilst not approving of the violence, Will’s mother is compliant  for some complex of reasons. The story depicts only one more such  abusive incident, when Will’s father slaps him so hard he is thrown  across the kitchen. Will’s reaction to this causes his mother to move to  stop the abuse, but Will’s fear and distrust naturally remains and  colours his actions into the future.

As is common for first  novels, there are elements of autobiography in Will’s story, but these are more seeds, starting places from which the story grew. My relationship with my father is one of those seeds and I have certainly  had my own struggles arising from childhood stuff over the years as a  result.

In writing  Through My Eyes. Again. I did not think about how its use of physical child abuse as a story element might affect people who have been victims of child abuse – and it is clear that my story is  stirring things up for some people. I was aware that the story elements involving suicide could well be problematic for some readers and so I explicitly warned about these.

But I did not think through what drove Will towards suicide and how that alone could be difficult for some people.

Authors  inevitably deal with difficult subjects – to some extent, this is part of the remit of storytelling: to bring dark subjects into the light and  to subject them to examination through the medium of a story. I  certainly did not have this as an aim when I started writing, but now  see I have blundered into this area.

I hope that Will’s story is helpful to those people who had had abusive childhoods and perhaps also to people now close to them.

If my story causes difficult thoughts, please seek professional help.

So - should I have warned about the child abuse? I don't know - perhaps the 'blurb' should have included a warning about this element. But one of the wondrous things about a story is that each person reading it reads a different version, coloured by their lives and their experiences which they bring to the words on the paper (or screen).

And that makes content warnings hard.