“I’d love to write a memoir, but the only thing extraordinary that’s happened to me is group therapy.” I said this over and over as I read Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” in 2012. I felt called to write, but I forced myself to stick with fiction since I was a nobody who’d never trekked anywhere except to my therapist’s office three times a week.
The novel I was working at the time offered an early clue: The protagonist was a lonely, hard-working young attorney who ended up representing her former therapist in a malpractice lawsuit. I strained to write a story that showed how a therapist could transform a person’s life, which I knew first-hand was true. When I couldn’t figure out how to end the novel, I slapped on a scene where the young attorney and her therapist slept together at the end of the trial. There was telling when there should have been showing, and there were things I showed that should never be depicted. Worst of all, Dr. Rosen made me bring the scene into group and read it out loud. The laughter and visible cringing of my group mates nearly turned me off writing altogether.
But I kept returning to Wild. I loved Strayed’s grit and her humility. I loved that she set out on an arduous months-long hike woefully ill-prepared. She was my kind of hero: flawed, honest, and vulnerable. Best of all, she kept going. Mile after mile, one foot in front of the other. If I ever wrote a book, I proclaimed, I’d want to have all of those factors in the mix. For years, I was so focused on her setting and the facts of her actual journey on the Pacific Coast Trail that I couldn’t see all the ways that my expeditions to therapy were just as transformative. And then one day I could see it–the arc of the book that would become “Group”.
I recalled the depression baking into my psyche that hot, heavy summer when I first called Dr. Rosen. I remembered the outfits I wore during my first three introductory sessions and the surprising things the strange man who would become my long-term therapist said to me. It was easy to summon the sharp sensations I felt during my very first group session—fear, shame, exhilaration. I thought of all the terrain I crossed to become a woman who could attach to other people and have intimate relationships. The mountain of my secret, shameful disordered eating. The valley of the trauma I’d buried years earlier. The desolate plains of my dating life. Of course along the way, there were my group mates as fellow travelers, and Dr. Rosen as our unorthodox guide.
I came to realize that not all journeys of transformation require a backpack and hiking boots. With “Wild” as my north star, I found my way to “Group”.
