“No way!”
“I swear on my mom's life.” The air rushed out of me as soon as I said it. Whoof. Like I'd punched myself in the stomach. My mom was everything to me—security, safety, food, love, my oasis in a hurricane of a home life—and I'd just lied her life away. Talk about following the shit with the shovel.
You better believe the girls wanted to play with me after that. Everyone wanted to play with me. I should have been thrilled, but I was sick at what I'd done. I spent the rest of the day weeping in the nurse's office. When she offered to call my mom to come pick me up, I demurred, positive that if my mom wasn't already dead, she'd certainly croak on the drive in.
At the end of the day, I could barely drag myself off the bus and into the house. Against all odds, my mom was there, dead lady walking. She took one look at me before bundling me inside a hug.
“What's wrong?”
I rolled over on myself like a professional narc.
And you know what? I felt a thousand pounds lighter, imminent punishment for lying notwithstanding. I'd been hauling that weight all day. It felt great to lay it down.
Catharsis really can be that immediate and that effective. Think of cathartic sharing as removing the lid from a bubbling pot, where the steam is any extreme emotion—guilt, fear, anger—that has been bottled up. Engaging a negative experience by talking or writing about it, or a version of it, releases the more intense emotions associated with it. Catharsis “lets off steam.”
Inhibition-Confrontation
According to inhibition-confrontation, the third theory of why writing is an effective pathway to emotional healing, it's hard work to avoid thinking about stress or trauma. This is the inhibition part of the name. Somehow, someway, the negative thoughts and impulses leak in despite our best efforts to tamp them down. This denial leads to chronic stress, which takes a toll on the mind and body.
Confronting these stressors through writing—the confrontation part of the name—produces immediate boosts in mental and physical well-being. The trauma or stress—in other words, the stimuli—still exists in memory form, but when you face it, its significance changes.
Here's an example. Think of your life ordeals as zombies trying to get in through your front door. You spend all your energy shoulder-to-the-door trying to keep them out—inhibiting the zombies' arrival—which doesn't leave much time or attention for anything else. Your very survival depends on keeping that door closed, but you're exhausted; you can only keep this up for so long, so you finally let down your guard. The zombies charge through, and—what??—you realize there were never any flesh-eating monsters on the other side of the door. It was memories of zombies you were holding back this whole time.
The arts, and specifically writing, provide a protected route for opening that door and letting the memories-masquerading-as-life-threats in. Once they're through, you free up all the time and energy you've spent shoring up that door. For my money, the most exciting part of this last theory is that what we've been inhibiting or holding doesn't need to be traumatic or long-buried. Through writing, we can confront even a minor annoyance and still reap health benefits.
In further good news, it isn't necessary to know which one of these three explanations you're tapping into to be sustained and healed by writing. You just need to write. You don't need to choose autobiography or memoir as your vehicle either, though both narrative therapy and expressive writing therapy are centered on factual writing, often in the forms of essays, journals, and letters.
What I have returned from the dark side to tell you is that fiction writing works just as well.
For some of us, it works even better.
REWRITING MY LIFE THROUGH FICTION
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,