Nancy Slonim Aronie - Memoir as Medicine: The Healing Power of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (but Gorgeously Yours) Life Story

Praise for Memoir as Medicine

This is a book about plain, humble human experience. Almost as an aside it teaches you how to write about such things effectively, but I think the books power and ultimate purpose is to help the reader survive a normal human life, with all its absurdities and impossible challenges.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Soul Therapy

Nancy Aronie writes from a large heart and a powerful brain, which is why her new book is so quickly becoming an essential addition to fine literature. The work is a frontrunner, and so is she.

Robert S. Brustein, theater critic, producer, playwright, educator, and founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater and Institute

After reading the first few chapters of Nancy Aronies Memoir as Medicine, all I wanted to do was write. Anyone struggling to stay with the process should read this book immediately! Aronies practical advice and sense of humor will keep you going. The book is a treasure.

Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation and Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

The unqualified success of Memoir as Medicine lies in the authenticity of the authors voice. Its the best writing advice since Anne Lamotts Bird by Bird. Throughout the book, its a pleasure to be in Nancy Aronies wise company.

Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True and five other New York Times bestsellers

Nancy Aronies disarmingly intimate, deeply insightful, uniquely funny, and profoundly moving book is a must-read! Memoir as Medicine unfolds in a myriad of unexpected ways and yet somehow precisely reconnects us to our own personal quest for purpose, truth, and meaning.

Tony Shalhoub, Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Tony Awardwinning actor

At her famed workshops on Marthas Vineyard, Nancy Aronie is described as the midwife to her students writing lives. Now she has brought forth a literary offspring of her own, pulsing with passion and pain, heart and hilarity.

Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of March, five bestselling novels, and three works of nonfiction

If this book doesnt get you motivated, I dont know what will. Nancy Aronie gives perfect examples using her own gorgeous stories. You will laugh, you will probably cry, but I promise you, you will write!

Carly Simon, author and Grammy Awardwinning singer-songwriter

Moving, helpful, inspiring, and tender, Memoir as Medicine makes you want to get up off your butt and write the heart and soul of your life.

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

Also by Nancy Slonim Aronie

Writing from the Heart

Copyright 2022 by Nancy Slonim Aronie

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Aronie, Nancy Slonim, date, author.

Title: Memoir as medicine : the healing power of writing your messy, imperfect, unruly (but gorgeously yours) life story / Nancy Slonim Aronie.

Description: Novato, California : New World Library, [2022] | Summary: A discussion of the healing benefits of memoir writing along with pragmatic advice for writing one. Includes a set of prompts, directions, and examples to help readers become writers of their own personal stories-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021057616 (print) | LCCN 2021057617 (ebook) | ISBN 9781608688074 (paperback) | ISBN 9781608688081 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Autobiography--Authorship. | Authorship--Therapeutic use. | Autobiographical memory.

Classification: LCC PE1479.A88 A76 2022 (print) | LCC PE1479.A88 (ebook) | DDC 808.06/692--dc23/eng/20211124

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057616

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057617

First printing, March 2022

ISBN 978-1-60868-807-4

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-808-1

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For Joel, my teacher, my best friend, my mentor, my Mike Nichols to my Elaine May, my constant source of wisdom, and the love of my lives.

And for Josh, whose sweetness and generous spirit have helped sustain me since the day he was born. And who gave me my Eli.

No shrinks, no pharmaceuticals, no comforting friendships, no exceptional partner (like the one I have) could come close to what writing my memoir did for my broken heart. Getting my rage, my terror, and my insights onto the page; looking at my marriage through an emotional microscope; seeing my strengths, acknowledging my weaknesses; knowing what work on my Self I still had to do; realizing how I had been held hostage. This was just what the doctor ordered. Only I found out that I was the doctor.

My son Dan was diagnosed with diabetes at nine months old, and at twenty-two he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). My husband and I took care of him for sixteen years. Dan was angry right up until a few months before he died.

I wrote and was shocked to find how much laughter there had been. I had forgotten the day I had stood at the foot of his bed and said, Goodnight, O King of Kings, and how I had bowed and then said, Goodnight, O Lord of Lords, and bowed again and how Dan, bedridden with bedsores and legs that had stopped working and hands that were tremoring, said, Goodnight, O Fruit of Loops. If I hadnt written it all down, I would have forgotten so much of the hardest thing I have ever done.

But the biggest healing, the biggest teaching, the most surprising thing: I would not have known how exquisitely beautiful the whole trip was.

Thats how I know writing your memoir is medicine.

Everyone has a story.

Ive been facilitating Writing from the Heart workshops for forty-five years, with one rule only: when someone finishes reading, tell her what you loved.

When you are willing to take the chance of saying this is who I am, these are the things that shaped me, this is where I am now, magic happens, health happens, healing happens.