How Psychology Helped Me Become a Writer: A Guest Post by Alex Michaelides
“I became a psychotherapist because I was f***ed up” is Theo Faber’s opening line in my novel The Silent Patient. Substitute the word “psychotherapist” with “writer,” and the same applies to me. I believe who we are, and the choices we make in life, all come down to our earliest years. Or to put it another way, Ernest Hemingway wrote that the best early training for a writer is “an unhappy childhood.”
I grew up on the island of Cyprus a few years after the Turkish invasion of 1974. Growing up in the divided city of Nicosia, encountering barbed wire, UN soldiers, and checkpoints on a daily basis contributed to a feeling of anxiety; as did the threat of a second invasion, which was in the air throughout my childhood. I was a lonely child, nervous, anxious, and I had trouble fitting in with my peers. I took refuge in books and movies, and, in many ways, I still do.
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The Fury
The Fury
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Hardcover $28.99
With a deviously unreliable narrator providing a constant and consistent supply of twists, turns and surprises, this character-rich story is dripping in readability. Rounded out with a propulsive plot and saturated in suspense, The Fury is immensely compelling and a joy to read.
With a deviously unreliable narrator providing a constant and consistent supply of twists, turns and surprises, this character-rich story is dripping in readability. Rounded out with a propulsive plot and saturated in suspense, The Fury is immensely compelling and a joy to read.
Even though I always wanted to be a writer, for many years I was unable to access any psychological depth in my writing — it remained shallow and superficial — largely because I didn’t know who I was. One book changed my life when I read it in my early twenties: The Drama of Being a Child, by the psychoanalyst Alice Miller. In the UK, the title was The Drama of the Gifted Child — by which Miller meant that the “gifted” child is one who is intelligent enough to adapt herself to parental demands, and not the other way round. Through this focus on pleasing others and submitting to their needs, the child sacrifices a sense of her true self.
Reading Alice Miller was an epiphany for me. She insists that the purpose of therapy is not to correct the past but to confront our childhoods and grieve over them. These words propelled me on a ten-year journey of psychotherapy, both as a patient and a student. And finally I was able, as writer, to examine not only my childhood but also the formative experiences of my fictional characters.
The hero of my new novel, The Fury, is a playwright called Elliot Chase, and he undergoes a journey similar to my own. He discovers, through therapy, that a wounded, traumatized child is living in his head — and like an unwilling time traveller, Elliot flits between the past and the present, never quite sure which is which.
My preparation for writing this novel about seven damaged characters was to delve deep into their childhoods. I wrote pages and pages about each character’s upbringing to clearly understand how the remote past affected their actions in the novel. None of this made it into the book: It wasn’t important that the reader knew all this, it mattered that I knew it — and then the reader would be able to intuit that the characters’ actions were rooted in truth and psychological reality.
In The Fury, Elliot eventually learns to communicate with the child in his head and live a more authentic and integrated life. And this is precisely what I wish for myself and the readers of my books, and it’s what I love most about books — their ability not just to entertain but to inform and inspire. This is why I write. And if I have managed to capture at least some of this wisdom in my writing, then I have done my job.