Book Review: The Great Failure

In The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth, Natalie Goldberg has offered yet another unvarnished view into what it means to be human. I am grateful to her, and to the many writers who are able to pull this off.  It is not common writing, and therefore I surmise it must not be effortless, even as her prose is as natural as to read itself.

I am fascinated by memoir, my favorite genre.  I find inspiration in the realworld experiences of people, and how they choose to tell the story.  Truth being stranger than fiction, the other part of what I find captivating is the unpredictable nature of actually happens in the everyday lives of families, marriages, spiritual quests - the type of human experiences which are not normally included in 'small talk'. A myriad of ironies happen everywhere, everyday, as we pretend in our little human way that we have control over life, that it can be managed and structured by our fervent wishing and hard work.

Natalie Goldberg practices  Zen Buddhism, which has been her way to make sense of life for more than 30 years.  She is my age, the mid fifties.  We shared the same eras, the same parent generation. Ours was an age group faced with more choices than our parents, yet we were still sorting through the remnants of old paradigms in conflict with the new.  Many of our generation did not make it through.  (I have 2 siblings who are mentally ill).  Many became wildly rich.  Many are gone altogether. We will become the elders soon, the past becomes longer and more varied for those of us still grinding away at the questions, making the most of this gift-challenge of life.


Early in her Buddhist practice, Natalie found her teacher/mentor, Katagiri Roshi. He was her strongest inspiration for 12 years, a formative time which changed Natalie's life, informed her writing and inspired her to create. In the midst of Roshi's teaching, he died of cancer, leaving his student devastated and disoriented. Natalie stayed with her practice, and carried Roshi's memory like a light, trying to survive the loss of the physical presence of a beloved person, gone too soon.

Several years after his death, Natalie learned that Roshi had had numerous extra marital affairs. The man she fervently revered was not the man he appeared to be as they sat for hours in dedicated meditation. Like the grief over death, she was faced with finding the way to still love her teacher, and be with the truth.

In tandem to this struggle, she relates the experiences of her family and it's failings, which she spent much of her life coming to terms with. What a gift this type of story is, a person willing to discuss the workings of a family, the personal journey of a spiritual practice as well as the realities of their own flawed human relationships, like a marriage that didn't work. It gives me solace, assuages that nagging sense that whatever I do is not enough, and that I am not as good as someone who has managed a more conventional life.

I found this quote recently: "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan". I think understanding failure is complex, and uncomfortable, but Natalie Goldberg has managed to write through the wall, putting light and air to our human weaknesses, offering forgiveness, setting aside judgment. It is an example of how we can each be in our own practice, noticing more, and judging less.

I bow to Natalie Golberg for her courage to write with honesty and love.