Becoming Whole:  Writing Your Healing Story by Linda Joy Myers belongs in your library of books about memoir.  Like Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story, Maureen Murdock’s Unreliable Truth: Memory and Memoir, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Patty Miller’s The Memoir Book, all of which have been mentioned or reviewed here, this book carves out a specific niche within the multi-variant world of memoir.

The subtitles of memoir books usually offer clues to the particular niche the author aims for.  This time we have memoir as “healing story.”  Myers is a practicing psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area who teaches memoir writing classes and has written her own memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother. The author uses occasional snippets from her own memoir as examples of the writing principles she describes, and throughout the book she draws upon her own experience with memoir writing as a way to frame issues for the reader.

Becoming Whole offers very practical guidance combining some of the free writing exercises Natalie Goldberg made famous with a whole field of memoir-as-therapy. Have you ever heard of a writing therapist?  Music therapy and art therapy probably sound more familiar, but writing therapy is making its way, too.

Early in the book Myers refers to research conducted by James Pennebaker, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and published in his 1990 book Opening Up:  The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. In this book Pennebaker described a study comparing a control group of people who were asked to write lists and plans for the day with another group who used the same 15 minutes to write about “your very deepest thoughts and feelings” about the “most traumatic moments in your life.”  The positive health impact on the second group was remarkably different from the first.

Based on this research, previous pioneers (Willhelm Reich), and subsequent studies, a field of writing and psychology has emerged.  Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smythe have pioneered something they call The Writing Cure.  Myers builds on this psychological base to create her own book for writers that could also serve as a guide for therapists and writing teachers who are drawn to the idea of writing as healing.  Writing about positive emotions and a positive future leads to improvement in both physical and mental health.

The book contains very practical guidelines and suggestions for how to organize fragments of memory into an integrated whole.  I recommend that you add it to your library and don’t just borrow it from the library.  This is a book that begs for notes in the margins and underlining (all my books are such beggars!).  I will leave you with a quote from Myers that describes the benefits of writing as therapy:  “When you write a healing memoir, one that probes the depth and breadth of your identity and sense of self, you will find yourself at a place different from where you began–and you will know the place for the very first time.”

T. S. Eliot said the same thing, of course, earlier and more poetically.  But Myers does something poets seldom, if ever, do.  She charts a path for how such transformation might take place.

I remember reading this breakthrough book soon after it was published in the late 1980′s.  I don’t remember how I bought the book, and I don’t have the old copy on my shelf, so I may have loaned or given it away, Mostly, I remember how I felt after reading it. High!  I had never read a writing book like this one.  It contains nothing about publishing.  Nothing about judging (in fact, discouragement about judging). I was a young mother teaching fulltime and choosing family and my students over writing.  This book made me feel that I could be a writer–I felt a deep yearning.  I knew that Natalie Goldberg would not allow me to say I would write later in life, but fortunately, she was not there to scold me when I chose not to begin a life of writing in her daily, disciplined way.

Now it is later–more than 20 years later.  I am writing, albeit very slowly.  This week I submitted two short memoirs and a poem to a local literary contest.  And I am writing to you, here, right now, in this moment.

A fitting way to honor Natalie Goldberg’s classic text, having just read the new and expanded version, will be to do a timed writing to illustrate one of her most important ideas.  First, however, I want to note a few other items of interest from the book.  The interview at the back sheds much light on the journey Goldberg has been on and contains a lot of her philosophy in nugget form.  For example, she explains why she loves memoir:  “Memoir is the study of how memory works.  It’s analogous to writing practice, to working with the mind.”  Goldberg loves that memory works in flashes and slices, not in linear chronology. By extension, one could add, the structure of a memoir should help us see the writer’s mind.  Memoir.  Memory. Mind.  We can call them the 3-M Company–the magic behind writing down the bones.

Now, to illustrate a timed writing.  Here’s how it works.  First, you pick a subject.  If you are in a workshop, Natalie picks the subject.  But I am going to pick this one myself, something Natalie recommends when you are ready.  She prefers that students write by hand, just as fast as they can keep a pen moving over the paper, but that won’t work with a blog.  So I will give myself ten minutes to write on one of the ideas I enjoy after reading this book and attending the workshop:  what does it mean to go slow and be dumb?

I have rushed at life.  Born first of five children, I exploded out of the womb and then tried my hardest to grow up before anyone could slow me down. I liked friends who were older because I thought they would induct me in the mysteries.  I remember convincing Mother to buy me high-heeled shoes at the age of 12 so that I could know what it was to be an adult.  I am amazed now that she did that.  I can only assume that Mother was reliving her own childhood and adolescence and enjoyed pushing forward to new adventures also.  I liked to finish as many books as possible and only read a few favorites slowly.  So when Natalie says a writer must learn to be slow and dumb, I feel a little chastened by all that pellmell speed in my life. I think I am only slow when it really matters.  I hope it will really matter more to me to be slow.  They say it is amazing to watch Thich Nhat Hanh move in the world.  I got a glimpse of that by walking behind Natalie in the workshop for ten minutes.  I tried to think of each foot as an anchor and to think of all the bones that ground me in each step.  I don’t know what it means to be dumb because I have spent my life aching to be smart.  But even that is not true altogether, because I have not had the luxury of others plowing the field of higher education before me.  I discovered on my own that people will tell you much more if you ask them how to do something (treat them like they are smart) rather than try to show them how smart you are.  I have called this being a “babe in the woods” and noticed how helpful people are if you humble yourself.  Buddhists call this beginner’s mind.  I think I have changed jobs every 4-8 years all my life because that way I got to have beginner’s mind again.

I stopped because the time was up.  If I were handwriting, I think I would have written a little more than that.  I will refrain from judging–and invite you to do the same! If we were in class, and I read this piece aloud, Natalie would ask what you recall.  If you said something like, “I was the first person in my family to go to college, too,”  Natalie would wave dismissively.  “Just the words.  What were the words?”  People might say things like high-heels.  And I could only assume my mother was living her own life over again, etc.  The writer learns quickly that the specific image is the one that lingers.  I did not have too many sensory-rich images in this piece, so it will not likely stick in your memory or mine.  However, I hope the illustration helped you see what happens in the workshop and imagine how valuable it can be to learn from direct experiences like these.  What it cannot do is replicate what happens to your mind when you practice writing every day.  Ironically, writing as fast as possible, trying to capture all the random thoughts as they come, is the key to becoming slow and dumb. Sounds like a koan?! 

What kind of writer are you?  Fast? Smart? Slow? Dumb?

One of the wise women I am honored to have in my life, Angeles Arrien, recommended this book to me. I found the book thoughtful and provocative, a wonderful distillation of many years of reflection both on the author’s personal story but also on the process of living, reflecting, writing, and transforming. Reading this book, I felt included in Maureen Murdock’s own memoir writing circle. It made me want to join such a circle, which may mean, eventually, starting my own.

The book includes an excellent bibliography at the end, so good that I copied it so that I could put it in my notebook.

I previously reviewed Patti Miller’s The Memoir Book, which was very helpful for genre definition.  Murdock’s book, in contrast, stirred the driving force behind my fascination with memoir–to search beyond the truth of my own life to the mysterious larger truth that links us all to each other.

These three quotations from Murdock may entice you to add the book to your holiday gift suggestion list:

“We are, after all, the only species we know of that reflects upon its memories.”

“For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world imbedded in us, we hold a secret deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”

“The way we tell our life story is the way we begin to live our lives.”