So, Is Writing Therapy?

“Know thyself” is a tall order. Is it even possible to uncover—without outside help—what is blocked from conscious awareness? To my great surprise, writing a memoir did just that.

I began the memoir almost a decade ago, and during the many years I worked on it, I experienced three epiphanies that completely reversed core beliefs I’d never questioned in years of work with several excellent and very helpful psychiatrists. My goal was not self-analysis. These three flashes of insight came spontaneously and were the unintended byproducts of trying to write well.

Memoir writing is not a substitute for psychotherapy. My husband and many of our friends are psychiatrists. A true believer, I recognize that my earlier therapy may well have been essential to my later self-discovery. Still, the writing succeeded where the best professional help had failed.

The first epiphany was about my cherished memory of having an exclusive relationship with my father as an only child growing up in 1950s Manhattan. Our Sunday excursions felt like a temporary boost to princess status and were an escape from the nonstop marital war at home.

We two often went to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, where I steered us to the mummy rooms. There, staring at the tombs of long-dead queens, I held my father’s hand and hummed “Mummm, Mummm,” under my breath—“Mummy” being what I called my high-powered, executive mother, whose constant, crushing efforts at child improvement terrified me then and into adulthood.

The outings with my father were recorded in family albums, the hard evidence—I thought—of our special, romantic twosome; for every photo of me with my mother, there are fifty with my father. The mummies and photos never came up in therapy, where the vocal and facial expression of two-way conversation could carry my long-accepted version of the story.

Only when I tried to evoke the feelings with the written word alone and had to dig for more vivid, visual detail did I recall the photo albums. So, it was an insightful member of my writing group, not a therapist, who asked the key question: “Who was holding the camera?”

No one but my camera-shy mother could have taken the pictures. We’d been three all along.

The second revelation occurred without prompting, when I was writing about a persistent childhood fear. I was raised by a live-in nanny, my very own Mary Poppins, who arrived when I was an infant and later became the cook. I loved her desperately and lived in dread that she would be fired for her daily missteps—a mismatched button thread, a forgotten doily—which drew my mother’s condemnation. The dinner table was a nightly plank walk: providing only one serving spoon for two ice-cream flavors might propel my nanny overboard. I watched, mute, torn, convinced that any defense from me would mean our joint dismissal.

Then, years after she and my parents had died, while struggling to describe this scene, it dawned on me that my nanny never was fired. She’d lived with my parents until she died. I was suddenly thunderstruck by something that on another level I knew perfectly well. The subliminal dread, which in therapy came up only as a bad memory, had outlived the players. Not until I was the observing writer and simultaneously in the head of the book’s younger, unknowing protagonist, did my irrational terror of her being fired emerge.

My life had been shadowed by fear of a catastrophe that never happened or was even at risk of happening. And, it is only now, as I write this, that I see my lifelong self-employment as a shield against ever being fired myself.

The third discovery came when I answered the question that prompted the memoir in the first place: what lay behind my parents’ bizarre unraveling at the end of their lives? A hard-driving, professional couple who had always been sensible, savvy, and fiercely independent, my declining parents retired in their eighties to Mexico, where they uncharacteristically embraced adventure—and a pair of wacky shysters. Their new, much younger best friends led them into one lunatic disaster after another, but my hypercritical mother refused to notice.

Puzzling out this mystery on the written page forced me to see my parents through their own eyes, to draw them in the round. I focused on their early lives, something not possible in fifty-minute therapy sessions.

I read my father’s half of their correspondence during World War II, when he was stationed in Florida, eight years into their marriage. My mother had taped the folded, crinkly sheets into a blank book, three to a page, and titled them in the margin: “a red-letter day,” “a can of peaches,” “love?” Each begins with his scolding her for not trusting him to be faithful. Each contains an apology for making her “winch thru all this slush” when he breaks down and admits he can’t live without her.

Months of imagining my parents’ upstream journey from immigrant beginnings to Manhattan sophistication slowly made me see that, in taking them at their word, I’d gotten them wrong: Their constant fighting masked a true love match; their airtight self-assurance was a false front; my frightening mother was frightened of me. They were as insecure as the rest of us.

One day, all the pieces fell into place, including those that had never fit my lifelong, child’s version of my fearsome parents. I was sitting in the Raleigh airport between flights when it hit me, and I burst into sobs. Suddenly, I saw under everything a continuous fight to deny their own vulnerability—and especially the vulnerability that comes with love.

Correcting a false premise you don’t know is false, all on your own, seems impossible. But you aren’t truly alone when writing your life. The writer-you regards the character-you with critical remove—and must, if anything meaningful is to be said. And then there is the imagined, skeptical reader behind the computer screen. The digging and parsing required to make a solid written case to someone who needs convincing can bring down your whole shaky reconstruction of the past, shocking and freeing you in an instant.

—

Elizabeth Marcus grew up in Manhattan, the only child of a dentist and a Macy’s dress buyer, the Zeus and Hera of Apartment 2B. After escaping to Boston, she ran a small architectural office for 20 years, when she wasn’t traveling to far-flung places with her psychiatrist husband and rambunctious children. Eventually, she decided to concentrate on writing, which allows her to pursue the many, quirky questions that fascinate her: Why are butterflies called ‘butterflies?’ Why can’t she recall the taste of wines? Why are first-love memories so potent? Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Boston Globe, on online sites like Cognoscenti, and in essay anthologies like Travelers’ Tales. “Don’t Say A Word!”: A Daughter’s Two Cents is her first book. She posts essays related to the book and other interesting tales at www.eLizWrites.com.

Facebook: @eLizMarcus

Twitter: @eLizMarcus

Instagram: ElizabethMarcus5503

“Don’t Say A Word!”: A Daughter’s Two Cents

Edna and Leo, a perpetually warring, tyrannical pair in their 80s, begin wintering In Mexico, where they abandon their usual prudence to embrace adventure and a bevy of sketchy new friends. Soon, Edna adopts a pair of shyster builders whom she trusts over her own architect-daughter Elizabeth, and a farcical house results.

Blithely indifferent to the calamities that result, the pair refuse all help from their too-compliant only child. Later, following her mother’s sudden death, Elizabeth’s wise, principled father attempts to fill his late wife’s shoes with a string of loopy, live-in housekeepers―with privileges, he hopes. Before it is over the Mexican escapade will bring down the kind of disasters commonly found in pulp fiction. Why can’t Elizabeth stop any of this from happening?

No matter the madness, she cannot confront her parents any more than she ever could. In the end, the surprising way in which they come undone reveals just what they spent their lives trying to hide, thereby setting her free. Though unique in its loony details, Don’t Say A Word! will resonate with beleaguered adult-children everywhere who will recognize the special misery of watching, helpless, as stubborn, diminished parents careen precariously toward the end of life.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips