Writing and the Creative Life: The incurable disease of writing

“In psychological terms, it seems that drive is more important than talent in producing creative work.”

This is one of the most fascinating interviews I’ve read in a long time. It’s subtitled “A neurologist considers the compulsions and frustrations of literary creativity.” The neurologist in question is Dr. Alice Flaherty, director of the movement disorders fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. And her story is quite a personal as well as professional one:

In 1998, a month after completing her residency, Alice Flaherty ’94 gave premature birth to twin boys. One baby did not survive the complicated delivery and the other died soon after, clutching his mother with a hand so tiny it barely encircled her finger. For ten days, Flaherty grieved. But then suddenly, she says, “The sun and the moon switched positions.” For the next four months, in a rare postpartum mania, Flaherty experienced her first episode of hypergraphia — the medical term for an overpowering desire to write. She wrote everywhere, all the time: on her left arm as she gripped the steering wheel of her car, on squares of toilet paper in public bathrooms, on Post-it notes in the middle of the night.

As a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Flaherty was able to diagnose herself — and to put her symptoms to good use. Within a year she had completed her first book, “The Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of…