Writing as Therapy

I used the idea if writing as therapy even before reading David Lodge's Therapy. Nice having my own ideas about writing confirmed.

Now comes Catharsis Isn’t a Dirty Word: A Conversation with Melissa Febos:

MELISSA FEBOS: I’ve been in that same position so many times. When my first book came out, there was a total onslaught of people being like, “Oh, so cool that you published your diary,” when I had worked really, really hard to make that work of art. And I did the reactive thing which was to be like, “It wasn’t therapy, it wasn’t cathartic, it was an intellectual work,” thereby reinforcing what I see as a sexist binary between emotional and intellectual work. But those things weren’t mutually exclusive. And I never felt great about [agreeing that they were], especially as I kept writing personally, because it was so obviously cathartic for me. It was so clearly saving my life.

I think really it was being a teacher that forced me to look at my own internalized biases and my response to that argument with more scrutiny. Because my students — and when I say my students, I mostly mean my female students, my students of color, my queer students, my disabled students — were like, “Oh, I can’t write about my experience because people will think I’m just doing it as a therapeutic exercise.” And the truth of my own experience just rose up and trampled over whatever else I had internalized, and I was like, “One, that’s a great reason to do something. And two, the best art that I have ever made is that which has healed me the most.” That’s just a fact of my experience. And I think I had to accumulate enough years of experience to feel confident saying it out loud, and risk the embarrassment of being like, “Yeah, it was therapeutic.” 

The interview has more so give it a read.

 

Sch 3/21/22