One True Sentence: How My Book Came to Be

By Marianne Ingheim

I’d been trying to write a book for 10 years. First it was a novel, loosely based on stories I’d heard from my mother and grandmother. Then I decided I needed to tell the truth, so I started writing a memoir. I took classes, I read how-to books. I was going to write this thing the “right” way. It was a disaster, but the good news is, the more I wrote, the more I began to recognize my own voice. Every now and then I’d glimpse it, whenever I wrote “one true sentence” as Hemingway would say, a sentence that wasn’t contrived or trying to be anything other than true to who I am.

My third attempt at writing a book was a self-help book about journaling and self-compassion. These were two topics I cared about a lot, and I thought writing a book might help me create workshops. In other words, it was a sensible, hopefully money-making endeavor. However, my life wanted me to write something else.

It all happened in rapid succession in the course of six months. In August of 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it woke me up to the fact that I hadn’t been happy in a long time and I needed to make some big changes in order to live a more meaningful life.

One of these changes was the difficult decision to leave my husband of almost ten years. I agonized about how to tell him because I didn’t want to break his heart, which, of course, I ended up doing anyway, no matter how hard I tried not to. He said he couldn’t live without me. I didn’t realize he meant that literally. But on a rainy February night in 2017, I received a call from the sheriff’s department, telling me there’d been a car crash in West Oakland. My husband had died instantly. The next day, I found a suicide note and Google map printouts of the crash site. 

How was I ever going to live without feeling guilty every day for the rest of my life? How would I ever move on? Well, there’s no moving on from that kind of loss; there’s simply moving through as best you can. My process was writing. I wrote short pieces and posted them on social media. I wrote from the place of a heart broken open, one true sentence at a time. And people responded. 

That’s when I realized I had a book. It wasn’t going to be a standard self-help book or a standard memoir. It was going to be its own thing, 67 short pieces that told my personal story and invited readers to discover theirs—specifically, their self-critical stories. I’d always had a harsh inner critic. After the suicide loss, it was especially harsh. Through the practice of self-compassion, I was able to move through my guilt and all the shame I’d accumulated through the years and come to a place of self-acceptance and kindness. Not that I’m never self-critical anymore. Self-compassion is a practice, a choice I make every day. It’s not something I can check off my list and say, “Now I’m done with that.”

Just like self-compassion, writing is a process that requires radical acceptance of self and the giving up of control. Just as I needed to stop forcing myself to be someone I’m not, I needed to stop forcing my writing to be something it wasn’t. There’s no “right way” to be—not in life and not in writing. My book announced what form it was going to take, and there was no way I could force it into being anything else. 

I found my voice by writing myself into it. It took a lot of writing to get there, and the only way to get there was through writing—one true sentence at a time.

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Marianne Ingheim is a Danish-Norwegian American writer, teacher, and PhD student at California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the author of Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion, which tells the story of her journey from harsh self-criticism to self-compassion and all the stops on that journey, from cancer to loss to remarriage. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and stepson.

OUT OF LOVE: FINDING YOUR WAY BACK TO SELF-COMPASSION

In short and personal pieces, Marianne Ingheim tells the story of how the practice of self-compassion changed her life in ways big and small, helping her unlearn harsh self-criticism, survive multiple tragedies, and live more authentically. In the wake of a breast cancer diagnosis and her husband’s suicide, she discovers the power of self-compassionate storytelling and finds belonging within herself―and in doing so, she learns how to manage anxiety and stress, how to be authentic in relationships, and how to let go of comparison and be truly creative.

We all tell ourselves stories about who we are. Many of these stories are self-critical and disempowering. Through the practice of self-compassion, we can rewrite these stories and become more authentic and powerful versions of ourselves―transforming not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us.

Through stories and journaling prompts, Out of Love: Finding Your Way Back to Self-Compassion aims to inspire readers to unlearn the self-critical patterns holding them hostage―and begin to live a happier, more courageous life.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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