Humor is something that I’ve always used. That’s probably one of my formative influences. Has humor always played a major role in your writing? The first thing many readers have said about your book is that it’s hilarious. Why don’t you just do the easiest book you can?” But of course it turned out to be very hard. I actually said that to a friend of mine, and he said, “Well, writing is so hard. It didn’t quite work out, and this just seemed like it would be so easy to write. I began looking at my parents’ divorce, and at some point I realized that if I wanted to write a memoir, I would have to include painful moments, too. It became a more reflective book than it would have been otherwise. But in the process, I went through a divorce, and that actually impacted its tone a little bit. I started writing the book because I had a lot of odd, quirky stories to tell that I thought would be funny. Why did you choose to write a memoir? Was it at all because Jung encouraged his patients to write about their own lives? I met up with Toub over coffee at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York to get into Toub’s head and find out more about the process of writing Growing Up Jung.
At once a confessional, entertaining story about one American family, it is also a collection of life lessons, a Jung-lite for the common man, and an intimate, well-researched portrait of Jung from the unique perspective of a writer who had no choice but to live by the creed WWJD (“What Would Jung Do?”). The vignettes from Toub’s life lend themselves naturally to his humorous recounting, but like any good Jungian, Toub has produced a multi-layered work. Raised in a version of suburban America in which a trip to Skipper’s seafood chain restaurant could easily veer off into the land of “magical beings and visits from E.T.,” Toub was encouraged by his parents to consult his ally, confront his shadow, linger in “double-meta land,” and, after failing to get a hard-on during his first sexual encounter (yep, he went there), “become the erection.” Especially if that boy is Micah Toub, the son of two Jungian-trained therapists and author of the new memoir, Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks. What could Carl Jung and an American boy raised in Denver, CO possibly have in common? A lot, actually. “I was writing the book at the same time that I was feeling very private, and these two things were coming towards each other in a collision course. Make your own Six-Word tee or choose among our favorites.
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