I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community in the Western Australian sticks, waiting for the world to end. When it didn’t, I had to figure out what to do with my life. It took a while.

The problem with growing up in a doomsday community isn’t so much that the world doesn’t end — it’s that you must coax your brain into getting behind all the mundane secular activities required to thrive: going to school, getting a job, learning what critical thinking is. When your entire moral and intellectual framework belongs to the Bible, and then it suddenly doesn’t, you become this blank slate of a person who needs rebuilding.

I was 16 when I left, after a God-denouncing blow-up with my mother. I moved to Midland and went to Cyril Jackson Senior Campus for my Year 10 equivalency. I spent a lot of those years wondering how I could trust anything I thought ever again. How could I just shrug off a whole belief system like that? It was as if my belief was a curtain that had fallen — I wasn’t sure about the view, and I thought I’d like to put it back up. I suppose we can only accept the reality we can stand. I was reminded of this every day on the school bus at the time; an elderly woman got on at the stop near me carrying what at first looked like a newborn baby, but I soon realised it was a doll.

I sometimes fantasised about going back to religion; I didn’t know who I could be without it. Secular life seemed so humdrum: just this slow chug to the finish line that everyone was on, no prophecy to look forward to, no signs and wonders, no imminent rapture events.

But I kept at it. I read voraciously, from classics to pulp, trying to pick apart the world and its array of spiritual and philosophical frameworks. My notes became essays and stories. Eventually I was the first person in my family to graduate from a university. Then, in 2017, I got a full scholarship to a graduate writing program at New York University. Zadie Smith had liked my writing sample. Soon I was moving to New York to study with such literary heavyweights as Joyce Carol Oates, Ocean Vuong and Jeffrey Eugenides.

Those first months in New York, I was hit hard by jet lag, insomnia, and a new and horrific level of anxiety. I hadn’t slept — whenever I was about to drift off, it’d be time to get up. And when I did sleep for my usual twenty to forty minutes, I kept having a recurring dream that I was snuggling with my dog, Bob, back in Australia. I’d wake up hugging the pillow, which I’d throw across the room in disgust.

I’d found a room in Harlem with a roommate who was, I thought, an architect, but I had not seen him since the day I moved in. The apartment was always quiet, except for the constant stream of salsa and merengue music from outside, and the scurrying of mice which would come in and out under the front door.

I felt totally out of my league in the writing program. All the other students spoke in perfectly formed sentences that I didn’t have the attention span for. Their stories were about summers in Paris and dalliances in Hollywood; no one wanted to read about scrappy Jesus freaks from the bush who couldn’t think for themselves and rarely went to school. Not trusting your thinking is a problem for many people; for a writer, it’s a full-time catastrophe.

I thought the smarty-pants in New York might have some clue, some loophole. But my anxiety led me to an endless cycle of meditation apps, audiobooks and YouTube talks in an attempt to get it together.

That spring, my workshop was with Joyce Carol Oates. Her being on the faculty was the reason I had applied. One of the first secular books I’d stolen from my grandmother’s nursing home was Expensive People, which had blown my little pre-teen mind. Joyce didn’t disappoint; she sat like an exotic bird at the head of the table covered in evil eye jewellery. In the first two weeks she made three students cry.

Then came the afternoon when my pages were to be workshopped. I was thinking a lot of negative thoughts in the morning leading up to class. My work-in-progress was messy, but I thought there was a strong voice. It was about me coming home as an 11-year-old, thinking my mum had been Raptured and I’d been left behind to face the seven years of tribulation as put forth in the book of Revelation.

We went around the room. People said it seemed unrealistic — kids like this did not exist in the 20th century. “There’s been a lot of books about people escaping cults and weird religious sects”, the actress from Hollywood said.

“Oh yeah,” someone else added, “Tara Westover, Patricia Lockwood’s memoir. Cults are so last year.”

Then we got to Oates at the head of the table.

“How long have you been working on this?” she asked.

“Three years,” I answered.

She shook her head. “If you haven’t figured out the structure by now, you’re not going to.” I offered some ideas, but she waived them off.

“I’ve met people like you. Carrying around these dead babies for 20 years. They come to all my talks and workshops. There is just no narrative arc, no engine.” She went on, “You need to leave it and work on something else.”

I wasn’t going to be the fourth person she’d made cry, but it was like Oates had confirmed the negative voice in my head, she was the voice embodied. A dead baby. I thought of that elderly woman on the bus. The story was (I’d found out from some other school kids) that she had lost her real children in a house fire. I walked back to the subway with a rising panic about the terrible mistake I’d made in coming here. Back at my rodent-infested apartment in Harlem, I thought what a stupid and frivolous thing it was to want to write a book, who did I think I was?

When I feel insecure, I have to look for familiar things, and because I was feeling particularly insecure, I bought a notebook with a picture of a Pomeranian on the front that looked like Bob. I took it out and stared at it.

A few days later there was a knock at the door. It was Patricia, the landlord who lived down stairs. I hadn’t initially realised she was the landlord, but over the past weeks, I’d noticed her and her mother and a building supervisor taking care of various issues in the building. I guess it was for the same reason, those old feelings of insecurity and the need for familiarity, I let Patricia in. She just reminded me so much of my cousin, Jessica. Patricia had these long fake fingernails in different shades of purple, with diamonds on them. She also wore about a pawn-shop’s worth of gold chains around her neck, just like Jessica.

Patricia sat down at the kitchen table as comfortable as if it were her own house. Which it turned out it was, in a way. She wore leopard-print leggings and white fluffy slippers. She had a whole list of rapid-fire questions, mostly about how much rent I was paying, how long I’d been here, and who had painted the wall?

It turned out, according to Patricia, I had been subletting in a building where subletting was illegal.

“I’m subletting?” I asked, unsure what it meant.

“Well you paid him, not me. I would have told you, this is a co-op.”

I didn’t know what a co-op was, and I didn’t want to ask.

She laid out her bedazzling, jewel-encrusted hand and inspected me as if I were an octopus that’d washed up on the shores of the Hudson.

“So. You seen the architect?”

“Who?”

“Malcolm, he ain’t paid no rent. Was due last week.”

“That’s the thing,” I said, glad to have someone to tell, “I haven’t seen him.”

“Since when you seen him?” Patricia sniffed the air.

“Well, I saw him the day I moved in. That was two weeks ago.”

“Wha? You haven’t seen your roommate in two weeks? Girl, you check da room?” She leant forward to look down the hallway, towards his bedroom door.

“I’ve knocked.” I said.

“Ay, chica,” she yelled, “He could be dead in there, you know.” She looked at me disgusted, disappointed, as if we’d known each other such a long time that she only needed a quick mental flick through her long list of resentments.

“What kin’a per-son are you? You gotta check the room, go! Check it!”

I walked down the hallway and stopped a few steps from the door. Statistically, men went for more gruesome ways of killing themselves. I was thinking about a documentary I’d once seen about a woman found in her apartment after two years when I felt Patricia’s acrylic nail dig into my side.

“Just do it already.”

I turned the handle. When the door burst open, the room was dark, curtain pulled — but he wasn’t there.

I shuffled Patricia out before she could open any more doors or try and get money out of me. When she’d left, I googled “Subletting rights in New York City.” Basically, I had none.

Usually when I couldn’t sleep I’d listen to my assortment of meditations, trying to lull my mind out of a panic. Sometimes I’d play Bruce Springsteen’s song about going down to the river and the river being dry, over and over, which is what I did that night. It’s the only Bruce Springsteen song I can stand, and if I concentrate enough, I could pretend that Bruce Springsteen is telling me the story of his pathetic life and how devastated he is about the way things worked out. It often makes me feel better about my own, and imagining Springsteen — the hopeless old loser — can usually get me to sleep.

That night I played the song six times to no avail. But I knew I had my engine, my narrative arc. It was my missing roommate. Only, instead of being an architect I’d make him a meditation guru and finally, he would carry my dead baby home.

Gone Guru by Nadine Browne, Fremantle Press, $34.99