CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JAPAN, CHINA, BALI, AND LOVE’S EXECUTIONER
As I was checking into my Tokyo hotel in the fall of 1987, I encountered the English-speaking psychologist my Japanese hosts had flown in from New York to serve as translator. He was staying in the adjoining hotel room and would be available at all times for the entire week of my consultation.
“Can you tell me exactly what I’ll be doing?” I asked.
“The program director at the Hasegawa Hospital has told me nothing specific about your schedule this week.”
“I wonder why. I’ve inquired but they’ve not replied: they seem almost to be deliberately secretive.”
He simply looked at me, hunching his shoulders.
The following morning when he and I arrived at the Hasegawa Hospital, I was greeted graciously with a huge bouquet of flowers by a large contingent of psychiatrists and administrators waiting inside the entrance. They said my first morning was a special occasion: the entire staff of the hospital would be in attendance to listen to my discussion of an inpatient therapy group meeting. They then guided me into an auditorium seating about four hundred people. Having commented on group meetings countless times, I felt relaxed and sat back anticipating a verbal description or a videotape of a group meeting. Instead I was stunned to see that the staff had elaborately prepared a dramatized re-creation of a group meeting. They had taped a group session held on one of the hospital wards the previous month, transcribed it, assigned roles to various staff members, and obviously spent a great many hours rehearsing the drama. It was a polished performance, but, alas, it portrayed one of the most dreadful group meetings I had ever seen. The leaders circled the group, offering advice and prescribing various exercises in turn to each member. Not once did a member of the group address another member—in my view, a clear example of how not to do group therapy. If it were only the taping of a real group session, I would have had no problem halting it and then describing alternative approaches. But how could I possibly stop a carefully choreographed production that must have required countless hours of rehearsal? It would have been a horrific insult, and so I sat and attended to the entire performance (with my translator whispering into my ear). Then, in my discussion, I gently, very gently, suggested some interpersonally based techniques.
I tried my best to be a helpful teacher during my week in Tokyo, but I never felt I was being effective. I realized during that week that something deeply embedded in Japanese culture opposes Western psychotherapy, especially group psychotherapy: mainly, shame at revealing oneself or sharing one’s family secrets. I volunteered to lead a process group for therapists, but the idea was rejected, and, to be honest, I was relieved. I think there would have been such powerful silent resistance that we would have made little progress. In all my presentations that week, the audience was respectfully attentive, but no one made a comment or asked a single question.
Marilyn had a similar experience on the same trip. She gave a lecture on twentieth-century American women’s literature at a Japanese women’s institute before a large crowd in a beautifully appointed auditorium. The event was well orchestrated, with a lovely dance recital preceding the lecture and an attentive, respectful audience. But when she asked for questions or comments, there was silence. Two weeks later, she gave the identical talk at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and at the end was bombarded with questions from the Chinese students.
Every imaginable courtesy was given me in Tokyo. I loved our formal bento box luncheons with seven layers of delicate and splendidly arrayed courses. Lavish parties were given in my honor, and my host generously invited me to use his 360-degree-view condominium in Hawaii whenever I wished.
After my consultation, wherever we traveled in Japan we were always treated generously by hosts and strangers. In Tokyo one evening when we were heading toward the Kabuki Theater but had lost our way, we showed our tickets to a woman washing the steps of a building and asked for directions. She instantly dropped what she was doing and escorted us four blocks to the door of our theater. Another time, in Kyoto, we had disembarked from a bus and were strolling through the city when we heard hurried footsteps behind us. An elderly woman struggling to catch her breath approached with the umbrella we had left on the bus. A short time later at a Buddhist temple we fell into a conversation with a stranger, a college professor, who immediately invited us to his home for dinner. But their culture did not welcome my approach to therapy, and very few of my books have been translated into Japanese.
Japan was the first stop of a year’s sabbatical. I had just completed a difficult period revising, once again, my group therapy textbook. Beginners, like me, who write a textbook are generally unaware that, if the textbook is successful, they are signing on for life. Textbooks must be revised every few years, particularly if there is new research and change in the field—and that, indeed, was the case for group therapy. If they are not revised, teachers will search for a more current text to assign to their classes.
In the fall of 1987, we had an empty nest: my youngest child, Ben, had left home for college at Stanford. After sending my textbook revision to the publisher, Marilyn and I celebrated our freedom with a full year of travel abroad, stopping for long writing retreats in Bali and Paris.
For a very long time I had been considering a very different kind of book. All my life I have been a lover of narrative, and I have often smuggled therapy stories, some only a few lines long, some lasting a few pages, into my professional writing. Over the years many readers of my group therapy text had informed me that they were willing to put up with many pages of dry theory because they knew there would be another teaching story coming around the bend. So, at age fifty-six, I resolved to make a major life change. I would continue to teach young psychotherapists through my writing, but I would elevate the story to a privileged position: I would put the story first and allow it to be the primary vehicle for my teaching. I felt the time had come to liberate the storyteller within me.
Before leaving for Japan it was imperative to get the hang of my newfangled gadget: a laptop computer. So we rented a cabin for three weeks in Ashland, Oregon, a town we had visited many times for its extraordinary theater festival. We saw plays in the evenings but during the daytime I assiduously practiced writing on the laptop. When I felt confident about its use, we took off for our first stop: the consultation in Tokyo.
I was a one-finger typist at that point. All my prior books and articles had been written in longhand (or, in one case, dictated). But to use this new computer I had to learn to type, and I succeeded via an unusual method: I spent my long flight to Japan playing one of the early video games in which my spaceship was attacked by alien vessels firing missiles in the shape of letters of the alphabet, which could only be repelled by pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard. It was an extraordinarily effective pedagogical device and by the time the plane landed in Japan I knew how to type.
After our visit to Tokyo we flew to Beijing, where we met four American friends and, with a guide, which was mandatory during those years, set off on a two-week tour of China. We went to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and, on a river trip, to Guilin, where we were enthralled by the pencil-like mountains in the distance. On all these journeys I continued to contemplate how I would write a collection of therapy stories.
One day in Shanghai I was feeling a bit under the weather and did not accompany the others on their full-day tour, but spent the morning resting. From my briefcase crammed with dictated session notes, I randomly selected one folder (out of twenty-five) and read over the summaries of the seventy-five therapy sessions I had had with Saul, a sixty-year-old biochemistry researcher.
That afternoon, while meandering alone through the back streets of Shanghai, I came upon a large, handsome, and long-abandoned Catholic church. Entering through the unlocked door, I wandered down the aisles until my eye caught the confessional booth. After making certain I was alone, I did something I had always wanted to do: I slipped in and sat down in the priest’s seat! I thought of the generations of priests who had listened to confessions in this box and imagined all that they had heard—so much remorse, so much shame, so much guilt. I envied those men of God; I envied their ability to pronounce to sufferers, “You are forgiven.” What therapeutic power! My own abilities felt dwarfed.
After sitting and meditating for about an hour in that ancient seat of authority, an amazing thing happened: I slipped into a reverie during which the entire plot of a story, “Three Unopened Letters,” revealed itself. I suddenly knew everything about that story—its characters, its development, and its moments of suspense. I was desperate to record it before it evaporated, but I had no paper or pencil (this was the pre-iPhone era)—no way to record my thoughts. Scouring the church, I found a one-inch stub of pencil in an empty bookshelf, but not a scrap of paper, so I turned to the only paper available to me—the blank pages of my passport—on which I scribbled the essentials of the story. This was the first of a collection I would ultimately title Love’s Executioner.
A few days later we said goodbye to our friends and to China and flew to Bali for a two-month stay in an exotic house we had rented. There I began to write in earnest. Marilyn also had a writing project (which eventuated in her book Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory). Though we dearly loved our four children, we exalted in our freedom: this was our first prolonged sojourn together without children since our honeymoon in France, thirty-three years earlier.
Our Balinese house was unlike anything we had ever encountered. From the outside we could see only the high wall encircling the large property, which was filled with lush tropical flora. The house had no walls, only hanging shades dividing and enclosing the rooms. The sleeping area was upstairs, and the bathroom was in a separate structure. Our first night there was unforgettable: about midnight, a swarm of flying insects descended upon us, millions of them, so overwhelming that we pulled the sheets over our heads. I eyed my suitcases, planning to get as far away from this place as I could as fast as possible when morning arrived. But by the time the sun rose, all was quiet again, not an insect in sight, and the servants swore to us that this termite mating swarm happened only one night a year. Birds in iridescent colors boldly perched in the intricately twisted trees of the garden and caroled strange melodies. The perfume of unfamiliar blossoms drugged us, and we found the kitchen stocked with several types of strange-looking fruit. A staff of six living in huts on the property spent their days cleaning, cooking, gardening, playing music, and making flower and fruit arrangements for the frequent religious festivals. A three-minute walk out the back gate down a sandy trail took us to the magnificent Kuta Beach—still pristine and deserted in those days. And all of this for far less than the rent we charged for our Palo Alto house.
After writing “Three Unopened Letters,” the story about Saul, from the notes I had sketched in my passport, I spent mornings on the garden bench trolling my case notes for the next story. In the afternoons Marilyn and I wandered for hours along the beach, and, almost imperceptibly, a story would take root and develop such momentum as to compel me to put aside all other notes and devote myself to that particular tale. As I started writing, I had no idea where a story would lead me or what shape it would take. I felt myself almost a bystander as I watched it take root and send up shoots that soon interlaced.
I have often heard writers say a story writes itself, but I hadn’t understood it until then. After two months, I had an entirely new and deeper appreciation of an old anecdote Marilyn had told me years before about the nineteenth-century English novelist William Thackeray. One evening, as Thackeray came out of his study, his wife asked how the day’s writing had gone. He responded, “Oh, a terrible day! Pendennis [one of his characters] made a fool of himself and I simply couldn’t stop him.”
Soon I became used to listening to my characters speaking to one another. I eavesdropped all the time—even after finishing the day’s writing, when I was strolling arm in arm with Marilyn on one of the endless buttery beaches. Before long I had another writerly experience, one of the peak experiences of my life. At some point while deep into a story, I observed my fickle mind flirting with another story, one taking shape beyond my immediate perception. I took this to be a signal—an uncanny one, to myself from myself—that the story I was writing was coming to an end and a new one readying for birth.
Now that all my words existed only on this unfamiliar computer, I grew more and more uneasy at having no paper copies of my work—such things as flash drives, Time Machine, and Dropbox were yet unborn. Unfortunately, my portable Kodak printer did not enjoy travel and, after only one month in Bali, gave up the ghost. Alarmed at the prospect of my work vanishing permanently deep in the computer’s innards, I sought help. There turned out to be only one printer in all of Bali, in a computer school in the capital city of Denpasar. One day I brought my computer to the school, waited until the end of class, and begged or bribed—I forget which, perhaps both—the teacher to print a precious hard copy of the work to date.
Inspiration came quickly in Bali. Without mail, a telephone, or other distractions, I wrote better and more rapidly than ever before. In my two months there I wrote four of the ten stories. In each story I spent a great deal of time disguising the identity of the patients. I altered the patients’ appearances, occupations, ages, nationalities, marital status, and often even gender. I wanted to be entirely certain that no one could possibly recognize them, and, of course, I would send the patient the finished story and ask for written permission.
In our downtime, Marilyn and I explored the island. We adored the graceful Balinese and admired their art, dancing, puppetry, carving, and painting, and we marveled at the religious parades. The beach-walking and snorkeling were heavenly. One day our driver took us, along with two bicycles, to one of Bali’s highest points, and we coasted several miles downhill through villages, passing stands selling slices of jackfruit and durian. To my surprise, chess was popular in Bali, and I found games everywhere. I often went early to a nearby restaurant to play chess with the waiter.
My agreement with Marilyn was to spend the second half of the sabbatical year in Europe. I love tropical islands, and Marilyn loves France, and throughout our marriage we have compromised. Marilyn had just officially left her administrative position at Stanford (though she has stayed on until this day as a senior scholar), and she still had some professional duties that took her back to Palo Alto on our way to Europe. I stopped in Hawaii for a writing retreat on Oahu at our Japanese host’s lovely condo, where I wrote two more stories. Finally, after five weeks, Marilyn rang the bell, informing me it was time to resume our trip.
Next stop, Bellagio, Italy. A year earlier we had each applied and been accepted for residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, she to work on her women’s memoirs of the French Revolution, and I to work on my book of psychotherapy tales.
A residency at Bellagio must be one of the greatest perks of academia. Only a short walk from Lake Como, the Rockefeller compound has beautiful gardens, a superb chef, who hand-made the pasta and served a different variety every night, and a handsome central villa that houses the thirty scholars and provides a separate study for each. The scholars met together at mealtimes and for evening seminars, where we each presented our work. Marilyn and I wrote each morning and in the afternoons we often took the ferryboat to one of the small, charming villages on Lake Como. I spent a great deal of time with one of the other scholars, Stanley Elkins, a marvelous comic novelist. Stanley had been invalided by polio and used a wheelchair. Every night he regularly trolled for plots and characters by listening to talk radio.
After Bellagio we spent the remaining four months of our sabbatical in Paris, renting an apartment on the Boulevard Port Royal. Marilyn wrote at home and I in an outdoor café near the Panthéon, where I finished the last four stories. Once again, I took my daily French lessons—alas, as always, to no avail—and late afternoons and evenings we strolled through the city and had dinner with her Parisian friends.
Writing in an outdoor café agreed with me and I wrote with unusual efficiency. Later, when I returned home, I found an outdoor café in San Francisco in North Beach (Café Malvino) with good writing vibes, where I continued the practice. Since I meant this to be a collection of teaching tales for young therapists, I set out to write a few paragraphs at the end of each story that elaborated upon the theoretical points illustrated within. That idea proved unwieldy, and instead I spent several weeks writing a sixty-page teaching epilogue to appear at the end of the book. Then I mailed the manuscript to my publisher with a sense of great satisfaction.
Two or three weeks later, Phoebe Hoss, the Basic Books editor assigned to the book, contacted me. Phoebe was an editor from hell (but also from heaven) and we were destined for an epic battle. As I recall, Phoebe did only minor editing of the stories except at one point to insert a phrase, “an avalanche of flesh,” into the fat lady story. That phrase sticks in my mind because it is the only gratuitous phrase any editor has ever added (even though I often wished for more). But then, when Phoebe read my long epilogue, she went berserk and insisted I ditch it entirely. She was absolutely sure that no final theoretical explanation was needed and that the stories would speak for themselves. Phoebe and I had a major war, battling for months. I submitted one version of the epilogue after another, and each was returned to me cruelly shortened until, after several months, she had reduced my sixty pages to ten and insisted it be moved to the front of the book. As I reread the book today, beginning with the succinct prologue, I am chagrined by memories of my fierce resistance: Phoebe, a blessed editor, whose like I would never again encounter, was absolutely right.
When the book was to be released Marilyn and I flew to New York for the publisher’s publication party—such events, now rare, were common in that era. The party was scheduled for a Monday evening, but a negative review in the Sunday New York Times put a damper on everyone’s spirits. The format of the book had very few precedents: only some of Freud’s case histories and Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, about patients in hypnotherapy, came close. The New York Times reviewer, a child psychiatrist, was affronted by the format and ended her sour review saying that she would prefer to read her case histories in professional journals.
A few minutes after midnight on Sunday night, however, I was awakened by a phone call from my overjoyed publisher saying that the Wednesday New York Times would publish a rave review by Eva Hoffman, a well-known writer and reviewer. To this day I am grateful to Eva Hoffman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting years later. I did readings of the book in New York and at bookstores in a dozen cities. Those national book tours are now largely a thing of the past, along with the profession of book tour guides, who met authors at the airport and transported them to speaking engagements. At almost every bookstore, Oliver Sacks had just preceded me, promoting his recently published book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Our paths crossed so much that I felt I knew him, but unfortunately we never met. I much admired his work, and after reading his moving final book, On the Move, I wrote him a fan letter shortly before he died.
Within a few weeks after publication, to my total astonishment, Love’s Executioner found its way to the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for several weeks. I was soon overwhelmed with interviews and speaking requests, and remember complaining about my fatigue and stress in a lunch conversation with Phillip Lopate, a fine essayist who had been one of my instructors at a writing workshop at Bennington College. His advice to me: “Chill out and enjoy the attention—bestsellers are rare and, who knows, you might never have another.” And, oh, how right he was.
Twenty-three years later, the publisher decided to reissue Love’s Executioner with a different cover and asked me to write a new afterword. I reread the book—the first time in a great many years—and had strong reactions: pride coupled with chagrin at my aging and envy of my younger self. I couldn’t help feeling this guy writes a lot better than I can. It was a pleasure to revisit all my dear old patients, many of them no longer alive. But there was one exception: the story “Fat Lady.” I remember writing that story in a Paris café and spending hours constructing the opening paragraph, which introduces the concept of countertransference, the therapist’s unbidden emotional reactions to a patient.
The day Betty entered my office, the instant I saw her steering her ponderous two-hundred-fifty-pound, five-foot-two-inch frame toward my trim, high-tech office chair, I knew that a great trial of countertransference was in store for me.
The story is meant to be a teaching tale for therapists, and I, even more than the patient, am the main character. It is a story about those irrational, sometimes abhorrent feelings a therapist may feel toward a patient that may constitute a formidable obstacle in therapy. A therapist may have extremely strong feelings of attraction toward a patient, or may have a powerful negative reaction flowing from unconscious sources, perhaps from encounters with negative figures in the therapist’s past. Though I wasn’t in touch with all the reasons for my negative feelings toward obese women, I felt certain that my relationship to my mother played some role, and I knew I had to struggle hard to overcome my unruly feelings and relate to the patient in a human, positive fashion. That was the story I meant to tell, and to do it I magnified the extent of my countertransference. Thus the conflict between my negative countertransference toward Betty and my desire to help her provided the central drama.
One incident, in particular, evoked strong empathy in me. Betty had set up a date from the personal ads in a local newspaper (the common practice in those pre-Match.com days) and wore a rose in her hair to be identified. The man never appeared. This was not the first time Betty had experienced something similar, and she surmised that he had taken a look at her from a distance and disappeared. My heart went out to her and I had to hold back my tears as she described herself struggling to keep her composure and drinking in solitude at the crowded bar.
I took pride in the denouement expressed in the final words in the story when she asked for a farewell hug: “When we embraced, I was surprised to find that I could get my arms all the way around her.”
I opted to write the story with brutal revelation of my shameful thoughts about obesity. No, it went much further than that: for the sake of literary power, I greatly magnified my repugnance and crafted the story into a duel between my role as a healer and the onslaught of bedeviling thoughts in the background.
It was with some trepidation that I handed Betty the story to read and asked her permission. I had, of course, altered all identifying details, and I asked if there were other changes she desired. I told her how I had exaggerated my feelings in the service of teaching more effectively. Betty said she understood and gave me written permission to publish the story.
The response to this particular story was vigorous and loud. “Fat Lady” generated a flood of negative responses from women who were hurt and outraged. But it also resulted in an even greater outpouring of positive letters from young therapists who felt relieved as they tried to work through their own negative feelings toward some of their patients. My honesty, they said, made it easier for them to live with themselves when they harbored negative feelings and enabled them to speak openly of such feelings to a supervisor or colleague.
When Terry Gross interviewed me on Fresh Air, a popular PBS radio program, she questioned me, perhaps “excoriated” is the more accurate term, about this story. Finally, in self-defense, I exclaimed, “Didn’t you read the end of the story? Did you not understand that the story was about my journey in therapy with someone toward whom I had negative prejudices and that by the end I had changed and had matured as a therapist? I am the main character in this story, not the patient.” I was never invited back to her program.
Though she may not have been able to tell me so, I imagine the story did cause Betty pain. I had put blinders on. I was too ambitious, too reckless, too caught up in liberating my writerly impulses. I regret it to this day. Writing that story now, I would try to transform obesity into some entirely different condition and more radically fictionalize the events of therapy.
I ended my afterword to a new edition of Love’s Executioner with an observation my younger self would have found surprising: namely, that the view from eighty is better than expected. Yes, I can’t deny that life in the later years is just one damn loss after another; but, even so, I’ve found far greater tranquility and happiness in my seventh, and eighth, and ninth decades than I had ever thought possible. And there’s one additional bonus: reading your own work can be more exciting! Memory loss has some unexpected advantages. As I turned the pages of “Three Unopened Letters,” “The Wrong One Died,” and the title story, “Love’s Executioner,” I felt myself burning with curiosity. I had forgotten how the stories ended!