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.
CHAPTER 2
KNOW THYSELF
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
We move what we're learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.
—Brené Brown
In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, expressive therapy pioneer Dr. James W. Pennebaker devotes several chapters to the history and power of personal honesty. According to his extensive studies, all humans have inappropriate thoughts, fears, and uncomfortable memories. The best way to move past them is to travel through them.
In other words, the truth will set you free.
Perhaps like me, you find this vastly comforting.
Building off social psychologist Dr. Dan Wegner's findings that the harder we try to bury a thought, the more power it gains (the “try not to think of a white bear” hypothesis), Pennebaker designed studies that found that when you stop suppressing and instead reveal your negative thoughts and memories, even if only on paper, you create a narrative congruence that allows your brain to release them.
Although Pennebaker's studies cannot pinpoint whether the relief comes from the act of releasing a secret or the cessation of the work of inhibiting it, the science is clear: disclosing your closet skeletons is good for your immune system, your mental health, your blood pressure, your heart rate, and a bunch of your other parts. In an elegant and interesting twist to his work, Pennebaker discovered in one particular study that the “sickest” subjects (as measured by the frequency of doctor visits) were also the people who wrote on the most superficial topics when asked to write nonstop on any subject for ten minutes, “whereas the healthy students' writing samples were