Reading popular writing guru Natalie Goldberg’s newly published memoir, The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth, Harper San Francisco, 2004, I am drawn to the speaker’s many descriptions of the two influential male figures in her life, her bartender father and her now deceased Zen teacher. When she writes about her need for her teacher, the sound of her writing and her word choice are musical and compelling:

Roshi, I’m calling you. Do you hear me? Get into form again. I want to speak with you, just one more time, and then I’ll open my hand and let go.

I’m invoking you back into sight, sound, taste, back into color and smell, the felt world from whatever sawdust, ash, Huge Mind you have dissolved into, whatever task you are attending to in what other universe. Put down your dust rag, your job of cleaning the altar in another dimension, and be with me. We have to talk.

When she explores her connection to her father by affirming it, her simple language carries weight:

When I was young, I watched him dive over and over into the ocean at Jones Beach. He taught me to swim. I’d stand on his shoulders, and when the great waves came, the two of us charged right into them, me on top, he on the bottom.

Despite the many moments I enjoyed the writing in this book, I came away from my reading astonished that the author, who has captured a wide audience around the world by encouraging writing practice, constantly refers to sandwiches, hamburgers, $10 salads, M&Ms, jelly beans, lemonade, ice cream, Coca-Cola and Pepperidge Farm cookies at the moments she might otherwise have made the deepest discoveries about herself, her convictions and her humanity. Instead of a heartfelt exploration of three topics –1) learning to set boundaries with her father whose teasing bothered her, 2) connecting with her mother whom she believed had always overlooked her, and 3) assimilating new information about her beloved Zen teacher’s indiscretions — to illustrate her personal journey from angry younger adulthood to forgiving, flexible older age, Goldberg writes about popping one treat after another into her mouth, escaping from rather than searching for emotional discoveries.

Repeatedly referring to food on the table or in hand, both hers and others’, she fails to delve into emotional information and its impact on her. For example, when she writes about a childhood visit to her Aunt Lil’s, she details dishes of pretzels, potato chips, hard candies and the caramel she unwraps and pops into her mouth before revealing the fact that Lil’s husband Seymour was found years later to have a whole second family in another state. Her adult thoughts about her uncle’s bigamy are obscured in her hurry to introduce another memory about food — this time a second aunt bringing Easter baskets into the room. The image of the young Goldberg snapping off the head of a chocolate bunny and shoving it into her mouth distracts me from what the real impact might have been on her from discovering this news about her uncle. I want to know what the adult Goldberg thinks about this family secret. Instead, I learn only how many jellybeans the little girl Goldberg ate in the situation.

 In another place, she writes about craving only Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and Coca-Cola in the first hours after a friend picks her up from a hospital where she was taken after she narrowly escaped death in a serious car accident. Goldberg writes that post accident, she could “no longer trust my life, that it will stay with me.” She writes about her cravings, “So this is what a human being clings to when she’s come a hair’s breath from death…”

I am crushed. This is the writer who introduced us to the idea that we can search our souls in our writing. This is someone who learned from a Zen master. I know I might be putting too much stock in all of that, demanding more from Goldberg than I have a right to, but I deeply resent being included in her notion of what a human being thinks after a near miss with death.

I felt like shouting, “Wanting only Haagen-Dazs coffee ice-cream and Coca Cola is what happened to YOU as a human being who almost lost her life. YOU may have gotten no further with yourself after being a best selling author, coveted teacher and keynote speaker, than wanting yet more ice cream, but the rest of us, Zen students or not, might care more about our lives and our loved ones and others’ need for us.”

The fact that Goldberg, once a hero of mine, can come no further in her writing than report that she “clung to” junk food after nearly dying made me reread many passages to make sure I had it right. Didn’t she already write about clandestinely popping spoonfuls of a sesame treat called gomasio into her mouth after washing dishes years ago at her zendo, only to be reprimanded by her esteemed teacher for disobeying the kitchen’s request to save the food for others? Hadn’t she written about coming to understand that she was capable of making incorrect assumptions?

I wondered if Goldberg would realize how often she uses food to act out and lets others down, so I read on in search of an upcoming revelation. I thought it might come in a scene I was reading late in the book. The author sits down with her quite elderly dad to hamburgers at a restaurant, and he tells her that she is fat and needs to lose weight. Goldberg reports being hurt to the core by her father’s comment. Instead of considering why he might say this, she instead tells us how she once again protects her boundaries by telling her father that her weight is none of his business and she is not fat (hard for me to believe with so many treats over so many years).

She intends to show that her indignation over his comments illustrates her success in redefining the father-daughter relationship, but this does not satisfy my longing for insight. Rather than feel her triumph over her father’s invasiveness (she’s discussed this many times in the book), I feel she is still locked in the childhood battle. In addition, she proves that she has a big stake in this battle. It is important to her to always be the leader with her dad, telling him what he can do. Throughout the book, she commands him: no phone calls, Dad, only letters, then tells him his letters aren’t good enough; on one visit she makes to see him when he is old and sick, he comes to her hotel early and she says he must sit and watch the sunrise alone because she has to do her half hour of walking. Goldberg never allows anything her farther says or does, consciously or unconsciously, to hold instructive meaning for her.

With all the escapist eating that precedes this scene, I am not ready to cheer the author for her ability to set boundaries; instead, I find myself more inclined to cheer the supposedly invasive father for his attempt to help his daughter. What if the author had looked at herself just then, and, no matter how much she hated hearing her father say what he said, contemplated the place of food in her emotional life? Instead, she tells her readers that after the gravediggers at her father’s funeral began their work, she handed out Pepperidge Farm cookies to everyone who was graveside just before they headed to the traditional large meal that follows Jewish funerals.

Writing for others means taking the responsibility of finding out about one’s self. Readers want to vicariously learn from emotionally informed individuals. All of us who write from personal experience must realize that it is not enough to simply record the reflexive actions of our daily lives. We must bravely examine these actions and let them inform us about ourselves. We fail in our writing when we opt for trying to delight our readers and ourselves with cute images like graveside cookies rather than with doing the hard work of discovering insight.

My disappointment with this memoir reminds me of some advice about creativity: “Get out of your own way.” In the passages I quote at the start, Goldberg does stay out of her own way as she implores her master teacher to take form again so she can talk to him and as she remembers loving swimming with her father at Jones Beach. By allowing the others to be center stage in her heart and eyes’ view, without eating behavior or judgments, Goldberg lets us feel her love and her connection to them.

Reading this memoir, you will definitely learn more about Goldberg’s life and the story she thinks her life reveals, but I believe you will be disappointed at the way she short-circuits emotional depth. If you read this book and feel let down by the person who may have inspired you to write with her earlier titles, remember that as writers, we learn much by what goes wrong in writing and our reactions to writing that is not yet doing the job it promised.

In Zen, the Great Failure refers to the moment when a practitioner realizes there is nothing to hold on to and nothing to lose. “Our arms spread wide, we welcome it all,” Goldberg writes. “Here we are, with our lives in our hands. Who were we? Who are we?” I don’t think The Great Failure was intended to provide its lessons through misdirection, but for me, it certainly does just that. I will redouble my efforts to pay attention to my work-in-progress and that of my students and be sure that as a result of careful response, we find out more and reach deeper into ourselves.