Page 15 - July Aug 2022 Newsletter Final_Neat

On Writing Fiction
Henry Massie, MD

Feb. 25, 2022
How did I segue from being an adult and child psychiatrist into writing fiction? It
began decades ago with my admiration and envy of jazz pianists’ wonderful ability to
improvise at the keyboard. I took some piano lessons and I was a dismal failure, so I
decided that in my next life I would be reborn as a jazz pianist. But then about two
decades ago I sat down at the computer keyboard and lo-and-behold I found that I
could fluently improvise stories about people complete with dialogue. I was hooked;
all I needed were plots. My first novel was the fictionalization of a case in which I was
an expert witness: a young group-home psychiatric patient, a woman, is found dead in the woods of unknown
causes, even after autopsy. However the novel was very flawed and I simply trashed it because I wasn’t
interested in it enough to take it into a second draft.
But I am jumping ahead because the roots of my writing predate the desire to improvise at the piano. They
started with my parents’ powerful role-modeling: My father was a cardiology professor who wrote the first
textbook on electrocardiography (EKGs) in the 1950s. I watched the stacks of paper accumulate slowly on his
broad desk, each one a chapter. My mother was a spirited lecturer in abstract expressionist art at Washington
University in St. Louis. Our walls were filled with art and as a child I thought she was in love with the artists she
collected. To create was to be loved. In my professional career from 1975 to 2020, I mixed research in child
development and autism, professional writing, and clinical practice—an amalgam of the influences with which I
grew up.

In about 2010, I heard the rumors of a psychiatrist whose father had been Marilyn Monroe’s last psychiatrist
before her death in 1962. To try to save her from anxiety and substance abuse the doctor more-or-less invited
Marilyn into his home (a boundary violation, it could be said) to give the foster-care-raised actress a family she
never had. According to the rumors, the son took Marilyn to his senior prom. Decades later, now an eminent
psychiatrist himself, the son committed a sexual boundary violation with a patient who reminded him of
Marilyn. The patient sued him and the doctor lost his license.

That story was all I needed for building the plot for my second novel, The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom,
Archway Publishing, 2021 (available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble). That is to say, the story is the
fictionalization of a rumor and Hollywood history. In it the contemporary psychiatrist, his patient, and Marilyn
Monroe all are beset with unhealed emotional wounds inflicted in different ways. After the third draft I was
satisfied by what I had created. When the revues started coming I saw that I had succeeded and I was thrilled.
The reviews best describe the book: “…mesmerizing…poignantly melancholic, and psychologically
sophisticated…a sensitive exploration of the effects of unreconciled sadness.” Kirkus Reviews. “A thought-
provoking reflection on the dark side of glamour…” Midwest Book Review
I have now started my third novel which is about the search for a real painting that is now really missing—
Scudera, by Franz Kline, a monument of mid-Century abstract expressionism. I have made up a fictional
granddaughter of Franz Kline who needs to find the work of art to heal the loss of her family. To help her she
has enlisted the defense lawyer and his artist wife from The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom. Scudera was
my mother’s favorite painting.
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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA PSYCHIATRIC SOCIETY Page 15 July/August 2022