A Conversation with Terri Cheney

As the pandemic surges in Los Angeles and across the United States, I am finding it's more important than ever to find ways to bolster my self-care. For me that's deepening my journaling practice, taking long walks by the beach, and staying connected with friends.

I had the opportunity to speak at length with author Terri Cheney, who is a mental health advocate. Her new book Modern Madness dives deeply into the complexities of mental illness and breaks it down in a way that is accessible, seeing it more clearly by unpacking the myths and realities. When I asked her what is most misunderstood about mental illness, she said, "how common it is." It may be challenging to release a book during COVID, but for Terri, the timing couldn't be better. It is not just for readers with a diagnosis but for anyone who is trying to better understand this issue and what we can do about it.

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Credit: Tracy Nguyen.

Terri Cheney is the author of the New York Times bestseller Manic: A Memoir. Terri's writings and commentary about bipolar disorder have also been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, NPR, and countless articles and popular blogs, including her own ongoing blog for Psychology Today, which has over one million views.

Her new book, Modern Madness, exposes the complexities of the mental health issues currently confronting our nation. Using the familiar framework of an owner’s manual, Modern Madness brilliantly imposes order on a frightening and forbidding topic. Cheney’s juxtaposition of conventional clinical language with real, lived experience unpacks the myths and realities of mental illness.

Read People Magazine's feature story about Terri and her new book.

KARIN GUTMAN: You wrote about your experience with bipolar disorder in your first two books. How is this new book, Modern Madness, different?

TERRI CHENEY: This book is different because the first two were really strictly memoir. I wanted to take this beyond the confines of memoir because since Manic became a best seller, I have heard so many stories and met so many people and am much more aware of myself as being a member of a community of the mentally ill. So I really wanted to reach out beyond me for a change and incorporate family and loved ones of people with mental illness, really see if I could bring them into the conversation more. So it is my story but it's also lessons learned. I think this is the big difference.

We actually have to come up with a new genre to market it, because it's on the edge… it is memoir, but it's also somewhat prescriptive. So my agent and I ended up calling it prescriptive memoir and that seemed to work out okay.

KARIN: What about self-help memoir?

TERRI: I didn't want it to be self-help, it's not what it is. It's memoir. I mean, it's all my story.

KARIN: What’s the difference between prescriptive and self-help memoir?

TERRI: Well, I think prescriptive bounces more heavily into memoir. This is not an advice book. I actually have a story in here where I rail against advice. I think it shuts people down and it turns them off. I have a story in here about saying, “Tell me where it hurts.” Sit down with someone who's struggling and just say, “Tell me where it hurts.”

Five little words that just make a world of difference, rather than telling them what to do, how to do... get more exercise, eat more blueberries, that kind of thing.

It's so hard to be told what to do when you're depressed, because you can barely move or breathe. Being told to take a shower or exercise is almost a slap in the face.

KARIN: When you wrote Manic, weren’t you originally intending to educate your audience? Until you realized, “This is just not working.”

TERRI: That is neat to remember that.

KARIN: That really stuck with me.

TERRI: I was in the hospital at the time and did tons of research when on grand rounds with the doctors. I immersed myself in the science and the clinical aspect of it and was so bored. I just couldn't get into it. When I was trying to write, I just didn't feel that tug, that I need to tell this. I don't know if I was narcissistic or what it was, but my own story was really fascinating to me, and just wanted to be told. So I threw away everything, all the research. I mean, I still have it, but I did a total about face and dove into myself and my own story, my own experience, my feelings, what it felt like inside my body to have bipolar disorder.

To be where I had been as an entertainment lawyer and then to turn into a writer on mental health issues was not where I saw my life going until I wrote the book.

KARIN: Do you think Modern Madness is maybe a different version of the original intention you had with Manic?

TERRI: It could be that it's more expansive than Manic was. It's more all-encompassing and it does have the introductory sections describing for example what depression is or what mania is. It does have that clinical element that I had thrown away. So the research was not useless. It came in very handy to know all that. Never throw away research.

KARIN: Does the book focus on bipolar disorder or is it broader?

TERRI: Much broader. My stories are necessarily partly bipolar, but also as I said, they are part of the mental health community and the mentally ill. So, this definitely reaches beyond just bipolar.

KARIN: How are you doing today?

TERRI: I'm doing great. I waited for the other shoe to drop with COVID because isolation is one of the things I talk about in the book as being a bad coping skill. Isolation is very bad for you when you're depressed or have a mental health issue. But I've done great during COVID.

KARIN: Why do you think that is?

TERRI: First of all, because I'm used to being alone. I'm not married, I'm a writer. I'm used to feeling separate as a writer and as someone with mental illness. I think there is a separateness that is inherent in that. You watch a lot when you're a writer and you stand outside. So isolation kind of comes naturally. It's almost as if I've been practicing for COVID. I'm trained for it.

KARIN: Wow.

TERRI: Yeah. I'm quite surprised.

KARIN: Do you take medication for your illness?

TERRI: Yes, I've been a proponent of medication from the beginning. I've been on every medication there is practically. For me to accept having bipolar disorder, I had to have a story around it. My story is that it's chemically based or it has something to do with physicality, whether it's caused by inflammation (that's a recent theory) or by a chemical imbalance in the brain. That is easier for me to accept and then treat with medications. So, I've always believed that medication is necessary.

KARIN: I recall you sharing that you enjoy the experience of hypomania. Does the medication interfere with that?

TERRI: Kay Jamison writes a lot about this, about not wanting to take lithium because it would dull her writing ability. I certainly love hypomania, it is the best part of being bipolar. You feel so on top of your game and everything connects, everything clicks. The words just come pouring out of you. But the consequences of not taking medication are so great that it's just not worth it. The trade-off is just not worth it because the reactions are so bad. I'm one of those few people who is totally medication compliant.

KARIN: With three books under your belt, what have you learned about the creative writing process, about how to birth a book. Is there anything that is consistent?

TERRI: Yes. I've learned that you can't wait for inspiration to strike. That's been a huge lesson. I struggled for seven years to write Manic because I would just sort of sit there with my pen waiting for the metaphor to come, and trying to force the damn metaphor. And it just doesn't happen that way. You have to put yourself in a place to write and then write something—anything—so you have what I call playdough. Clay that you can sculpt. Because then the next day when you have to face the writing process, you're not facing an empty page, you're playing with words. And playing with words is great, I love doing that. I don't like the blank page.

KARIN: Many writers I work with struggle with finding the structure of their book.

TERRI: I've learned that I am not very good with structure, it's my bête noire. I work better with a short form format—the essay—than I do with a long form. So, in Manic and in Modern Madness I use the essay form to create a book with a narrative thread.

I tried to turn it to my advantage, because I know I have trouble with plotting a long chronological narrative. It's one thing I work at really hard, but I think some people are gifted in it and some people aren't. And I don't feel like I'm particularly gifted that way. I can see the arc of a short story very clearly, I feel it, but I don't feel the long ones.

KARIN: What about your second book, The Dark Side of Innocence?

TERRI: That one was more chronological. I don't think it worked as well. It told the story of my childhood. In a way, it was the idea of my editor to write about my childhood and I didn't have very strong feelings about it at the time. I sort of wish I had held back and waited for something that really felt more like it needed to be written the way that Manic and Modern Madness felt. These are stories that I've seriously wanted to tell and get out there.

KARIN: What was the urgency around this book? What were the stories you wanted to tell?

TERRI: I felt very strongly about incorporating relationship stories into a book because I was too wrapped up in my illness for too many years to see how it affected the people around me. I had watched how it affected men that I dated, friends that I had, my family. I had a little more perspective after all these years, and I felt very strongly that relationships were unexplored in my earlier work because it was mostly just about me.

KARIN: How does your mental illness affect or inform your creative process? Or is it hard to have perspective on it?

TERRI: No, I can see it. I can see it with some clarity. When I'm depressed I can't and don't write and that's something I've learned. It's been a really difficult lesson to learn, that there are simply times when I can't write and I have self-compassion for that, because you feel rotten when you don't write when you're a writer. You feel like you just haven't gotten anything done and you're just all clammy and stuck. I hate that feeling. And when I'm depressed I just don't have the inspiration or the desire really to tackle the words, so I let myself have those days off.

I try to make up for it when I'm in better places. I try to take advantage of the hypomanic moods. There's also normalcy in bipolar disorder. You have periods where you're just like everybody else, when you're not going through a mood state.

So I write as much as I can. When I’m manic I try to write because I think I've got the world's greatest ideas and I'm going to change the universe with them. I see the fabric of the universe, but unfortunately I write very badly when I'm manic. I write almost illegible to begin with, I like to do it in longhand.

KARIN: Do those episodes still happen even on medication?

TERRI: Not as much as they used to. I don't get as high and I don't get quite as low. I still get depressive episodes unfortunately, but they're fewer and for the most part they don't get as suicidal. So that's huge.

KARIN: How long do those depressive episodes typically last?

TERRI: I'm a rapid cycler. It's sort of a curse and a blessing because my episodes are very short, like four days depression followed by three days of mania. So the good part of that is that I know people who have episodes that last for months and I cannot imagine being severely depressed for months or years. But the problem is, it's very hard to treat because you're always chasing the symptoms. They're changing constantly. I think I write in Modern Madness, it's like chasing a comet's tail to try to get the last symptom that you had and medicate that, but then you're on to the next one.

KARIN: How much time typically passes in between?

TERRI: It varies. It can be weeks, months, generally weeks. I'm very aware of my moods and I don't know if that's because I'm bipolar and I've educated myself about it, or because I'm a writer. I'm just hyperaware of my emotions and my moods. I'm always thinking of it as material.

So it really does inform the universe for me. There's this big controversy that's saying, “I am bipolar” versus “I have bipolar disorder.” I get yelled at a lot by people for saying “I am bipolar,” which is part of the way I see the world. It's part of my mindset. It affects everything, so it doesn't feel weird to me to say that. But I understand it's not your whole identity. There are other parts of me.

KARIN: Since you’re so comfortable exposing yourself, is there any part of you that gets nervous to release your work into the world?

TERRI: I have a perfect example of that. I had this big lecture last night in front of 250 people, and it's on Zoom and I had to read a story from Modern Madness. I chose one that has me wondering where my panties went after an illicit interlude. And I'm thinking as I'm reading this, “There are doctors in this audience, there are people I know... what am I doing? Are you crazy?” And yet there's a certain thrill about doing it. Because there's a power to self-exposure as long as it's not too graphic and doesn't make people too uncomfortable. There's a great power to it. I spent so many years, as you know, hiding out and not telling anyone about my illness and just literally hiding under my desk when I was depressed as a lawyer. Lying all the time, pretending that something else was wrong with me and I couldn't go out because I had the flu or whatever. I would get so tired of the lies that telling the truth and being honest about what's going on can never feel as bad, I think, for me as it might feel for other people. I know how sick that made me to be lying all the time.

KARIN: Also, you have tended to expose yourself versus other people.

TERRI: Right. I worried about exposing my family when I wrote my second book. I was very careful with that. Both my parents are dead now, so I don't have to worry about that now and I probably have more to write about them. But exposing yourself... I feel like you're fair game. Who is the famous writing teacher who wrote, “If people want you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better”?

KARIN: Anne Lamott.

TERRI: I love that. That has encouraged me many times.

KARIN: Has anything ever come back to bite you?

TERRI: I've tried not to make people too recognizable, but people that are recognizable have been absolutely thrilled to be in the book. I have an ex-boyfriend who does not come off very well. He brags about it all the time. He said to me, “I'd marry you in a minute if it weren't for your bipolar disorder.” I wrote that in Manic and I think that's a pretty damning statement. He joked about it all the time and loves that he was a character in the book. So that's been my experience. I know other people have had problems but I've been very lucky. And I don't let people read my writing before it goes out. I think that's a dangerous habit.

After years of working for other people, if I'm going to make the self-sacrifice to be a writer, I want to have the perks of it as well. And part of that is being able to say what you want. You're the writer. You live or die by your words.

KARIN: I love that.

TERRI: Yeah.

I miss the money of being a lawyer. Writing is so hard financially.

KARIN: Do you miss practicing law at all?

TERRI: Well pretty much money is the only part. There is a certain instant credibility that went with being a lawyer that I miss, that business card moment when people, men especially, started to take you very seriously all of a sudden. When you say you're a writer there's that pause, that uncomfortable pause like, oh, another one.

KARIN: Even though you're published?

TERRI: Well now I get to say what I've written. Then I get to do my killer line, “And I wrote a book that became a best seller.” That's great. I mean I'm so lucky. I just love being able to say that, because I never in a million years expected that would happen.

KARIN: Why do you think it hit so strongly? What were the forces behind that?

TERRI: I think one of the big things, just from a marketing standpoint, was that my Modern Love essay for the New York Times hit a week before Manic was due to come out. And it was a powerful essay. It got filmed and Anne Hathaway ended up playing me which was such a bizarre turn of events. But that really helped, getting that exposure in the New York Times was tremendous.

KARIN: Was the timing just by chance?

TERRI: Just fortuitous. Yeah.

The same way that Modern Madness has come out in the middle of a pandemic when everybody is struggling with their mental health. I mean, I've been lucky. And I certainly didn't time it that way, and I didn't realize the title would be so prescient.

KARIN: Who is Modern Madness for?

TERRI: Pretty much everybody, because I think one thing I've learned is that when I tell people I'm bipolar there's this... it's not even six degrees of separation. It's, “So am I” or ”my best friend is” or somebody I work with, or I have depression, I have anxiety. That really has surprised me how many people are affected by mental illness. And if you don't have it yourself, you love someone who does.

So when I was writing my proposal for the book, I realized if this goes out, this could be marketed to almost anybody. It's not just for those with a diagnosis.

KARIN: What do you think is most misunderstood about mental illness?

TERRI: How common it is. One in five Americans takes a psychiatric medication, and the suicide rate, even before COVID, has just been skyrocketing. There's one suicide in the world every 40 seconds. It's tremendous what's happening and I don't really understand why, particularly with young people, it's so prevalent. I think it's being talked about more, thank God.

KARIN: Why do you think it’s so prevalent?

TERRI: I think it's easy to say social media is contributing to it. When I look at the people, I don't read my comments anymore, although I hope everybody will leave me an Amazon review! I really try not to read anonymous comments anymore because they were so brutal.

I had one person say, “Terri Cheney writes about suicide so much, I wish she would just go ahead and do it already.” If you read something like that you're like, “Do they not think I'm a human being?” So that sort of cured me for a while. That was for an article I wrote in The Huffington Post.

KARIN: What is your life like now? How do you spend your days?

TERRI: Well, now that I don't go to the cafe anymore to write, I try to set aside time for productivity every day which I am trying to be kind to myself about. Right now I've been dealing so much with publicity. That's been the last few months. But I've started to plot my new book. You have to really be kind to yourself when you're a writer because it's so easy to find fault with not doing enough. There's always that feeling of “I didn't do enough today.” But I think any day that you face the page or you face the project is a day well spent. Because your brain is percolating, I call it.

KARIN: But don't you find a lot of the writing, or the ideas, come when you're not facing the page, too?

TERRI: Absolutely, yeah.

KARIN: So how do you balance that?

TERRI: I write down all my ideas because I have a terrible memory. And it's just getting worse. So I have post-it notes everywhere. I use the software program Ulysses that lets you organize your ideas. I'm very technophobic, so that's the best I can explain it.

KARIN: Can you say anything about your new book?

TERRI: Well, I can say what it feels like at the moment. I'd like to write about recovery from substance abuse and mental illness because that's called a 'dual diagnosis' when you have both.

There's a lot of addiction and recovery memoirs out there, so I'm a little nervous about that. But I don't think there's been enough about dual diagnosis. I facilitated a mental health support group for dual diagnosis for about 15 years at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and heard a lot of stories. I'm still in a group. I just joined one in fact. And I think the issues are different when you have the combined forces attacking you. It's really a tough recovery and I'd like to write about that. It's funny, there are whole areas of my life that I haven't written about because I've been too ashamed, if you can believe that after reading everything that I've written already. But I heard if you have shame, it's probably a good thing to start writing about.

KARIN: It is pretty shocking that there are areas you haven't explored yet.

TERRI: I know. I didn't really want to go there. But I have used up a lot of my life in three books. So I think it's time to turn to the stuff that was very difficult. I felt like with alcohol there was more of a volitional aspect than with bipolar disorder, which feels to me like it was not within my control.

KARIN: I see. So, you relate personally to the dual diagnosis?

TERRI: Very much so. I'm 21 years sober, so I went through quite a journey.

KARIN: How have you become a better writer over the years? Have you always been a writer?

TERRI: Interesting question. I have written all my life since I was a little girl. My father would read to me and encouraged me to write poetry, and that was a huge bond between us. So I always wanted to write. The entertainment law, while it had its perks, was a major detour off my true passion. I was an English major and I always envisioned myself as a writer and never really let that dream go. But I've noticed my writing changing over the years, which is exciting and scary at the same time because I think I write more simply now than I used to. I don't know if that's because I've used up all the words already or if I really just have a clear thought process after writing so much.

KARIN: Are you more confident in some way?

TERRI: Well, I hear a pretty strong rhythm in my head and that guides me. I got that from, of all things, the Hudson Harlem line—the train from Poughkeepsie from Vassar College going into New York City—where I went every weekend to go play and go to the museums. I would hear that train sound and that's when I would do all my writing and my homework and it got into me. It got into my bones somehow and got in my head. So my writing has always been rhythmic, whether it's poetry or memoir. I haven't lost that sense of internal rhythm. That's why I can't write when like rock music is playing. I can only write if classical music is playing. Anything that disrupts that rhythm is going to disrupt my writing.

I don't know if that answers your question but It's just a very lovely memory of going on the train and writing to the wheels.

KARIN: What a great touchstone for you.

So, is the simplicity about less words, or more minimalist in sentence structure?

TERRI: Yes. Less metaphors. A little less flowery, I'd say.

I don't agonize over every image as much as I used to. So I wouldn't say it's easier. I don't think writing is ever easy, but it does flow more than it used to. I used to have terrible writer's block and I don't seem to have that. That's something I'd love to tell your readers. I went to see Dennis Palumbo, the writing coach, and he told me to “write one moment” and those three words have gotten me through so much. Just write one moment, because you get so overwhelmed by a lot of the story and characters. I've found when I write one moment and I focus on my internal sensations, something happens... something comes up.

It breaks through that ice.



Buy the book!

To learn more about Terri Cheney, visit her site.

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A Conversation with Hope Edelman

Over the years, I have developed a favorite tradition in the Unlocking Your Story workshops by inviting guest authors to visit the groups. I love cheerleading writers and their new books as they make their way into the world, and it's also a way to cultivate community, as I enjoy inviting back workshop alums for these events.

This fall we have two incredible women visiting the groups, both of whom have written books on the topic of grief and loss—a theme for the times, to be sure.

Hope Edelman, author eight nonfiction books including the #1 New York Times bestseller Motherless Daughters, is also a certified Martha Beck Life Coach specializing in grief, early loss, and creativity. She runs workshops and retreats to help motherless women revisit and reassess their early losses. Hope's new book, The Aftergrief, launches next week and explores what loss looks like 10, 20 or 30 years later.

Hope and I spoke at length about how to think about grief, especially against the backdrop of Covid-19. She shared her thoughts on how shifting our perspectives about our losses can help us grow, and how writing can be a great tool for this.

Barbara Abercrombie, also visiting this fall, is a longtime, beloved teacher at UCLA Extension Writers' Program, whose book The Language of Loss is coming out in November. Stay tuned for an interview with her next month!

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Photo: Hannah Kozak.

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Her work has received a New York Times notable book of the year designation and a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction. She is also certified as a Martha Beck Certified Life Coach, and facilitates Motherless Daughters retreats and workshops all over the world. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

Her new book, The AfterGrief, explains that the death of a loved one isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond. With guidance for reframing a story of loss, finding equilibrium within it, and even experiencing renewed growth and purpose in its wake, Hope demonstrates that though grief is a lifelong process, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong struggle.

KARIN: Congratulations, Hope! I know your new book took a while to birth.

HOPE: Thank you. It was four years in the making, which is a very long time, but it took me that long to do all the research I felt thoroughly conceptualized and articulated this way of thinking about grief. It just took that long to really know what I wanted to say. It takes as long as it takes.

KARIN: So, is the book much different than the way you originally pitched it?

HOPE: Yeah, very different.

KARIN: What did you know at the beginning, and what did you discover as you went along

HOPE: The book went through several iterations.

When I first started working on it, I was going to write kind of an all-purpose book about grief. I look back now at that proposal, and I was emphasizing post traumatic growth—looking at the positive outcomes of grief once we allow ourselves to grieve and the reasons why we may not have been able to grieve, especially if we were young when a loss occurred.

As I started doing interviews and talking with more people, I became so intrigued and dismayed by how many adults who were bereaved as children, who lost a parent or a sibling or a close friend, and didn't get support and all the ways that that was showing up in their lives later. So, the second iteration of the book was very much about adults bereaved as children.

Also, the 2016 election happened a few months after I sold my proposal. I started thinking about cultural responses to grief in a different way because half the country, as far as I could see, was in mourning, and portions of the other half were just saying, “You lost, get over it.” There was a sense of just get on with things, let go and move on, deal with it. That was so reminiscent of how many of these adults were told to cope with their grief when they were younger. It was an old school message, but it was pervasive in the culture for a couple of months. I mean, I saw it everywhere on social media and it really made me rethink what I wanted to write about and what was important to write about, and did the world really need another book about grief that talks about the long-term positive outcomes? There's so much already written about posttraumatic growth.

Then I started studying narrative therapy and doing more research and leading retreats. I saw that a lot of the long-term lingering effects were similar, regardless of what the age was at time of loss. As I got deeper into that research, I realized that what I was discovering was applicable to a much wider portion of the population, which was anyone who had a major loss in the past. What does that long arc of loss look like?

So, the third iteration of the book really became looking at the long arc of loss and what a major loss is bound to look like 5, 10, 20, 30 years later, and how it will recur. Grief will recur, but I didn't want to call it grief because it isn't the same thing that you feel in the first year or two after someone dies, when you're making all the adjustments and adaptations simultaneously with trying to figure out how to live in the world without this person and missing them and having the physical absence. What shows up 10, 20 years later, is really something very different, but I didn't know what to call it.

I was thinking what comes after grief? Then I realized, we're just going to call it The Aftergrief, because that is, I think, the phase of it. We've all been conditioned to think about five stages of grief. The bereavement world doesn't think in those terms anymore, but the general public very much does. Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think Kubler-Ross was a brilliant mind, but her work got co-opted in the direction that I don't think she ever intended for it to go in. She did a lot of good in the culture by getting people talking about death and loss, but when those five stages started being applied to bereavement, things really went awry culturally, I believe.

KARIN: Didn’t Kübler-Ross intend for her work to be applied to someone who is dying?

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right. Terminally ill patients. Those were the stages that she observed people going through as they came to terms with the imminent end of their own lives. Then it got applied to bereavement.

In my experience—and I've been doing this work now for more than 25 years primarily with women who've lost their mothers, but also with any adults who were bereaved as children, and also having the experience of having lost family members and close friends as an adult, and helping others navigate their losses as a grief coach—I believe that people really only care about two stages of grief: the stage where you feel really bad and the stage where you start feeling better.

I think of that as grief and the after grief. Grief is that stage where you feel really bad. You're dealing with sorrow and distress and despair and all of the physical symptoms of grief. Then the after grief is when you start feeling better and feeling that you've got the inner resolve and resilience and fortitude to move forward in your life. You'll miss that person and hopefully you'll find ways to carry them forward with you, but you can do it. For everyone, that transition is different. There's no morning where you wake up and say, “I'm in the after grief.” That doesn't happen.

KARIN: Is it common to transition back and forth between the two?

HOPE: Oh yeah, you can. In fact, there is a name for that. It's called the dual process model of bereavement. It was developed by two Dutch psychologists who observed in widows that it would move back and forth between focusing on the loss and focusing on the practicalities of life. They called it an oscillation.

Some people make that transition in a very discreet way. Some just feel it coming on gradually. Some can pinpoint the morning that they wake up and feel that this is the first morning I've woken up and feel a sense of hope about the future. For others it's a slower process. 

We phase into it a year after the loss, two years after the loss, six months after the loss. It depends on so many factors, including the relationship you had with that person, how dependent you were on your interactions with them, your temperament, your prior losses that you may or may not have had. And then I think it extends to the rest of your life. Because aspects of that loss may recur or bubble up for you. I think that the cultural message has been that if, 10 years after your mom or your dad or your sibling died, you reach a life transition and you powerfully miss them, that your grief was somehow incomplete. In fact, that was the belief in the psychoanalytic literature well into the '70s and '80s. I think the word that was used was unresolved or incomplete grief.

KARIN: Wow, that's amazing.

HOPE: Right. Whereas the number of people that I've encountered who say, “20 years after the loss, my first child was born and I found myself missing my mom or my dad all over again. Or 10 years after the loss, on my wedding day, I couldn't stop crying because I missed my sibling so much and wished that they were there.” I don't think that should be pathologized. I think it's actually a normative response. I don't like using the word normal because who's normal? What's normal, right? We're all so complex. But if I just look at it in terms of inductive reasoning, given how many people that have told me this story, I think it is on the scale of normative responses.

Now, if you're so crippled that you don't feel like you need to cancel your wedding because you can't show up, that's different.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: That's an extreme response. But I have plenty of friends who say, “I had a big response as I approached and reached the age my parents were when they died.” That's a huge transition. I find that to be actually a really normative response, and so I'm looking to put this book out in the world so we start a conversation that validates and normalizes those responses.

KARIN: Is this relationship to grief unique to Western culture? Did you look at other cultures?

HOPE: I did. There's a whole chapter on that. It's that important, because grief is culturally relative. And this is something that we weren't really talking about much in the '90s when I first wrote Motherless Daughters. At that time, I was really focusing very much on, “Let’s look at all the common denominators because women feel so isolated; they want to know that others out there feel the same way. So, I'm going to look at the parts of this experience that transcends culture, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background.” But now there's a lot more appreciation for how all of those factors can determine a grief response.

I went deep into looking at how other cultures respond to grief and death because their belief systems tend to infuse death rituals and mourning practices, including, how long will you commemorate your dead? We look at Asian cultures that do ancestor worship or Latino cultures that come together every year for the Day of the Dead.

But yes, Western culture has done a particularly crappy job in helping us adjust to the loss of a loved one. It didn't used to be that way. What's remarkable, Karin, is that it's been just the past hundred years. One of the things that changed mourning practices in Western culture was the flu pandemic of 1918-19. And the fact that we are 100 years later experiencing something so similar is really serendipitous. I won't say coincidental, I think serendipitous.

KARIN: What happened 100 years ago?

HOPE: Three things happened in quick succession.

1914 to 1918 was World War I, which was the first technological warfare where lots of people died at once. For the first time, lots of people were dying far from home, so you couldn't bury your dead. They often had to be buried where they died.

So people didn't have graves to visit or funerals. That really was difficult because Victorian mourning practices tended to be elaborate, particularly in the UK and the Commonwealth, but also somewhat in the United States. We had very elaborately prescribed rituals for what to do after someone died and how long it lasts and mourning dress and how you decorated your house and there were social rules and what the women wore and for how long depended on who died. This all was also an effect of Queen Victoria, but mourning was a very social activity. 

And then in 1917, Sigmund Freud published the paper Mourning and Melancholia, and the psychoanalysts began thinking and researching grief as an individual internal process. We were also shifting from romanticism to modernism as a cultural movement and that was really important, too.

The third thing that happened was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, right on the heels of World War I. So many people died between the war and the flu pandemic that the culture just couldn't keep up with those mourning rituals, because we were mourning two and three people at once. Sometimes a whole family would die from the pandemic and we couldn't gather for big funerals, and mourning periods would have overlapped, and people just started thinking of mourning as something now you do privately or alone, which I think really screwed us up because we're a tribal species. I don't think we were meant to have these intense, really painful emotions by ourselves and have to figure out how to get through them on our own and be told that if we didn't do it properly, that we were unresolved or incomplete. I mean, that really messed up the way we think about grief.

So now, 100 years later, we have not just the opportunity to hold onto what we have, which is minimal by comparison, but to improve upon it. I see some hopeful glimpses into that, that people aren't willing to just let go of funerals. That they're trying to create virtual memorials and the internet is a place where we can share our stories.

KARIN: I just recently attended an online memorial for a friend and was reminded of how important funerals are, even in this virtual form.

HOPE: Absolutely. Funerals, memorial services and particularly eulogies are some of the last social experiences that we have connected to losing someone where a community of mourners will come together and share their stories and comfort each other. Because think about it… after the funeral, or the wake if you're Catholic, or the Shiva if you're Jewish, what do we have? Then the families just have to do it themselves from that point forward. So if we lose that, then we're losing any kind of social interaction around our grief and any opportunity for culturally prescribed social support. It's critically important that we hold onto that somehow, and the internet, fortunately, has allowed us to do that.

KARIN: When you say, “I see hopeful glimpses?” is that what you're referring to?

HOPE: Yes. I'm part of a taskforce—a virtual funeral taskforce—which is made up of about 90 bereavement professionals. It's authors, activists and academics and people in the field who were meeting online through the first month of the COVID epidemic to share our different initiatives and try to cross pollinate and help each other, help the culture adapt to this new reality, be it temporary or parts of it permanent.

These virtual memorials allow people from out of state to attend. It used to be, if you couldn't get on an airplane on short notice, you couldn't take part in the service. But now people can and I think that's something we may not want to let go of. In the future, I hope we will see hybrids where we can gather socially again and people can come together and have the comfort of hugs and handshakes, but we can also livestream these events so that people from out of town who can't travel for physical or financial reasons can still be part of the day.

KARIN: Just to extend the COVID conversation, it is my understanding that the grief we're experiencing now is re-triggering old losses for many people.

HOPE: Yeah, that's exactly right.

I write about what I call new grief, old grief, and new old grief, and I'll just briefly explain what each of them is.

‘New grief’ is when you've just lost somebody and a lot of the response that you're having is related to that person's suffering and the loss of that relationship in the physical world—any sadness, anger, guilt, whatever emotions you're feeling around that loss. I call that new grief, the freshly acute phase. The shock, the numbness, the despair, the sleeplessness, all of that new grief.

‘Old grief’ is what I call a loss from the past that resurfaces in the present. That's what's getting re-triggered for a lot of people with COVID, and it's getting retriggered for all different reasons. It might be that you didn't get to say goodbye to a loved one who died in the past and now you're reading about all these families that can't be with their loved one when they die. It may be that you lost someone very suddenly and the fear of COVID coming on and taking a life very quickly is triggering some of those emotions.

Old grief may be triggered by a loss in the present, too. If you've lost someone freshly to COVID—or any other cause—and you're feeling new grief around that, it may re-trigger old grief from the past that you weren't able to process at the time because you either developmentally weren't mature enough or there was too much else going on or you didn't have support, didn't feel safe.

What I call ‘new old grief’ is when you experience your old loss in a new way, and that typically happens when you reach a milestone in your life that requires you to revisit that loss and see it differently—like a wedding or parenthood or divorce, for example. It also can be an age correspondence event where you turn the age someone was when they died or your child turns the age you were when somebody died. You're experiencing that old loss in a new way.

KARIN: Is that new way typically positive or could it go either way?

HOPE: It can go either way, but it typically has elements of both in my experience. There may be a renewed sadness; let's say for example, my mom was 42 when she died. So when I turned 42, I felt powerfully sad because I realized how young it was and how much she had missed out on. But I also felt this renewed gratitude for being here and being alive and getting to be 43 and 44 and 45. So you can have both of those experiences at once. They don't have to cancel each other out.

KARIN: Your book is described as showing us how shifting perspectives of grief can help us grow. How can we shift our perspective and can writing be a tool?

HOPE: Yeah, absolutely. I think of those shifts happening when we are willing to revisit and revise our stories. By revisit, I mean go back and look at the same set of facts. They probably don't look the same way they did when you experienced the loss, right?

I mean, I was 17 when my mom died. While I was writing this book, I unearthed a box of interviews and notes from Motherless Daughters, which I wrote in the early 1990s. In there I found a typed version of my story of my mother's death—five or six pages that I'd typed up when I was in my late 20s. I read this and I thought, “Wow, this is an artifact. This is an example of my story in motion because that's not the way I was telling the story at 17, and it's definitely not the way I'm telling the story now. This is a whole different version.”

So I could see the evolution of my relationship to the same set of facts, and that's what we're doing in the memoir workshop. We are encouraging people to go back. When you write the story of your life, you're revisiting the events and you're creating an artistic representation of them. But then your workshop cohorts are asking questions, and they're challenging you to really think about your interpretation of those events and articulate them in a way that offers something to your readers. So, I think of the memoir workshop as almost the best and purest example of revisiting and revising our stories. I think that's why we see such remarkable change in some of the students or some of the writers in the workshop because we're watching them develop new relationships with their stories, and that's how I think growth occurs.

I think what we're also seeing, and I was just thinking about this the other day, Karin, is that because of the cultural messages we have about grief and because there's such a cultural imperative to let go and move on and get over it, we're not always good at finding ways of maintaining relationships with our loved ones who died and finding ways for them to walk forward with us.

When we're writing a memoir about a loss, about someone we loved who has died, we are spending time with them again. If you're writing the book, you might be spending a couple of years with them again, and that often feels good to have them back, right? To have their presence surrounding us, which is why sometimes it's hard to finish those books. We have to be prepared that we're not letting go of them. I think there needs to be rituals for us, honestly, to let go of the shaping of that story and figure out how now we're going to carry these people forward differently.

You, like I do, I'm sure, have students who have been working on their books forever. Sometimes I wonder, is it because it feels so good to be in the presence of that person that they're writing about? How can we help them as instructors to find new and different ways to maintain that connection, but be able to bring the book to its conclusion and put it out into the world?

KARIN: Wow, I've never thought about that.

HOPE: No, me neither. That's the first time I've really articulated it that way.

KARIN: What about the students who are writing about loss and the painful parts?

HOPE: Well, that's hard, because it can reactivate trauma in their lives or in the classroom. Then we have to know when to gently encourage them to also have professional support while they're writing the book, because that's out of our wheelhouse and we shouldn't try to be their therapist in addition to their writing coach.

KARIN: Right.

HOPE: They may come with the impulse because they know that they need to start externalizing this. They can't keep it private and in silence anymore, but they may not be prepared for what starting to tell that story is going to involve. I mean, they might have flashbacks and recover memories that they haven't had before, and we want to make sure that they are emotionally protected and not in any danger, right?

Do you know the work of James Pennebaker?

KARIN: Yes, I have his books.

HOPE: Yeah, he's great. I figured you would.

Sometimes we have to assess, are you stable enough to tell this story now? I've actually had in the past a student or two where I've suggested that it might be really good for you to process this with a professional first, instead of trying to process it initially on the page. If you have extreme abuse in the past, for example, and memories are being recovered, I don't think it's advisable to try to heal yourself through just writing the story. I think you really need some professional assistance in order to cope with what might be coming up.

But what we do know, and from Pennebaker's work, is that expressive writing is the combination of writing about your thoughts and your feelings. If you're just venting your emotions on the page, it doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. In fact, sometimes it makes you feel worse. If you're just writing at the surface, what you think about what happened and the episodic events, it's not really that beneficial either.

But it's that marriage of narration and reflection that makes a memoir really work, that also helps the writer heal. So, if we're seeing someone just venting their emotions on the page, we can guide them toward putting more of the episodic narrative through line in there so that they can work with both, and learn how to interpolate one with the other.

If we see somebody just writing the episodic version of events, which I find is more common in my workshop, the difficult first draft—this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened—then you start asking them questions about, “well, how were you feeling when this happened? What do you think about this?” Get them to integrate their thoughts and their feelings. Then I think we're really helping them heal in a way that writing becomes the catalyst, maybe not the end product.

KARIN: Thank you so much, Hope! This has been such a fascinating and enlightening conversation.

To get a sneak peek of The AfterGrief, to be released in October 2020, click here!




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A Conversation with Lisa Dale Norton

I have the great pleasure of introducing you to someone whom I've long admired. Lisa Dale Norton is an author and memoir coach who wrote the fantastic guide to writing memoir, Shimmering Images—a book I highly recommend to anyone embarking on this journey of writing personal stories.

She talks about the most important requirement for a memoir to be publishable, and also shares her heartening take on what is being born in this unusual time we're experiencing. She calls it “an opening” available to all of us to step through, provided that we recognize the opportunity.

There is something about what she says that deeply resonates based on what I'm feeling personally and noticing around me. What are you noticing? If you have a moment, I'd love to hear from you.

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Lisa Dale Norton is an author, developmental book editor, and a dynamic public speaker. She is passionate about layered writing structures in narrative nonfiction that reflect the complexity of life experience, and about the transformative power of writing a memoir. 

For many years she taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Currently, Lisa works privately as a developmental editor with writers completing book manuscripts. She earned degrees from Reed College and the University of Iowa, and lives in Santa Fe.

She is the author of Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Griffin/St. Martin’s Press), America’s go-to guide for writing memoir, and Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press), a book of literary nonfiction—part memoir, part natural history writing—that won comparisons to the work of Annie Dillard. Her new book of literary nonfiction has just been completed.

KARIN GUTMAN: Where did your journey begin as a writer?

LISA DALE NORTON: I've always been a writer of some sort. When I was very little, I loved writing letters. I'm not sure where that came from, but there was this natural interest in expressing myself on the page. I wrote to everybody and anybody and my mother, I loved it so much. She even helped me find pen pals all over the place whom I would write these letters to.

So early on, I loved the written word. I remember one other story that I've never forgotten. I was in grade school, and we were writing book reports. For some reason I chose a very mundane semi-adult book. I have no idea why I chose that book. But I remember while writing the report for school, I had an absolute, clear image inside me of exactly where I was headed with what I was going to say and the point I was going to make.

I never forgot it, because I thought it was kind of cool and weird. And I think that those kinds of little experiences led me forward, always writing. It’s been what I've always done. Eventually there developed, as with most young writers, the obsession and deep desire to write a book and to be published.

We all know that as writers there becomes this moment where you really are committed to this life; for me, it was the only thing that I could see in front of me. I had to have it, it was an obsession. And so, I went off on that journey and it was a long journey, but I actually got there.

KARIN: When you eventually focused your attention on writing a book, did you know what story you wanted to tell?

LISA: I knew there were things that I cared about, and I had written vast quantities of that wandering journal-esque. I suppose in the midst of that, I was defining that which resonated on the deepest level for me. But no, I did not set out to say, "Hmm, I'm going to write a mystery novel or..." No, it wasn't like that. It was very organic. I came to it slowly. I knew what bothered me, so I knew what the problem was, although I couldn't have spoken of it that way then. And I knew what I loved and I just followed that.

KARIN: Was it personal narrative?

LISA: The first book I published was, yes.

KARIN: Was it about a certain period of your life?

LISA: It was, but it was about much more than that. This turned out to be a story set over a certain set of years and based in the Sandhills region of Nebraska—and my relationship with that place, a little cabin that's there and the family history. But it was really in large part about environmental issues of that region, and that involved not only water, but looking at soils and talking to ranchers. So it was deeply journalistic. I traveled and interviewed for many, many months. It was a weaving together of what grew to be my adult concerns about the landscape and my childhood concerns about this story that was in my heart.

I use the word heart. The Ogallala Aquifer is this huge aquifer that fills the porous soils beneath the sands of the Sandhills and is the throbbing heart of that whole region. It's drying up. That was the whole thrust of the environmental concern.

KARIN: How did you end up publishing it?

LISA: I wrote and wrote and wrote and had developed a certain set of chapters that seemed to be getting at something. I was doing the best I could at the time, but I was passionate and young. I also remember that summer getting ready and saying to myself in my young 20-something mode, “I'm going to make something happen.”

I went to a conference at which I was speaking and teaching. At that conference, I met an agent and she was interested, and having zip knowledge about how it all worked, I was thrilled and I gave her my chapters. Before the conference was over, she said, “I'd like to represent you.” This is the little magic story from the sky.

Over the course of months, she helped me craft these chapters and helped me put together a package, which included what I realize now is a cover letter. She went out to 50 agents and 50 editors. No one took it. And so, she came back to me with the feedback she was getting, and we looked at the feedback together. It's hard discerning what they're really saying, because everyone's very careful, but we did decide that they were saying something vaguely similar.

And so, I rewrote the entire book based on what I thought they might be saying to me. And when that product was ready, I sent it back to the agent and she went out again. I did then get two responses, one from Knopf and one from Picador St. Martin's. There was a little bit of a battle, it was all very exciting. And I went with Picador.

KARIN: Nice. Do you remember what you changed when you rewrote it?

LISA: Gosh, it's been so long. I think it was something like ‘more of me’ in it.

KARIN: You eventually became a teacher of writing and a memoir coach. Did you study writing or did teaching simply emerge from your own background as a writer?

LISA: My second degree was in journalism. So that was a form of writing. When I went to the University of Iowa to study journalism, there was no nonfiction program in the writer's workshop. They didn't exist. At that time, there were no nonfiction programs in America. It was a club. There was fiction and poetry.

KARIN: What year was this?

LISA: I was at Iowa in the eighties. If you wanted to study nonfiction writing, you basically had two tracks. You could get a degree in English and focus on the essay. But you couldn't major in that. And then, in the journalism program, there were two people who were innovative and open, and one of them was a writer and she was writing what we would have called narrative nonfiction. That was her field. I gravitated to her. Patricia Westfall was her name. She was willing to be inventive with me. So along with her and John Bennett, another member of the journalism program, I basically invented a creative thesis in the journalism program to write narrative nonfiction.

I wrote my thesis as a narrative nonfiction product. It was not what the program normally did, but I realize now I was really on the beginning of a wave of people who wanted to study that, but there was no path to study that—no official path. So I had studied writing, but in a kind of a nontraditional way.

KARIN: Were you surprised when personal narrative took hold?

LISA: No. I saw it coming.

KARIN: Do you have a sense of why memoir has emerged in the way it has?

LISA: Well, I can give you my experience of that history.

I was interested in it already, but I was approaching it with this journalistic backbone, or reportage. You had the essay voice going on, but you also had reportage, which I think is important. I think it's important also in memoir today, having something more to say than your own personal thing. So I had been reading a lot of essays and environmental essays because I was crazy about the natural world.
 
Then along came Terry Tempest Williams's book, Refuge. Terry was huge. She was doing exactly what I was already leaning toward. She wrote this very deeply personal story about her mother dying from cancer, which was very related to the land because she grew up in Utah which had been influenced by the nuclear bombs that were being tested. They were downwind and she did die. The book was all about the environment and her mother.

This happened at about exactly the same time I was moving in my own circle of expression. She deeply influenced an entire generation of women writing about a personal experience and that melding with the natural world. So there was a whole movement that happened in the early nineties of women writing about the land, and inside that were these deeply personal, feminine stories.

What then happened was those deeply feminine, personal stories began breaking away from the relationship with natural history issues and they became their own thing.

Then along came Mary Karr and she wrote The Liars Club. I remember when I read about that book and that it was coming out, I said, "That's going to be a huge hit." And indeed, it was. That then signaled women speaking and unhinged from the natural world and in some ways unhinged from really anything else, but the personal story itself. That was the beginning of where the personal story felt no need to attach itself to reportage of any other topic, and the subject itself—me, my life—became the whole thing. If you're a stylist like Mary Karr, you can get away with that. If you're not, here we are today.

KARIN: What do you mean, “If you're not, here we are today”?

LISA: What that means to me is, you have lots and lots of women writing deeply personal intimate stories about their lives, but those stories aren't necessarily attached to any other topic that can add depth for publishing and a good portion of them are not a stylist like Mary Karr. And you have a saturated memoir market, which when Mary Karr came on the scene, you did not have.

KARIN: How do you talk about publishing with a writer?

LISA: Well, I always do clarify because sometimes clients do not have that as their first goal, but I would say 95 to 99% of people say I want to get this published. Or how do I get this published? They may not have actually even written it. So that looms as this myth about what it means and will mean to be a published writer. So right away, I determine whether the writer is interested in that.

Then I have a general conversation about publishing and the various forms available for one to pursue publishing. Then I talk about the kinds of writerly necessities of a story to find a home in the big publishers. And then I let all that rest. And then we try to turn our attention back to producing the best product that that particular writer can produce without ghostwriting.

KARIN: What do you emphasize for a memoir to be publishable?

LISA: I have come to the conclusion that one of the smartest things any memoirist can do is to broaden their story so that it is about more than just their own personal experience. I'm going to give you a simple example. You're writing about a loved one dying with cancer, and half of the story is about cancer or some research or something about science. It's not just about the traumatic journey that the narrator has gone on. It is in part about that, but it's also about this other topic. And when I find memoirists who are willing and able—because it's a different skill when they are willing and able to step up to that and actually produce market-worthy material—they have a hell of a lot better chance of making it in the door.

So that's number one on the list. I would say that 90% or more of people don't want to do that. Beyond that, I basically say, “Your writing has to be stellar, knock my socks off. Wow me,” and 90% of people can't do that. I know I'm sounding horribly jaded and there's nothing wrong with the writing that they are doing, but to get into this elite club, there are certain things that have to be done to play that game.

KARIN: What do you think about the self-publishing and hybrid publishing options that are emerging?

LISA: I think it's great and horrible. It depends on each particular case. It has certainly opened up publishing and that's wonderful. It has also segregated publishing and that's not so wonderful. It has also contributed to the whole redefinition of publishing, at least in our country. And that's sad.

KARIN: Sad because...?

LISA: I used to think of publishing as this well-intentioned marketplace of broad ideas in which many publishers really were committed—deeply, ethically and morally committed—to the dissemination of differing ideas and voices. That is not where we're at right now. I mean, the most recent upsets all rising out of George Floyd and his death point directly at the ongoing and even more deeply embedded inequities in opportunities for publishing and for voices. It's not what it was. One could argue, “Oh, in the good old days, it was just a bunch of old white guys who got published.” Maybe that's a good argument, but still it has narrowed the field and many of those voices are then sent off into the hinterlands of self-publishing, which has a long and potholed-filled journey ahead of it.

KARIN: What has happened?

LISA: Once upon a time, it didn't matter if a publishing house made money, and hence they were more free to publish books they felt were good or important, but which they knew they might lose money on. That was part of what publishing did.

And now it is not like that, or a whole heck of a lot less like that. Because the publishing houses—at least all the imprints at the big 5 in New York—are owned by conglomerates, the bottom line is just exactly what it is for any other arm of a business: It must turn a profit.

When you apply that capitalistic requirement to art, well, you have the situation we now have today, which is: Many books that once upon a time might have made it into a publishing house, will not today, and not because of their merit or worth for society, but rather simply because they will not turn a profit.

KARIN: Now during this time of Covid and George Floyd, I think we’re all experiencing a kind of disorientation. But at the same time, I’m noticing that people are moved to write the stories they haven’t yet voiced. What are you noticing?

LISA: I do think there is a great deal of disorientation that I am picking up on personally and also among colleagues and clients. And yet there's this other thing happening, which I find it very heartening and exciting. It is a place where I have always believed personally that openings come. And one's ability to take advantage of those openings in one's life depends on being aware. Do you see them? Do you recognize them as openings? Are you open to the openings? If we are closed off and tight and inflexible and frightened, we often don't see those openings and they pass us by. The universe delivers them and they dissolve into space-time if we don't grab them.

There's some kind of opening—a black hole, a space-time opening in the universe—and large quantities of people are seeing it. Maybe they're just feeling it; maybe no one can name it. There's nothing we can all call it. I'm calling it an opening. There is this opening for people to step through and what is on the other side we don't know, but what people are coming to the opening with is art and stories and ideas. They're stepping through this opening. They're walking into the unknown, and out of that will come new voices and new stories and new art forms and things we can't even imagine.

It's all very unknown and wonderful and scary. Now there's a lot of people still saying, "I don't know what to do!" And that's okay. That's where they are. But what I'm seeing are all these other people taking the door, walking through the opening and they're making art and they're writing stories and they're doing TED talks or talking to people in their community, on the street corner. They're voicing their stories. And I think there's going to be an incredible blossoming, the likes of which we cannot yet get our hands on.
 
KARIN: That is so heartening and exciting.




To learn more about Lisa Dale Norton, visit her website.

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