She crashed the NYT website: “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.”
What if you were to come home one day after being happily married for many years and your husband or wife said this: “I don’t love you anymore and I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out.” What would you do?
Writer Laura Munson’s calm, unusual response took the nation by storm when she wrote about it in her essay that was featured in the New York Times: she said she didn’t believe him. She felt that this was his internal crisis and he needed the space and time to fix it (which he did). But during the dark months when her husband was distancing himself from the family and their marriage was falling apart, Munson coped how she knew best—she wrote about it.
After a 20-year career as a writer with 14 unpublished books, Munson decided to chronicle this dark time in her life—but in an unexpected way. In this interview, she shares how she wrote This Is Not The Story You Think It Is… to help others navigate a crisis and come out stronger in the end. While most memoirs are full of bitterness and anger, she wanted to change the paradigm around suffering to be about empowerment, personal freedom and the choice to be happy. Now with her first published book and a marriage still intact, it sounds like she is doing just that.
Laura Munson is the author of the memoir This Is Not The Story You Think It Is…, based upon an essay she wrote for The New York Times which took the country by storm. In the book she chronicles a crisis in her marriage and how she handled it in a most in unusual way. Laura has been writing for 20 years and this is her first published book. You can read her blog at http://lauramunson.wordpress.com.
thanks for sharing, life, liberty and the persuit of happiness. God Bless
I can definitely identify with writing as a coping mechanism. I do it all the time. And I get the benefit of going back and reading over my thoughts and feelings later. What better therapy? Laura’s book came to my attention a few months ago (I don’t even remember how) and I laughed and cried and camped out at the bookstore for 2 months reading it (a mom on a budget doesn’t have an allowance for books). I am in the process of trying to save my marriage and it was so nice to find someone “on my side” in that when he says ‘I’m done’ that doesn’t have to be the end. Laura’s brave trek into the unknown with head held high gave me back the confidence in myself I forgot I had. Thanks, Laura.