Memoir as Medicine

The Healing Power of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (but Gorgeously Yours) Life Story

Key Selling Points

Innovative insights, examples, and step-by-step prompts guide readers to write
The author has taught Writing from the Heart workshops for forty-five years
Includes examples from the author’s writing featured on NPR’s All Things Considered
The author is the founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop on Martha’s Vineyard and gives workshops at Kripalu, Omega, Esalen, and numerous other venues

Description

A wonderfully fresh and frank guide to why and how to write personal stories that will heal, liberate, inspire and entertain — both writer and reader

Writing has been medicine for Nancy Slonim Aronie. At nine months old, her son Dan was diagnosed with diabetes. Then, at twenty-two, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During the years she and her husband took care of Dan, and when he died at age thirty-eight, Aronie could not find the book she needed. So she wrote her memoir.

In her decades of teaching memoir writing, Aronie has found that everyone has a story to tell and that telling it is important. Being willing to share “this is who I am, these are the things that shaped me, this is where I am now” allows a kind of magic and healing to happen. Over decades of self-healing and teaching, Aronie has created a set of prompts, directions, and examples that show readers how to: get to the heart of what they need to say — and say it effectively experience the loss of regret and shame, as well as deep sorrow understand procrastination and move past the fear of writing tell their stories in ways that create an incomparable legacy for children and grandchildren treasure the way their writing can help others heal

Famed memoirist and journal writer May Sarton wrote, “So perhaps we write toward what we will become from where we are.” Aronie here shows that we can also write through where we have been and into deep understanding, profound healing, and even unexpected joy.

Review Quotes and Endorsements

“The unqualified success of Memoir as Medicine lies in the authenticity of the author’s voice: it’s tough yet vulnerable, sad but funny, simultaneously self-critical and self-assured, and one hundred percent truthful.”

— Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True and five other New York Times bestsellers
“Nancy Aronie writes from a large heart and a powerful brain, which is why her new book is so quickly becoming an essential addition to fine literature. The work is a frontrunner and so is she.”

— Robert S. Brustein, theatre critic, producer, playwright, and founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre “Masterfully weaves sacred sorrow with irreverent wit, perennial wisdom with personal vulnerability, a transformational narrative with magnificent writing. Nancy Aronie’s voice, seasoned by decades of teaching writing and cultivating what her teacher Ram Dass called ‘loving awareness,’ is pitch-perfect.”

— Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss & Transformation and Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Teachings of the Women Mystics “Nancy Aronie’s disarmingly intimate, deeply insightful, uniquely funny and profoundly moving book is a ‘must-read’! Memoir as Medicine unfolds in a myriad of unexpected ways…and yet somehow, precisely reconnects us to our own personal quest for purpose, truth, and meaning.”

— Tony Shaloub, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Tony Award winning actor