I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (novel)

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For other uses, see I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Author Joanne Greenberg
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Autobiographical novel
Publication date 1964
ISBN NA

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is an autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, written under the pen name of Hannah Green. It was made into a film in 1977 and a play in 2004. Neither the novel nor the film or play should be confused with "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden", the Joe South song, most famously recorded by Lynn Anderson in 1970.

[edit] Plot summary

Rejected by peers and to a certain extent by her family, victimised by anti-Semitism, and traumatized by painful surgery for a tumor of the urethra in early childhood, Deborah Blau is a highly intelligent and sensitive girl who perceives reality as innately cruel. At approximately age nine, during her third summercamp, she creates the Kingdom of Yr, an alternative dimensional world where she is respected as a queen. It has a language of its own called Yri, which may or may not be based on scraps of other languages Deborah heard from her multilingual family. It is rich in metaphor and poetic imagery, with place names like "the Plains of Tai'a" and "the Canyons of the Sorrow".

In its purest form, Yr is an ancient kingdom of awesome beauty. Eagles soar over mountain ranges overlooking plains and valleys where wild horses graze. Deborah has several names there, but is most often referred to as "Bird-one"; she can shapeshift there and become a wild horse or a bird. Because she sometimes slips and speaks or writes Yri words in school or other everyday situations, there is a figure called the Censor who guards her speech and actions so that she can travel in Yr while maintaining a semblance of normality in the real world. The gods of Yr described in the book are Anterrabae, who perpetually falls in a shower of fire; Lactamaeon, a black man on a black horse; and Idat, a rarely seen, androgynous figure known as the Dissembler.

Over time, Deborah is removed from anti-Semitic environments and moves to a large city where Jews are accepted. As she matures and earth world pressures ease up on her, such that at sixteen she actually has friends and is doing well, she finds her loyalties divided, but is unwilling to put Yr behind her. She holds onto it more firmly than ever, such that its hold on her becomes tyrannical. In her perspective, it's the gods who will not let her go. She begins to suffer much more from their cruelty than in her daily life, but she's afraid that she is too different from ordinary people, that the earth world is still not a good place for her and will ultimately destroy her if she tries to exist there without Yr to retreat to when things go wrong. In addition, it's no childish fantasy to her; it is a homeland, the birthplace of her soul. It is at this point that she enters a private hospital for the insane, and begins therapy with an insightful female psychiatrist.

The doctor in the novel is based closely on Greenberg's real doctor, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Deborah's hospital is Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. In writing the novel, Greenberg changed names and places, of course; but she also changed the names of the Gods (Yr was Iria, and Anterrabae was originally Antilobia, for instance), and so the words of the Yri language given in the book may not be the true Irian speech. Some of Greenberg's doctors at Chestnut Lodge felt that she had made up Iria on the spot to impress Fromm-Reichmann, who wrote glowing reports focusing on Greenberg's genius and creativity. Fromm-Reichmann saw these qualities as signs of Greenberg's innate health, indicating that she had every chance of recovering from her mental illness.

In both real life and in the novel, Greenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia; however, this word was used at the time to describe any thought disorder. In fact, undifferentiated schizophrenia was a trashcan diagnosis which could cover anything from anxiety or depression to simple homesickness. A 1981 article in the New York Times cites two psychiatrists who examined Greenberg's self-description in the book and concluded that she was not schizophrenic, but suffered from extreme depression and somatization disorder. [1] In a recent interview on public radio, Greenberg states that subsequent to the brain surgery, her vision literally went "grey and flat", and stayed that way for many years. She still reports difficulty with depression, but says she can alleviate it with activity.

At the novel's end, understanding that acceptance by other people is not impossible, discovering that she can find beauty in the real world, and after a long period of therapy with Dr. Fried, Deborah gradually pulls herself away from the Kingdom of Yr and eventually makes a full return to the world of reality.

In the novel, Deborah's doctor, Dr. Fried plays a major role of her recover. Dr. Fried was the first to acknowledge that Deborah was sick, which brought the possibility of her recovery. At the same time Dr. Fried made it clear to Deborah that only she can cure herself, with the doctor’s help. Also Dr. Fried was the first to tell the truth to Deborah and encouraged her family to always tell the truth to her; as everybody was lying to her before, even her family.

During the Deborah’s straggler to get better, with lots of set backs, she was reminded by Dr. Fried, by saying “I never promised you a rose garden.”

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