There’s a moment in my debut novel, Room 706, in which the protagonist, Kate, hiding in a room with her lover in a hotel that has been taken over by terrorists, writes down a series of letters and numbers. “What’s that?” James, her lover, asks. “The password for the online grocery app,” Kate replies. Of everything she wants to tell her husband in case she does not make it out alive, this seems the most important, or at least the easiest, to write down.
Kate meets James in London hotel rooms every few months for no-strings sex, despite being happily married to Vic. When she tries to rationalise her actions to herself, she compares this to a shoe-buying habit, or a woman secretly having ‘tweakments’. It’s a kind of ‘me time’ that allows Kate to be a wife and mother the rest of the time.
Yet even as she goes to meet her lover, Kate is thinking about the things she must do, from buying after-school snacks for the kids to collecting the family’s pet rabbit from the vet. She’s remembering to restock bread rolls for the kids’ packed lunches and thinking about their playdates. Before she left the house, she put that night’s dinner in the slow cooker. Her life is full of ‘hidden work’, which Melissa Hogenboom, author of The Motherhood Complex, says is “hard to measure, because it’s invisible and performed internally.”
The idea of a woman taking a lover was easier to understand than the idea of her needing to be alone.
It was this incessant nature of the mental load, coupled with the exhaustion that came from parenting young children, that gave me the idea for Room 706. I am the mother of three children, all born within five years of each other. While recognising how very lucky I am to have exactly what I wanted in this regard – I had always hoped to have three children – at times when they were very young, all I wanted was to go alone to a hotel room and shut the door, to spend a few hours neither needed nor touched. When I shared this fantasy, though, people seemed to think I was saying I would like to go with a lover, and their reaction when I said no, my fantasy involved being entirely alone, showed that for some, the idea of a woman taking a lover was easier to understand than the idea of her needing to be alone.
Though it is terrorists with guns patrolling the hotel corridors that give Room 706 its plot, perhaps what gives Kate real fear is the never-ending to-do list she maintains both in her head and in an app on her phone, and whether Vic will be able to do all this if she doesn’t make it out alive. Worrying about this, she backs up the nearly 10,000 family photos from her phone, orders her daughter’s main Christmas present, schedules paying the balance of a family holiday, and buys a costume for her son’s dress-up day at school. Her brain is so full of the tasks she must do for her family that she needs other apps and services to look after her own body, receiving messages on her phone at various points to remind her to do her pelvic floor exercises and to check her breasts for lumps and changes.
Women – both those who are single and those in relationships – tend to shoulder the majority of this hidden work.
This never-ending to-do list does not just affect women who are mothers. Whether they have children or not, women – both those who are single and those in relationships – tend to shoulder the majority of this hidden work, be it looking after ageing parents, arranging social occasions, or handling presents and cards.
I remember having a conversation once with a friend about toilet roll, a conversation that found its way into my book when Kate remembers to add them to the online shop she is doing. When you buy toilet roll, my friend had complained to me, it’s not just going to the shop to buy it. It’s noticing that you are running out. It is knowing which brand your household finds too scratchy and which brands are too thick and clog up your ancient plumbing. It is working out how much the economies of scale in buying a huge multipack are, versus where to store 48 rolls at once. It’s finding time to go to the shop and making sure there is fuel in the car, remembering the many other things you may as well pick up while there, and having time to unpack the frozen foods you’ve also bought before you have to rush out again.
At one point during the editing process, one of my editors suggested that I might like to tone down the to-do list of domestic duties, as there were rather a lot. That’s funny, I said, because I had just been rereading the manuscript and thinking to myself how there weren’t nearly enough to reflect the reality of women’s lives. (I took my editor’s advice, however, because novels are meant to be a form of escape).
That’s why, when people ask me what my novel is about, I have two answers, with neither being that it is about Kate and her lover. The first is that Room 706 is about Kate’s love story with her husband, which is brought sharply into focus as she contemplates the possibility of dying in this hotel room with another man. And the second answer, which is just as true, is that Room 706 is about the mental load, and the need to reset their domestic arrangements should she, and her marriage, survive.
So, is there a happy ending? No spoilers from me, except to say that Kate’s husband, even without a prompt from Kate, does remember to pick up the rabbit from the vet. There’s hope, she realises, that even if she doesn’t make it home, they’ll manage without her. And that feels like a happy ending to me.
Room 706 by Ellie Levinson is out 15th January 2026