Psychology Taught Me How to Tell Real Stories

One of the best things about my Northwestern experience was being surrounded by smart, talented peers. One of the worst things about my Northwestern experience was being surrounded by smart, talented peers. 

Fall 2002: At the start of my junior year, I sat down for my first class with the 14 other fiction-writing majors who’d been accepted into the creative writing program that year, feeling pretty full of myself. Despite having learned English as a second language, I’d earned a spot in this competitive major. I figured my book deal would arrive soon enough. 

My fellow writing majors quickly disabused me of this notion, not through any malevolence on their part but simply through their skill. Week after week, I read their stories and marveled at how fully formed some of them felt as writers. Several would go on to publish books. One would go on to win a MacArthur “genius grant” and have her work short-listed for the National Book Award. 

How are they so good? What are they doing that I’m not? I would turn these questions over in my mind as I tried to sleep. I knew I was missing something as a writer, but I didn’t know what. 

Spring 2003: I accepted that no book deal was forthcoming. One of my fundamental flaws, I realized, was that I didn’t understand people very well. My characters were all thinly veiled versions of myself, and let’s be honest: You can pen only so many stories about disaffected young adults before tearing your own hair out. Though the program had done a tremendous job teaching me how to write (shoutout to professors Reginald Gibbons, Sheila Donohue and Brian Bouldrey ’85), it couldn’t teach me what to write. Only life can teach you that. 

So I pivoted. I enrolled in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. After graduating spent the next 15 years working as a psychologist in private practice, occasionally popping out of my office to teach future therapists in my capacity as an adjunct professor. 

By the time I went back to school for an MFA, I’d noticed a change. Years of talking with people about the most human of problems — and years of living through those same problems — had transformed my stories. What is life if not grief, love, lost love, jealousy, ambition, illness, faith, lost faith and transcendence? I’m not talking about singing other people’s lyrics here. I’m talking about the melodies all of us come to learn just by being alive, the moments of connection that arise when you’re singing your song and another person starts to hum along. 

That’s why I never know what to say when someone asks me, “What do you write about?” I write about the strangeness of being alive. Whether my main character is a child in rural Taiwan meeting missionaries for the first time or a futuristic cyborg losing her memories as a metaphor for dementia or a 19th-century “pirate queen” struggling to survive during a time of economic precarity, I’m interested in the stories that bind us together across time and space. Do I still write about disaffected young adults now and then? Sure, but from the vantage point of someone decades older who has learned just how much more she had yet to learn. 

Rita Chang-Eppig is an author and clinical psychologist based in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, was published in 2023.