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, 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
