The narrator of Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), winner of the 2014 Costa First Novel Award, is an 82-year-old woman suffering from dementia and obsessed with finding an absent friend.
The story has a certain violent momentum, but most of the action takes place inside the mind of its variously mad and damaged characters, obsessing over redemption, suffering and the spiritual world.
Both he and Janine were suffering from each other, and Janine obsessed over the portrait of herself in "Ariel".
With the distance of time, and an acceptance of his own sexuality, Williams could render a more overtly erotic play, obsessed with light and dark, suffering and salvation.
Dora, possibly suffering from anorexia, became horribly emaciated, while Sara, obsessed with her menstrual cycles, followed her father into opium addiction, with all its bowel-related indignities.
For 40 years, neoliberals lived in a world of denial and indifference to the suffering of poor and working people and obsessed with the spectacle of success.
An adolescent suffering from Anorexia Nervosa will often be obsessed with his or her body weight, shape, and cloth size.
The novel's finest character, for me, is Piotr, Iris's lover, who is obsessed with photographs of 20th-century suffering.
I am not one of those who are obsessed with their roots, and I'm certainly not suffering from a crisis of identity; my obsession is about the future and the political rights of all people.
(Spoiler alert!) His brother is suffering radiation sickness; Dolphin is just a lonely widow, heartbroken and obsessed with the memory of her husband; and the burden borne by his suicidal father is repressed homosexuality.
Therefore, when we become obsessed with a desire, the cycle of pleasure and suffering inevitably emerge.
