A Conversation with Joanne Greenberg

Joanne Greenberg (1932-) is best known for writing I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a groundbreaking, fictional representation of a teenage girl's recovery from schizophrenia, based on the therapeutic relationship between Greenberg and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann; the novel was recently re-issued with a new afterword. Greenberg has published seventeen works of fiction; a new novel, Miri Who Charms, is scheduled for publication in May 2009. Greenberg's work—praised by writers as varied as Sanford Pinsker, Ruth Wisse, Joyce Carol Oates, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt—still awaits the acclaim and critical attention it deserves. Formally inventive and deeply moral, politically aware but skeptical of political agendas, Greenberg's work explores Jewish themes and characters. Greenberg's first publication was a historical novel, The King's Persons, about the twelfth-century York massacre of Jews (1963); like that novel, this conversation reveals Greenberg's ongoing concern with Jewish history and texts. Greenberg lives with her husband, Albert, near Golden, Colorado, in the home they built over fifty years ago. In addition to writing daily, Greenberg teaches writing, ethics, and anthropology at the Colorado School of Mines.

This conversation with Gail Berkeley Sherman took place at Greenberg's home in August 2007; the notes are supplemented by further discussion in November/December 2008 and February 2009. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

GBS:

Let's start with why you got interested in writing. What were the passions that drove you when you first started?

JG:

I don't know. I know when, but I don't know why. I was nine. I had read a wonderful book, The Black Tanker, by Howard Pease.¹ I was taken out of myself: I became a young man, dissolute, failing at Stanford; his father sent him a telegram, and he went off, got a job on a tramp steamer, solved a murder, came into his own as a man, saved his father—I mean the whole thing was just wonderful! It was not December 7 yet; it must have been the spring of that year [1941]. My father, who was an immigrant, was distraught over what was happening [to Jews in Europe], and I thought I could kind of fix it, so I wrote a letter to Hitler. Hitler never answered, so my good advice went to waste. But I liked doing that; I liked doing that.

I was waylaid, I think, by my growing mental illness, so I got derailed into a whole lot of other stuff. If you're mentally ill and creative, you associate those two things together, your creativity being the strength you have to beat the mental illness (but you don't know that yet, so you think that if I get rid of my mental illness, this is the only thing I've got.

Your ego is all bound up in it, whatever ego there is. Psychotherapists have to be very, very careful to separate these things so that people don't mess this up. This is one of the bad things that the Greeks have done to us, talking about the muse that sort of drops on you and can go away at any time as though you have no action in the thing…it's very damaging both to creative people and to mentally ill people. My sister, for example, was afraid of being creative because she thought she'd have to go nuts. This is not good.

Anyway, I was writing at twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I stopped when I was fifteen because I was just too sick; at eighteen, I found it again. But I think I better tell you about the visit of the Yetzer HaTov and the Yetzer HaRa.² I was twenty. Yetzer HaRa came and said, "There's nothing but greatness and death, and if you're not great, you might as well be dead. So I'm going to give you a year, and if you're not great by a year, you can commit suicide." Okay. So I waited a year and guess what? No greatness.

So Yetzer HaTov came. Yetzer HaTov...