Читать книгу Rewrite Your Life - Jessica Lourey - Страница 17

In 1996, when nonfiction-specific writing therapy was gaining traction, Dr. Melanie A. Greenberg crafted a clever study in which she measured the curative properties of writing about a real traumatic experience, an imaginary traumatic experience, and a real neutral experience (the control group). Her findings? People writing about imaginary events were less depressed than people writing about actual trauma, and the fiction writers demonstrated significant physical health improvements. I liken this healing power of directed fiction writing to straight-up art therapy. You don't need to (and most of us probably aren't capable of) painting an exact representation of the issues you want to work through. Instead, you paint/sculpt/ write/sketch an abstraction, and in the act of creation lies the cure.

The specific benefits of rewriting your life make even more sense when you consider Dr. Pennebaker's discovery that two elements above all else increase the therapeutic value of writing: creating a coherent narrative and shifting perspective. These are not coincidentally the cornerstones of short story and novel writing. Writers call them plot and point of view. And identical to expressive writing, the creation of fiction involves habituation, catharsis, and inhibition-confrontation, but from an emotionally safer perch than memoir. While I enjoy reading memoirs and wholly support anyone who wants to write them, and all of the healing benefits and many of the instructions in this book can be applied to this type of writing, writing memoir has never felt like a good fit for me. Writing fiction allows me to distance myself, to become a spectator to life's roughest seas. It gives form to our wandering thoughts, lends empathy to our perspective, allows us to cultivate compassion and wisdom by considering other people's motivations, and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel, when we learn to walk through the world as observers and students rather than wounded, when we make choices about what parts of a story are important and what we can let go of.

I believe this in my core, but I knew none of this when Jay and I married. Back then, I hadn't heard of narrative or expressive writing therapy, and if I had, I'd have been put off by their focus on essay writing and memoir. I'd always enjoyed creative writing, though, had even crafted a rambling semblance of a novel as my master's thesis before I'd met Jay, a novel so awful that years later I tried to steal the only copy from the college library. (I was actually in the clear, thesis in hand outside the library, when guilt overtook me. In retrospect, bringing my then-ten-year-old son along was a mistake. The problem with raising your children right is that they're real wet blankets when it comes time to commit a crime.) After graduate school, though, I found myself newly married, teaching full-time, and pregnant with my second child. I barely had time for personal hygiene, let alone creativity.

Then, in the days and weeks following Jay's suicide, I couldn't imagine formulating a coherent sentence, let alone a book. Even landing in a cold puddle of dog pee wasn't enough to shift my grief into novel writing.

It took my deepest shame for me to learn to rewrite my life through fiction.

I'll try to type this without crying.

It was January, dead cold winter in northern Minnesota. Jay had been in the ground for exactly four months. The sharp loneliness that I wore like a shroud was all the more unsettling for the fact that I was carrying my son in my body—I felt like the unwilling meat in a death-and-life sandwich. I'd been shambling along, teaching a full load, parenting Zoë as well as I could. Life had become a numb routine: wake up, shower, drink coffee, get Zoë ready for day care, drive her there, teach, pick her up, drive her home, feed us, play, give her a bath, head to bed.

Wake up and repeat.

Something that still surprises me about grief is how much time you spend not feeling anything. You expect the crying jags and the pain so sharp you think you're having a heart attack. You can't prepare for the long stretches of feeling nothing, though, not curiosity, not joy, not even annoyance.

Nothing.

Four months into my full-time grief, I actually thought robot-me was doing pretty well, which shows the depths of my depression. My wake-up call came on January 15. Zoë was still three. She was also still stubborn, willful, and outspoken, like any respectable three-year-old, plus a little extra because she's always been my Princess Fury.

A blizzard had just roared through, and I knew the roads were gonna be tough. Plus, it was a new semester, so I had a whole slate of new classes, new students, new questions. Life felt extra heavy, a yoke on my shoulders and a person in my belly. And that feeling of nothingness was getting to me, a constant low buzzing that made it almost impossible to climb out of bed that morning.

But I did. I think it was muscle memory.

On this particular day, Zoë didn't want to go to day care, even more than usual. Yet, we went through the motions. In a numb haze, perched at the top of the basement stairs and near the garage door, I helped her with her pants. She flapped her legs like a wind-up doll the entire time. I tugged her shirt over her head. She screamed. I tried to yank her jacket on, and she went no-bones, melting onto the floor.

Then it came time to wrench on her boots.

One of her flailing legs connected with my face. Smack. The pain was raw and white and I snapped. Just like that, the force of the kick broke through my nothing and released pure black rage and something terrifyingly primal, a monster I didn't know I housed.

Here I need to take a break and tell you that my parents, for all their foibles and deep dysfunction, had never so much as yelled at me, forget spanking or hitting. I was raised to be an organic granola pacifist, someone whose go-to in times of conflict and stress has always been research followed by earnest communication. The idea of striking a child was as foreign and abhorrent to me as cutting off my own finger. Hitting Zoë, my baby fuzz, the tiny precious peanut I'd played music for while she was in my tummy, planned a water birth for to minimize her stress as she entered the world, nursed her whole first year despite a full-time job and a forty-minute commute each way so that I could directly deliver every nutrient she'd need to thrive?

Not on your life.

But dammit, I was gonna return that kick.

I was going to smack her back.

And I wasn't just going to hurt her. I was going to punch her shut her up punish her make her hurt as bad as I did so help me it's survival to finally feel something because I am drowning in numbness and I can't go back to feeling nothing again so after I take care of her I'm going to—

I can still taste the mustiness of the basement wafting up the stairs.

I can still see her red face, shock suffocating those beautiful green eyes.

She recognized, smelled it maybe, what I was about to do.

Hand still in the air, I fled. Like a woman morphing into a were-wolf, I raced out of that house before I became a full monster who'd eat her own children.

The icy air wasn't enough to slap me back to my senses. I jumped into my car.

I started it.

I raced out of that driveway, the snowdrifts a sun-blocking wall of white on each side. My eyes were dry. Have you ever cut yourself so deep that it didn't bleed? That's what I'd done, cut too deep to even cry. I just drove, abandoning my wispy-haired, short-armed baby girl, the child who'd walked into her first day of Just for Kix, all belly and knees in her black leotard, clapped her hands to get everyone's attention, and in her high, precious voice thanked all the other little girls' parents for taking time out of their busy day to come watch her dance, the first true love of my life, Zoë Rayn.

I ran out on her because I feared what I would do if I stayed.

It took just past the end of the driveway for my prefrontal lobe to calm the animal in me. My daughter was three years old and alone in our house. I don't think she'd ever been alone in a room before. She was frightened of the dark and the entire basement, would grab my hand with her chubby fingers when strangers talked to her, was as defenseless as a newborn fawn.

My fear bowed to nausea. I tried to turn the car around, but the snow was too high, only a single lane plowed on my back country road. I had to drive one more icy mile before there was enough space to change direction, and by then, I was sobbing so hard that I was gagging. I'd seen the look of betrayal on her face in the forever-moment before I'd raced out of the house. It had been ringed with terror.

I pulled into the driveway and leapt out of the car without turning it off.

I'd been gone for six minutes, a lifetime to a three-year-old.

I raced into the house.

Zoë was exactly where I'd left her, on the floor, boots lying beside her. Potty-trained for well over a year, she had wet herself in fear. The dark stain flowered on the front of her elastic-waisted jeans. A puddle had formed underneath her. She was staring at the ceiling, shuddering.

She'd seen that awful thing in my eyes, and then she'd heard me drive away.

I picked her up. I held her until she stopped shaking and the weeping came, that heaving gale of the shattered child. If my heart wasn't already broken, it would have cracked when she stuttered, “I'm sorry, Mommy. I'm sorry about my shoes.”

I cried with her, told her she hadn't done anything wrong. I apologized, but I knew there would never be enough sorries. I cleaned her up, me up. I wanted to stay at home and hold her all day, shut out the world, but sometimes you catch a glimpse of unbending Truth and I knew that if I didn't step back into the stream of life that day, I wouldn't ever again.

I drove to day care. I confessed.

When I arrived at work, I called her dad, Lance, and told him, too, what I'd done. I'll never forget how kind he was in that phone call. I expected him to take her away from me, for day care to call the authorities. They would have been well within their rights. Instead, everyone supported me with that peculiar aching sadness, like they knew something I didn't.

I started writing May Day that night, after Zoë fell asleep.

Compiling journal entries wouldn't have worked for me. I couldn't survive reliving the pain, not then, not on my own. I needed to convert it, package it, and ship it off. All those mysteries I'd been devouring offered me a glimpse of the potential order I could bring to my own story, a way to rewrite my life. Based on the number of people who line up after my writing workshops for a private word, or who contact me online, I know I'm not alone. There are many of us who need to reprocess our garbage, but who can't bear the idea of writing memoir, whether it's because we are too close to the trauma, don't want to hurt or be hurt by those we're writing about, or simply prefer the vehicle of fiction.

I kept up writing May Day, rubbing it like a worrystone, afraid to relapse into that gaping darkness where I was the monster. I wrote about laughter, the unexpected, a woman startled by the death of someone she loves. She thinks she's responsible but is held up by unexpected allies. In the end, she solves the mystery of his death.

May Day is an uneven book, my first real novel.

It's entirely fictional and was deeply therapeutic to write.

When I typed the last word of that book, I knew the darkness would never return, not at the level that I'd experienced that day with Zoë, not in a way that had the power to obliterate me.

The research would tell you that I was externalizing the story, habituating myself to it, inoculating myself against deep grief by exposing myself to it in small, controlled doses. All I knew was that my brain wasn't spinning as much and I was beginning to feel again, even if it was the emotions of fictional characters. Little by little, I was carving out new space for thoughts that were not about death or depression. Through the gentle but challenging exercise of writing a novel, I was learning how to control stories, which is what our lives are—stories.

I'm not the first writer to discover this healing process.

Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is his public grappling with some of his more haunting childhood experiences, including a complicated, troubled relationship with his father. In addition to Dickens declaring David Copperfield his most autobiographical and favorite of all the novels he wrote, The Guardian places it at number fifteen in a list of the one hundred best novels in history.

Tim O'Brien is a Vietnam War veteran whose The Things They Carried is about a Vietnam War veteran named Tim O'Brien. The work is fiction. He coalesces something fundamental, something almost mystical at the heart of rewriting your life, when he writes in his most famous book, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple.

Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep.

Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”

Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did.

Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked by a friend why she must make everything a story. Her answer speaks directly to the power of rewriting your life: “Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” Heartburn is Ephron's first published novel. In addition to being a bestseller, her screenplay was turned into a box-office hit starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

This alchemy of transmuting-pain-into-gold isn't the purview of an elite group of gifted, well-trained authors who were born with pen in hand. You too can access this power. When I wrote May Day, I had an English degree but had never taken a novel-writing class. I didn't even know the basics of writing a short story, let alone had I met a person who actually wrote books. Plus, I was living in rural Minnesota and, pre-Internet (at least where I lived), I had no access to writing groups. I taught myself to write a novel.

Nor is the therapeutic power of novel writing exclusive to those who have experienced deep trauma. Dr. Pennebaker found that directed, expressive writing is beneficial for everyone, meeting us where we are, whether we're coming to terms with a difficult commute, struggling against an annoying coworker, navigating a divorce, or coping with deep grief or PTSD.

You don't even have to want to publish what you write, and in fact, it's okay if you don't. Undertake this journey as if your writing is for your eyes only. You can always change your mind about publishing, but if you begin from the perspective that your writing is private, you give yourself permission to write freely and with integrity without polluting your story with the fickle demands of the publishing world, because here's the truth: it doesn't matter if you burn the novel the second you finish penning it. You can even toss it in the air, still burning, fire bullets into it, pour acid on it when it falls, and bury the ashes. You'll still reap all the physical and psychological benefits of writing it. The balm and insight lie in externalizing and controlling the story, not in showing it to others.

If and when you do decide to publish, though, you'll have something genuine and powerful to offer the world. Dickens, Alexie, O'Brien, Ephron, Allende, Winterson, and hundreds of other best-selling authors created compelling stories because they pulled them from a place of truth, vulnerability, and experience. Turning crucible moments into a novel is not only regenerative for the writer, but it's also glorious for the reader. That authenticity creates an indelible story.

So, now you know what brought me here. It wasn't Jay's suicide that was my rock bottom. It was what I let grief do to me, how I allowed it to sneak up and turn me against my child. You also know how I dug myself out—writing fiction. I didn't know the science behind narrative therapy, though it was already firmly established. I just sensed that I had to write, and it had to be fiction.

I am staking out this territory.

I'm calling it rewriting your life.

I'm inviting you to visit. Stay as long as you want. Redecorate, even.

This book is your map to this land. It puts the merciful, transformative, and very possibly profitable power of novel writing in your hands. It combines the science of narrative and expressive therapy with the practice of novel writing and a juicy vein of “I'll show you mine, so you can show you yours.” The result, I hope, will be your prescription for health and renewal from wherever you are, something you can accomplish any place, anytime, cheaply, alone or with others. Above all, this journey will be gentle and humane, and the end result will be a novel with the bones to be great.

You don't have to believe any of this.

You just have to do it.

This is the power of writing.