On Dec. 5, a book release party and reading from Nancy Slonim Aronie’s new book, “Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay” (Seven Secrets), took place at the Grange Hall. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.
Though you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know Aronie, for those who haven’t had the honor of meeting her, she is the author of two previous books, “Memoir as Medicine” and “Writing from the Heart,” and has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and a columnist for multiple newspapers. Aronie has taught writing at Kripalu, Omega, Esalen, and Harvard, and is the founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop, where people from all over the world assemble to write about their joys and sorrows in a safe and encouraging space.
“Everyone has sorrow in their life,” Aronie said. “We all have core wounds.” On her website, Aronie says, “If you feel safe, you can do anything. You can take the risk of saying, ‘This is who I am, this is what terrifies me, this is what moves me, this is what makes me laugh.’ When you take that risk, you dig deep. You will access your innocence, your truth, and your vulnerability, and then you cannot miss.”
In “Seven Secrets,” Aronie uses examples of her own and others’ work to illustrate her advice on personal essay writing. The contributing writers in the book include the famous, like Tony Shalhoub and Kate Taylor, as well as students, doctors, lawyers, flight attendants, life coaches, and many others.
Twelve writers who have essays included in “Seven Secrets” — Gerry Yukevich, Joy Reichart, Steve Kemper, Glenn Bergenfeld, Kate Feiffer, John Abrams, Brad Hamermesh, Suzy Trotta, Daphne Friese, Julia Kidd, Jim Murrin, and Kate Taylor — joined Aronie on stage. Each piece was powerful, beautifully written, and as different as the writers themselves.
Essay titles included “Freedom on the Grave,” “Let It Break,” “How I Met Her,” “Just a Dumb Idea,” and “My Passionate Mother”; some, like “The Hardest Thing,” “Breakfast at My House Was …” and “I Should Have,” were based on prompts Aronie had provided in past workshops.
Some of the essays were painful but also inspiring, like Hamermesh’s story of experiencing a horrific skiing accident and learning how to walk (and nearly everything else) again. Friese’s piece about a physically and sexually abusive co-worker and the poisoning of her father rendered the audience silent. Some pieces were philosophical, like Reichart’s experience of coming to accept her despair and releasing her effort to control it, and Abrams’ tale about the rift between him and his father, and the healing that occurred after he posed the question, “How about we celebrate each other?”
Others essays were hilarious, like Feiffer’s piece about how her mother wrote a “naughty” book titled “A Hot Property” when Feiffer was a child –– and how her high school boyfriend found it and read excerpts to her out loud –– and Kidd’s account of an online love affair with an old peer, and how her 16-year-old son, while trying to help her download photos from her phone, found a few that weren’t meant for public viewing.
Taylor, the consummate storyteller, chose to share her piece sans reading. “You never forget your first Beatle,” she said, while telling a story about how she and her brother, singer James Taylor, went to California to meet with a record producer, and came face to face with Ringo Starr.
After a rousing round of applause, everyone went downstairs for drinks, snacks, and conversation. Mathew Tombers of Edgartown Books was in the house selling books, and Aronie signed nearly 100 of them.
I can’t close without sharing what a few contributing writers had to say about the evening. “Nancy has a remarkable ability to laugh and cry in the course of a single sentence, and while she can’t gift that to us, she did get everyone in the room to laugh and cry in the course of a single night as we listened to each other’s essays,” Feiffer noted.
Reichart, who first attended an Aronie writing workshop more than 20 years ago, said, “I’m grateful that Nancy’s life-changing work could be celebrated this way, and deeply honored to be part of it. It was so humbling to be up there with such phenomenal writers and humans — and our stories are a fraction of a fraction of the powerful stuff that Nancy helps us all touch into.”
And Aronie herself? “It was lively, festive, and moving. I was bursting with joy! The Yiddish word for being proud of your children when they do something special, like win an art award, score the final goal in a soccer tournament, get into Harvard, you kvell for them. I was kvelling all night!”
To learn more about Nancy Aronie and her writing workshops, visit chilmarkwritingworkshop.com/nancy-aronie.
