THE DOCTOR IS IN

If you will be in the Boston area on July 6, please stop by

Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston Street, at 12:30 pm. Career advisor and radio host Mel Robbins will interview me as part of her Live at Borders: Advice for Living program.

WHY WE DO THIS

On Tuesday evening, I took part in a reading of essays from Jessica Berger Gross’s anthology About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope at McNally Robinson NYC.

The reading was scheduled to begin at 7. At 6:30, my husband and son and I met Andi Buchanan, as planned, at the bookstore’s café, and sat down to catch up. We were soon joined by Jessica, and shortly afterwards, Caroline Leavitt and Rochelle Shapiro and her husband came in. We made short work of the agenda, and spent most of the remaining time before the reading catching up on personal and professional news. Andi had come from a meeting at HarperCollins and showed us the dazzling promotional material for The Daring Book for Girls. I had just received advance copies of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued, and a copy was passed around and admired. “The colors are great—it will pop right off the shelf!” was said more than once. The more accomplished writers (pretty much everyone) gave me advice about promotion and tips for calming my nerves about upcoming readings and interviews.

We worried about the small turnout. It was raining. Miscarriage is not the “sexiest” topic imaginable. There was a reading of Victoria Zackheim’s The Other Woman a few blocks uptown that several of our friends were participating in, and others were attending. (I would have loved to go myself, if only cloning were perfected. And Caroline had had to make a difficult choice because she has an essay in both anthologies.) We wondered whether the reading would be at all profitable for the bookstore.

I had never met Jessica before, but we had exchanged so many emails discussing important life events that I immediately felt I had known her for years. Andi, Caroline, and Rochelle are “real-life” friends. Whenever I am with them I feel lucky to know such brilliant, empathetic, supportive and fun women.

And yet it occurred to me, as we chatted, that we could have been any group of small-scale entrepreneurs talking shop. We were exchanging stories and advice about pushing a product. We were concerned that our joint project might end up on the red side of the ledger. Aside from the relative puniness of the profits under consideration, we might have been discussing screwdrivers, or widgets. Rachel Zucker, the last reader to arrive, presented Jessica with two of her beautiful poetry books, and I found myself considering their lush covers from the standpoint of “packaging.” Did these books, too, “pop right off the shelf”? Was that the point?

Then, it having been decided that the sparse audience represented everyone who was going to show up, Jessica took the microphone and began reading from her introduction to the book, about her own miscarriage and its life-changing impact.

From that moment on, there was a palpable hush in the room. This was not polite attention, nor was it the respectful silence nice people accord someone who is relating a painful personal experience. It was the sort of stillness I have been part of on a few other occasions: at particularly charged and focused Quaker Meetings; at a performance of a Bach partita by Yo-Yo Ma; on a tour of Anne Frank’s house. At all of these events there was a sense, not just of empathy or appreciation, but of deeply shared experience; of an invisible golden thread connecting everyone present, one heart to another. These essays were not talk-show exploitations of personal pain; they were beautiful, honest, thoughtful explorations of an issue that is too often ignored and turned away from, and important reflections on the meaning of loss.

The quiet was broken sometimes by laughter, more often by sniffles and nose blowing. By the end, many were weeping openly, including the readers. The “Q & A” included intimate sharing by audience members as well as more abstract, though still intense, discussion of the reasons for the silence surrounding the topic of miscarriage.

This was not screwdrivers. It was not widgets. This, I realized, once again, is the point, the reason we plug away at this insane, rarely profitable "business": to distill our most deeply felt experiences, our most personal vision; to express these as authentically, purely, and beautifully as possible; and to share them, one heart to another. What a privilege.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book,  Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity, has been shipped and will be available in bookstores later this month. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[Sandra Gulland]

Beautifully said, Dr. Sue. It brought tears to my eyes.

[Richard]

It was one of the best readings I've been to in New York this year. As someone who knows nothing about miscarriage, has rarely given it a thought, I was both informed and moved by the wonderful pieces. Dr. Sue will not say this, but she read last, a really moving excerpt from the end of her essay, and it was the best part of a wonderful evening for me. Get that book!

[T]

Lovely post, Dr. Sue. The business side of things creates so much noise that sometimes *why* we write gets lost.

[maple story power leveling]

so interesting

what we lost is less than we get

so don't worry about it

[ali]

I was there that night as well. Susan's reading was very moving. I arrived, but late, as I was coming from Long Island. My husband has just finished reading the book--and it's been a tremendous help to us as we try to understand eachother through a difficult past of recurrent miscarriages. I thank all the writers.