Review published on https://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/a-review-of-natalie-goldbergs-thundering-world/

I discovered Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones at a bookstore when I was thirteen years old. I already considered myself a writer. As a child, I filled countless notebooks with stories of princesses and talking kittens. But by middle school, I found those stories meaningless. I didn’t yet have the words for the new narratives taking shape inside me. The book’s cover promised to “Free the Writer Within.” I shelled out my allowance and took it home

Goldberg’s writing rules were a stark contrast to the stuff I’d learned in school. Writing Down the Bones urged me to keep my hand moving, go for the jugular, don’t cross out.

Later I purchased Goldberg’s second writing book, Wild Mind. There I discovered that her writing rules applied to almost everything: tennis, sex, even daily life. Her memoir about Zen Buddhism, Long Quiet Highway, exposed me to a new spiritual practice. Thunder and Lightning taught me about the publishing process. Old Friend from Far Away helped me draft a memoir.

This June, Goldberg released her fourteenth book: Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. It’s a cancer memoir, though Goldberg writes in the introduction that she never planned it that way. Friends discouraged it, fearing she’d spark a recurrence. But “the things we avoid have energy. If I ignored my suffering, the life of my writing would die.”

After a decade of lingering health issues, Goldberg is diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal form of blood cancer: chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL. The illness forces her to cancel a writing workshop in Europe. She asks two long-time students to teach in her place, then types a letter to attendees: “This is about practice. You signed up. Be there to sit, walk, and write. I will be there with you.”

While her students study writing and sip herbal tea, Goldberg begins infusion treatments at the Santa Fe Cancer Center. A longtime Zen practitioner, she finds the world of doctors and hospitals strange.

“I trusted acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy,” she writes. “These made sense to me, but cancer made no sense. I was out of my league. I had to drop all of my opinions, my likes and dislikes, and fiercely go into the belly of the beast, the white-coated medical world.”

Goldberg brings readers with her, giving a clear-eyed view of not just her own cancer but that of her partner, Yu-kwan, who discovers a lump in her breast the same time Goldberg is receiving infusions. The double diagnosis strains their relationship. Goldberg wonders, “Who’s going to take care of me?” But as Yu-kwan undergoes a mastectomy, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home grows from a cancer memoir into a love story. With their mortality on the line, Goldberg realizes the true depths of her love: for her partner, for her writing, for the world.

Throughout the book, Goldberg pays homage to the long-deceased writers who inspire her work. She reflects on travels to Paris, where she placed a penny on the grave of Simone de Beauvoir. She visits Rome and the tombstones of Shelley and Keats. She wonders about William Faulkner: “Whatever he wrote, whatever agony he lived, whatever prize he won, he too is gone. Sure we remember him, but where is William Faulkner?”

Goldberg never receives an answer. After rounds of agonizing treatments and a bone marrow biopsy, she tries a new drug, ibrutinib, that sends the cancer into remission. To celebrate, she and Yu-kwan take a hiking trip they cancelled the year before. They visit the home of the Bronte sisters. Of them, only Charlotte Bronte lived to old age. Tuberculosis took the others: Anne at twenty-nine, Emily at thirty.

“The local Haworth public schools did not read their famous authors, the Bronte sisters,” Goldberg writes. “We don’t recognize the greatness in front of us. We all long for another story, another place. I was sixty-seven years old. That’s a lot more years than the Brontes live. Sixty-seven is a long time. How lucky I was.”

It would be easy to call Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home a reflection on mortality. But all of Goldberg’s books are reflections on mortality. We write to preserve fleeting moments. We write to grant our thoughts and experiences a life beyond our lives.

Goldberg’s books have been my constant companions for the past twenty years. They’ve guided me from a confused adolescence to a spiritual awakening, and through the practicalities of publishing and writing memoir. All the while, they reinforced this simple truth: “A writer gets to live twice. First we live, and then we write about what we have lived … Often the second time is the real life for a writer. It is then we get to claim our existence.”

As a longtime student of Goldberg’s work, I hope she has many more lifetimes to share before she joins the ranks of de Beauvoir, the Brontes, Faulkner. But it’s never too early to place a stone or a penny. To pay homage. To let them know, in Goldberg’s words, “in this tough world, that what they did mattered.”

I would perhaps recommend this book for family or friends of a person challenged by cancer so that they may understand the depths of struggle with cancer and its treatment. I would not recommend this book for anyone who has been recently diagnosed or currently under treatment as the author takes the reader through a step-by-step description of her own treatment. Her observations are poignant at times and reflective but do not really add, in my opinion, any sort of salve for the healing of the reader. If anything, the journey of the author may trigger more fear, I feel. As a Canadian with moderate income, I had a hard time dealing with much of the information the author shared. When she was given a particular diagnosis or test result and confronted with a crisis, she would gather her well-connected contacts and put out feelers and get the "Best" doctor in the country (U.S.). Repeatedly, the author described scenes where she was in a dilemma and to solve the health issue, she would recruit "the best". Well, given this author is a successful writer, and is American, she can, it seems, use her finances to get "the best". Great. But for other Americans without her income or her contacts or worse - no health insurance - what message does this send? And as for anyone who has socialised universal health care like myself, a Canadian - the message certainly doesn't apply. We generally get in queue for our doctors and we are all treated equally. So, it's a begrudging 3 star recommendation I give to this book. I'd give 2 star but Goldberg's prose is quite lyrical.

Natalie Goldberg is known for her powerful way of teaching writing – and a number of books that challenge writers and would-be writers to use words and the craft in all sorts of interesting, original ways.

But in Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home, Goldberg explores her path through healing from cancer – both for herself, as well as her partner Yu-kwan, who is also diagnosed with the disease. How to go on from that – how to find the strength and courage to face this disease head-on when both you and your loved one are diagnosed? This is partly what this fascinating memoir is about – as well as Goldberg’s very personal journey through being ill. There’s humour, and there’s anger; there’s getting lost within the medical system, there’s flying across country to meet new doctors. And through it all there is also Goldberg’s life-long Zen practice – and this too helps her get through the onslaught of weakness and medical treatments: “Cancer demanded that I let the whole thundering world come home, that I accept the horror and unknown of human life— and death. Zen taught that, too, but I was not ready to receive it.”

But receive she had to. And cancer became a teacher too: “Cancer was teaching me how to carve out and live in a small space. I had to narrow my vision to stay on top of the drugs, the appointments, the weird changes in my body. The world shrunk to what was in front of me, to my immediate needs. Zen all along was trying to teach me to pay attention: this single sip from this cup of green tea— green tea was supposed to be a cancer preventative. This button on my shirt— unbutton it, it’s too hot. Even the screech of car brakes out the window— this, too. I’m still alive.”

And cancer also forces her to think back over her life – to think back to her parents, and growing up and the differences between her mother and father. Cancer pushes her to the brink of hell – a hell that her partner shares. But a hell they cannot share together: “It felt as though we were carrying heavy sacks on our backs and had trouble moving toward each other. Time itself became awkward. …I leaned over and kissed her, but it had such a different resonance than it did before. Instead of passion, I could hear way in the distance the low sound of a bell tolling.”

But this story of a battle with disease, and a kind of thrashing toward survival is both compelling, fascinating as well as horrifying. The best kind of memoir there is – highly recommended.

If you love Natalie Goldberg, you'll love this memoir. If you find it difficult to read memoirs focused on illness, read this one anyway. Inspiring, raw, and enlightening.

An amazing memoir that demonstrated how a positive attitude can have an impact on cancer. I love how the author used the title of this book throughout it.