Introduction

This book is a quest describing a quest. It is the story of a little girl who struggles to be happy in a childhood filled with love, abandonment, turmoil and loneliness. She grows up, raises two children, and lives as most Americans do. Then she is catapulted into a life she neither anticipated nor desired. She has her hour in the sun, despairs and crashes back to earth. She reorients herself and recrafts her life.

The narrative is uniquely my own. I am the only girl born, in 1947, to Frank and Avis Bray, parents who served fried rattlesnake, poke salad and field corn for dinner and who never spent a minute indoors if they could help it. Only I, at six years old, lived for a year without my mother in a trailer behind my uncle Otis’s house two miles from Sparta, Missouri. Only this Mary lived in Beaver City in 1959 and spent lazy afternoons catching frogs and turtles while her peers fretted about hemlines and lipstick.

Yet the basic map and milestones of my story are universal. We all search for understanding, love and respect. We strive to make sense of ourselves and our environments. Over the course of our lifetimes, we encounter love and loss, success and dismal failure. We establish our characteristic ways of coping with adversity. We search for a way to develop our talents and employ them for the benefit of others. We all seek the holy grail of self-acceptance. We become more and more ourselves, but we remember everyone else.

On my journey I faced certain challenges many times over. I suffered losses and learned to compensate. At moments when I felt most alone, I found loving people. When I was ignorant, I worked to understand what I could. Often I believed I was irredeemable. I endured fright, loneliness and despair, but I carried on. And even as I have been a wanderer, all my life I have searched for home.

In my earliest memories of myself, I have certain characteristics. At age two, I loved people fiercely. I still do. For as long as I can remember, I have been a shy girl with a galloping mind and a lively imagination. I have always considered myself to be competent and resilient. Over time, I have been influenced by circumstance, and yet in some essential ways, I am unchanged. With this book, my quest has been to explore my life in terms of core and periphery, theme and variation.

On every page, I asked myself, “Who am I?” Throughout the writing process, I have reflected on basic questions. What did I inherit from my ancestors? What did I learn from my surroundings? Was I loved? Was I good? Did I matter?

I found the experience of writing about my life to be deeply strengthening. Yet this book caused me more trouble than any other I have written. Writing a book about freeing myself from neurosis—what Buddhists sometimes call “the trance of self” required, shockingly, a constant focus on myself! Only I could come up with a complicated writing assignment such as: “Explain your efforts to stop trying to stop trying.” I have had moments when I wasn’t sure whether I was gaining clarity or falling into a cauldron of boiling self-absorption.

Self-study is not for sissies. When I take on a new project, I immerse myself entirely and intensely in the subject. This constant scrutiny worked well when the topic was teenage girls or refugees, but when the subject was myself, it felt claustrophobic. By the time I completed my first draft, I felt I had run an emotional and intellectual marathon. I had learned a great deal, but the process had torn me down. I wrote my editor: “Remind me never to write about myself again. I am weary of me, me, me. My next book will be on something less intense and complicated, like the history of Poland or the inner workings of the Vatican.”

There are three kinds of secrets—those we keep from certain people but not others; those we keep from everyone, and those we keep from ourselves. Writing this book forced me to deal with all three. Many formerly private aspects of my life are now public. Even Jim and my children learned new things about me. And as I explored my own life, I was shattered to discover many aspects of my experience I had long avoided.

For most of my life, I have recalled good times and loving moments. When I remembered my girlhood, I painted myself into scenes as a happy, loved girl, filled with honorable intentions. I worked to construct a temple of comforting beliefs—that I was nurtured, respected, and in control. With this quest, I have probed deep layers of memory that I had long struggled to ignore. As I faced the facts and examined painful recollections, I realized that what happened to me is both more unpleasant and more interesting than my previous “official” story. When I finally gave myself permission to travel with my eyes open, my reactions have been a clamorous mix of “Hallelujah” and “Ouch.”

Writing this book, I confronted numerous problems. How do I make sense of things that happened to me before I had language? How much should I trust my memories? What should remain private? Like many members of my generation, I have been around. I’ve smoked marijuana, hitchhiked and done countless other things I would just as soon my grandchildren and my former therapy clients not read about. I still commit most of the seven deadly sins on a regular basis. I would feel silly telling my story as if I had always been some pure and prudent person. I am reasonably wholesome now, but I’ve had many experiences that directed me toward my current life. How much of this do I need to disclose to be honest and yet not write a lurid confessional?

Wright Morris observed that anything processed by memory is fiction. To the best of my ability, I have made sure that the times, places and basic facts of my story were accurate, but the narrative you will read is what I understand about what I remember, a story built by attention and interpretation.

Huck Finn said of his creator, Mark Twain, that he “told the truth, mainly.” I hope that can be said of me. Writing about my own family was complicated. I believe that the way to honor people is to describe them as they actually were. To gloss over flaws or to invent virtues is to suggest that who people were wasn’t good enough. My relatives can stand on their records. I have no desire to malign anyone, yet I want to explain what actually happened to me. I don’t want to offer up a narrative soaked in Clorox.

Even though my siblings and children are important parts of my life, I don’t write much about them. Through no fault of their own, they have a writer in the family. Their stories are theirs to tell. And even though we all dance around a common flagpole of place, people and time, we weave amid the other dancers with our own ribbons. Our choreography is uniquely our own.

I am also aware of the ridiculousness of trying to explain that being a best-selling writer led me to misery and depression. I know here are a million people out there who would love to be published by a national press or to have any kind of success that led to fame, money and travel. Until this happened to me, I was one of those people.

Convincing people that great success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is a hard sell. For a long time, I’ve been aware of that and, up until now, perhaps wisely, I have kept my mouth shut. I expect many readers would trade places with me in a minute and, indeed, there are people who would enjoy what I found to be extraordinarily difficult. But I am too anxious and self-critical for life on a grand stage.

In this book, I tried to tell my truth, which includes what happened to me as a person after 1994. Yet I can imagine readers feeling slightly bitter as they read of my woes. I can just hear my writer friend Matt saying, “I should be so unlucky!” To those readers, I can only say I hope that your dreams come true and you are able to see for yourself your own reactions. I fervently want you to relish your good fortune.

Until 1994, when Reviving Ophelia was published and climbed to number-one on best-seller lists around the country, I led what I considered a balanced life. I was a wife, mother, teacher and therapist. I had the usual adult problems: children’s report cards, work stress, financial worries and, as is the case with almost all working mothers, limited discretionary time. My mother had died in 1992, my son had graduated from high school in 1989 and left for college, and my daughter was in her senior year of high school. I felt a great sense of loss about all these events. But I was happy. My husband played in local bands, and he and I enjoyed a life filled with musicians and writers. I spent my free time camping, hiking, writing and drinking coffee with my friends.

Then, without my really planning on it, I entered a new era. I said good-bye to my ordinary life and embarked on a more complicated and stressful one. I kept my day jobs, but I also began lecturing all over the world. Within months, I was speaking to large crowds and conducting daylong workshops for professionals. Members of Congress flew me to D.C. to educate them about teenagers. The Polish ambassador’s wife invited me to a conference in Warsaw. Between 1994 and 2002, I wrote and published four more books, two of which became best-sellers.

When I traveled to Chicago to be on Oprah, my son drove me to the airport. On the way, Zeke asked me, “Mom, this isn’t going to change anything, is it?” I blithely reassured him that it wouldn’t. At the time, I had no idea how much would change and how quickly. My success as an author had triggered a process as dramatic and irreversible as the push of a boulder that starts an avalanche.

Leaving my life as a relatively contented person behind, I entered a zone of constant pressure, scrutiny and high stakes. My schedule, which had been manageable, became frenetic and not entirely under my control. I was bombarded with invitations and requests from people I didn’t know. As my familiar world slipped away, the Mary I had known for forty-seven years vanished as well. I hadn’t made conscious choices about any of this; it just happened. No one was more surprised than I was.

By 2002, my identity had exceeded its shelf life and many of my certainties turned stale. I had always considered myself competent and able to handle anything that came my way. Now I faced a situation in which I felt neither strong nor happy. I didn’t want to leave my house, and when the phone rang, I jumped as if I had been electroshocked. I couldn’t sleep at night and I stopped laughing. All I wanted was to be left alone.

Mostly, I attributed my despair to life events. What some people would have found exciting and even wonderful just wasn’t right for me. After almost a decade of work as an author/speaker, I was weary of hotels, airports and speeches to big crowds. I missed my family, my bed, my cat and my own cooking.

I thought my situation unique and supposed I was falling apart in an idiosyncratic way. In one sense, I was. My particular life exhausted and depleted me. But I now realize my experience of a crisis was common. For their own reasons, many people politely fall apart at some point in their lives. How they regroup and move on determines what their future will be.

Growth is the only cure for great sorrow or an identity crisis. Recovery requires the building of a roomier container in which to hold our experiences. It helps to put our suffering in context and to see our lives as part of a larger whole. All experience can be redemptive if we ask, “What did I learn from this?”

We can make any experience transcendent by viewing it from a higher level of abstraction. For example, last year our family was discussing the details of our daughter’s upcoming wedding. After a few minutes of hashing over logistics and potential problems, I said, “Let’s step back a moment and discuss this more holistically. Our daughter has found a wonderful life partner. John has found Sara. We are gaining a new family member that we all love, and we are celebrating this wedding at our house with friends we have known since before Sara was born. These next few weeks will always be a sparkling memory in the history of our family.” Everybody nodded. Then Zeke said, “Mom, when you talk that way, my wife and I joke that you are ‘going meta’ on us.”

Zeke’s term “going meta” is a way of describing the process of seeing a situation from a larger perspective. This allows us to help ourselves and others handle increasing complexity and ambiguity. It expands our points of view from what Einstein called “the merely personal” into something richer and more universal. When we do this, life becomes much more meaningful and interesting.

I suspect that most of us feel as if our lives are both pedestrian and momentous. We all experience ourselves as exceptional and ordinary. Within us, we host libraries of narratives and experiences. And yet we are aware that we share a great deal of emotional terrain with everyone we meet.

We humans carry more or less the same template for growth. We are all born into a certain family in a particular time and place. We arrive on the scene with certain gifts and deficits. Family members educate us about our tribe and its rules. We traverse the same developmental stages and share critical life moments—birth, childhood and young adulthood, the commitment to a partner or a community and the deaths of family and friends. We make choices and are swept away by fate. People, place and time shape our lives just as wind shapes the Nebraska Sandhills.

Most of us eventually face crises of confidence, or what Saint John of the Cross described as a “dark night of the soul.” Spiritual traditions have many examples of this: Jesus was forsaken in the Garden of Gethsemane and Mohammed was unhappy with his life in Mecca and retreated to a cave in the mountains where he experienced his first revelation from God. Mental health professionals call this crisis a breakdown. I used to do that, but now I call it a gift.

Of course, not all people grow from crises. Some refuse to accept the need for redefinition, and orchestrate their own intellectual and emotional shutdown. Those who do grow manage to stay awake to the anguish, confusion and self-doubt. This requires a high tolerance for discomfort, as well as the ability to see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Over time, the people who continue to struggle emerge wiser, kinder and more resilient. After they have broken and rebuilt themselves, they feel less breakable.

Living is a complicated process, a journey of discovery that never ceases. As I grow older, the basic facts of life seem increasingly simple. The closer we live to our core, the more we realize that we are like other people. My fear and sorrow are yours, as is my harsh self-judgment. My desire to be good and to feel loved is your desire, too. We all seek peace.