It’s safe to say that “Grit & Grace” was a long time coming.
To start, author Deborah Rudell spent nearly 20 years writing her debut memoir. There’s also the fact that the book itself covers more than 30 years of Rudell’s life, with most of it taking place in the 1980s and early ’90s. And on top of all that, Rudell had to write about a time in her life that most readers would consider to be traumatizing and dangerous, treacherous and healing.
“Honestly, I thought my life was normal and then I’d read a piece at a writer’s group and everyone at the table would be like, ‘wait, you what?’” Rudell says, laughing from her self-described “funky writer’s retreat” of a home near Normal Heights. “I quickly realized that maybe this isn’t everyone’s experience, and maybe it would be a good idea to share that.”
Much of “Grit & Grace: The Transformation of a Ship & a Soul,” which was published Feb. 27, covers Rudell’s time in the Rajneeshpuram commune, a religious community on the Big Muddy Ranch in Oregon.
The people on that ranch followed the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru who emphasized, among other things, intense meditation and yoga sessions, intentional living, and free love practices that ultimately became problematic for many of the followers. As the cult implodes — its leaders arrested and charged with crimes such as attempted murder and bioterrorism, among other allegations — Rudell escapes to Kauai, Hawaii, where she has to come to grips with her time in the commune.
“There were some difficult parts to write for sure, and the reader can probably guess what those are,” Rudell explains.
Still, readers expecting a salacious tell-all about commune living should likely look elsewhere. Yes, there are tense s of her time at the the ranch, but most of the memoir takes places shortly after Rudell leaves the commune and begins what can only be described as a years-long healing journey in Hawaii, where, throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, she and her family rebuild a dilapidated 50-foot schooner boat and, eventually, sail it across the Pacific Ocean to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
“I didn’t want to write a book about being a disillusioned Sannyasin,” says Rudell, referring to the anti-materialism, Hindu-based teachings emphasized by the Rajneeshpuram commune. “That wasn’t my story. It also wasn’t my story to just write a book about rebuilding a boat and sailing across the ocean. What started to come out was that there was this inner world and how was I going to structure it. Rather than telling my reader, I was trying to have them be there with me.”
Rudell could have easily begun her story with any number of the personal reflections and gripping s of commune living. Instead, she begins the book shortly after leaving Hawaii with a particularly harrowing story of her attempting to navigate the restored boat through a treacherous gale. Like many who have had a near-death experience, she begins to take personal inventory within this , adeptly flashing back to her time at the commune and wondering if she truly had lived a meaningful life.
It becomes clear to the reader in this moment, that this isn’t simply a memoir about sailing and shipbuilding, nor is it an embittered personal of surviving religious dogma. Rather, it’s a story about survival and what it means to let go of the past and set course, both literally and spiritually, into calmer waters.
“I think that was probably the most dramatic thing that happened to me, because I thought I was going to die,” Rudell says now, reflecting on the gale that almost capsized her boat. She adds that she ultimately stuck with the gale age because it was the first thing she wrote when a friend first suggested in 2009 that Rudell should write about her life.
“I think one of the driving things was that a lot of my friends, and just people in general, they live their lives and they have regrets, and they’re also blaming something,” Rudell says. “By doing that, it’s a huge bondage. There’s no freedom there. I learned through going through these experiences that freedom comes from inside. Freedom comes from taking responsibility.”
For many memoir writers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of presenting their lives to the reader as coming from a place of regret, rather than introspection. And while there are many harrowing reflections in “Grit & Grace,” Rudell does well to present her story without self-judgment or boastfulness. She moved to San Diego in the early 2000s and credits the city, and especially the local writing community, for giving her the strength and encouragement to finally tell the stories that make up her memoir.
“As time goes by, we get wiser and we do introspect about what went on in our life and what was the point,” says Rudell, who also works as a professor at Southwestern College. “I started having much more appreciation for these adventures that I was able to experience.”
“I want readers to know that, no matter what they want to do, no matter how crazy it is or how impossible it seems, that they know that they can do it,” she continues. “This is just an example of how someone else did it.”
