Coffee Hour

Bibliotherapy

There have been many times in my life, especially those times when I have found myself consulting a doctor or therapist, when I have ardently wished to be prescribed not a pill or a course of cognitive exercises, but a really good book. I am a great believer in the curative powers of literature. Not for mechanical problems, of course. I wouldn't want a reading cure for a broken leg or manic depression, but there are many areas of medicine and psychology that are not simply a breakdown of the physical structure of the body or a misfiring of synapses and these ills, I believe, are the sort which benefit from a change in perspective, a chance to get outside of one's own head or circumstances, or the introduction of emotions foreign to one's previous experience

So far, I have never met a doctor or therapist who subscribes to my theory and so, following the example of so many quacks before me, I have begun to offer to others in my quasi-professional role as a student minister what I so much desire to have in my personal life. My first attempt was a great success. I suggested a poet of my acquaintance while away the hours of unemployment not only by standing in line for township assistance and searching the classified advertisements, but also to amuse himself with George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. My premise was that it would be cheering for a person suffering a temporary setback to read in detail about how much worse of they might actually be. Orwell's sojourn as a kitchen drudge and worse, his depiction of the horrors of bedbugs, thievery, and unwelcome homosexual advances from tramps and, above all, his ability to transcend these experiences into the realm of artistic expression, have something useful to say to any underpaid artist, and I was as pleased to hear that my poet friend was once again writing poetry as I was to hear he had found a new job.

Judging, therefore, on standards of efficacy as curative literature, I would say that Karen Armstrong's new memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is an excellent book for late bloomers and anyone else who is convinced they haven't yet found their proper place in life. Interestingly enough, Armstrong herself turns to literature for help and her book's title is a reference to T. S. Eliot's poem Ash-Wednesday. Eliot's poem uses the metaphor of ascending a spiral staircase on which the protagonist must turn again and again in blindness and without hope as he seeks a spiritual union. He struggles against "the devil of the stairs", renounces hope, accepts futility, desires integration. For Armstrong, this poem was a kind of medicinal literature, too. Long after she left the convent and came to a place in her life when she thought religion had nothing to offer her, she had a transcendent and life-altering experience while reading the poem.

The Spiral Staircase recounts the turnings in Armstrong's life which, like the steps of a spiral staircase, seemed to come from all different directions but in fact combined to make progress around a central axis. She is candid about times in her life that were apparent failures: renouncing her vows, failing to achieve academic recognition, losing a teaching job, failed relationships, even the failure of the first book she tried to write about entering secular life after leaving the convent. Despite these endings, her life continued, and she was able to discover new meaning in her life and even share what she has discovered with others, adding meaning to their lives, in turn.

I came away from the book with a dose of what I can only describe as a kind of faithfulness to the truth of our inner knowledge. Many of Armstrong's failures were the result of trying to conform to other people's ideas of who she ought to be. Again and again, Armstrong trusts people whom she believes know her better than she knows herself--sometimes to tragi-comical extremes, like the hours she spent going through the motions of sewing because she thought a nun was trying to teach her humility by not acknowledging her request for a needle. Or how symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy were first dismissed at the convent as attention-getting hysteria and later, at the psychologist's office, as a manifestation of her denial of sexuality and femininity. She is repeatedly misunderstood, stereotyped, and pigeon-holed, and her memoir might be considered a record of her attempt to gain self-knowledge in spite of the fact that she is sometimes convinced by the low estimation others have made of her.

Armstrong's story is unusual and colorful enough to be absorbing reading, but her struggle is universal. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who feels their life is going nowhere, anyone whose potential is as yet unrecognized (perhaps even by themselves), and anyone coming to the realization that they are their own best interpreter. As it happens, these are also the reasons the book was strong medicine for me.