As a writer and author of memoir, I found this book helpful and often inspiring. For anyone writing memoir for the first time, this is a book that weaves craft together with spiritual practices of meaning, connections, listening, and imagination.
Maureen Murdock is an experienced writing teacher and psychotherapist. She’s the author of The Heroine’s Journey, a classic work that explores the feminine psyche and female personal transformation, which has gone through several editions going back to 1990, when it was also the title of a creative writing course Murdock taught at UCLA. It’s still on many recommended reading lists.
Murdock brings that experience to this new work, as well as experience reading and teaching memoir over the last thirty-plus years. And she continues to use myths and mythology — here, to explain topics such as narrative, storytelling, wounds, and healing. See, for example, how Odysseus makes his way into the excerpt accompanying this review.
Murdock quotes recent memoirists Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels, Mary Karr, Isabel Allende, Joan Didion, Terry Tempest Williams, and Joy Harjo like old friends. Essential questions for life, as well as memoir, frame the chapters, for example, Who am I? Who are my people? What is my journey? What is my purpose? (Those are chapters 2-5.)
The spiritual practice sections at the end of each chapter are valuable. “I invite you to explore your personal mythology as you respond to the suggestions,” Murdock explains. Here’s a sample of writing prompts from pursuing your purpose: “What is the Big Truth you feel you can’t write about?” “What narrative question does your memoir seek to answer?”
Here’s another sample of a writing prompt at the end of a chapter, from chapter 4: “Have you ever been silenced? How did you overcome being silenced?”
Go Deeper
ReStorying Your Life: An e-course that guides you through a life review of your history, grief and gratitude, present path, and legacy.
