The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WITH ORANGE LEAVES STILL CLINGING to branches in that unusually mild stretch of late fall, on a sweet street in quiet St. Paul, I was..." (more)
Key Phrases: Uncle Sam, Zen Center, New Mexico (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Of course, we are drawn to teachers that unconsciously mirror our own psychology," writes Goldberg in a memoir about her wrestling match with her particular devil. In Writing Down the Bones, she coupled writing with the insights of Zen Buddhism, showing writers how to use a stream of consciousness approach to move through blocks and understand their true experience. Here, however, as Goldberg explores the link between her elegant Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, and the gritty, charming bartender father who sexually violated her, she inadvertently demonstrates this approach's shortcoming. Years after his death, Goldberg learned that Katagiri, the teacher who taught her so much (and the subject of Long Quiet Highway), carried on affairs with female students. Goldberg was shattered; she'd wanted to believe he was an immaculate refuge. Liberation through disillusionment is a universal and durable theme, yet as Goldberg muses and tells stories—splicing in a long Zen tale for a little extra-dimensional oomph—her account closes rather than opens up. In spite of her fluid writing and honesty, the work feels insular and self-cherishing, like personal notes rather than a compelling narrative for the rest of us. Many readers will conclude that this is a not-so-great failure after all, or perhaps a heartache that hasn't really healed.
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From Booklist

Goldberg is renowned for Writing Down the Bones (1989), a book that inspired millions of people to express themselves through writing. Also known for her study and practice of Zen Buddhism, described in Long Quiet Highway (1993), Goldberg has taken readers time and again into her world of raw feeling, real experience, and broad awareness. In her new memoir, Goldberg seeks to reconcile misconceptions about her long-time Zen teacher and entangled feelings of love and anger for her father with truths she has discovered. Readers looking for writing advice, even by example, may be disappointed. Goldberg's writing is straightforward and utilitarian, and her mission is personal as she tries to come to grips with two influential figures in her life. What readers are most likely to appreciate and to learn from is her dogged determination to get at the truth and to come clean about personal failings. This is the path toward better understanding, a road Goldberg has unwaveringly navigated throughout her writing life. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (August 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060733993
• ISBN-13: 978-0060733995
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #892,924 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new direction for this author, October 29, 2004

By	Dr Cathy Goodwin (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book differs in subject and style from Natalie Goldberg's previous books. Here she writes of feeling betrayred by two father figures, her natural father and her Buddhist teacher Katagiri Roshi, the bartender and the monk of the subtitle. Attending an abuse group, she begins to remember episodes from her childhood and she wants her family to acknowledge how they harmed her.



Without sparing herself, and with a hint of irony, Goldberg writes of confronting her parents by letter. They react with almost comic bewilderment. Goldberg's mother, Sylvia, a child of immigrants, views the world literally: did you eat and sleep? Were you warm? Her father, Buddy, ran a "rough" bar for years. His response to Goldberg's accusations was, "Were you on drugs?" Psychology, the author summarizes, was developed in a country outside Brooklyn.

Even after the family reconciles - which means she begins speaking to them after three years - Goldberg's parents still don't understand her new life. When Goldberg offers to give them a Zen experience, her father begins singing along with the silence bell. In one of their last visits, Buddy whispers an insulting remark about Natalie's weight.

The author gets her second shock, as word spreads about Katagiri Roshi's numerous love affairs with Zen students. She begins to remember episodes she'd tried to ignore. She recalls Roshi's remarks about her beauty. And ultimately she recognizes that Roshi gave her a tremendous gift, regardless of his personal life. She writes (page 136) that both artists and religious leaders can be "enlightened" in their work, yet function "cruelly and ignorantly" in their personal lives.

Toward the end of Great Failure, Natalie writes about crashing her car while fiddling with knobs on her tape deck. She adds, almost casually, that she'd been given "two or three" speeding tickets in the past six months, including one where the police actually chased her down. These episodes were disturbing.

She realizes she's acting out rather dangerously, and she realizes she's in an in-between phase, losing Roshi but not finding another touchstone. She doesn't judge herself, just reports, and in fact people often do behave in unusual, even bizarre ways when they're in the eye of the transitional hurricane.

I think the key to this book is Natalie's wish to be remembered like her heroes, not just as a writer, but as someone who dealt with loneliness and made mistakes. Because she tells these stories about herself, that's exactly how she will be remembered.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A strange memoir, December 4, 2005

By	S. D Temple "SDTemple" (Iowa City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Great Failure : A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Hardcover)

The oddest and most disturbing memoir of abuse is perhaps Kathryn Harrison's book "The Kiss", about her sexual relationship with her father, a relationship that extended into adulthood. In contrast, Natalie Goldberg's book is odd precisely because it is difficult to figure out who did what harm to her, despite the fact that the book is packaged in the language of sexual expoitation. That her father could be boorish, insensitive, unattuned to his daughter's needs, and at times frightening, is not in doubt. Whatever sexual doubts and insecurities the author harbored, were only amplified by his grossly unattuned parenting of her. And while the author takes pains to document allegations that her beloved Zen teacher, the renowned Dainin Katagiri Roshi, she states that he never sexually expoited her. To be sure, both men disappointed her. And this seems to be the crux of the memoir. It is really a lament about disillusionment, important people in the author's life who were flawed and imperfect, despite her emotional needs that they be otherwise.

To her credit, Natalie Goldberg is a fine writer, who manages to put her own frailties on the page for the reader's scrutiny. She deserves credit for this. The book will lead readers to question our own assumptions about teachers, about parents, and about the failure of those important people in our lives to be 'perfect'. Goldberg doesn't provide any neat and tidy epiphanies here. But in a sad and loving tribute to her teacher, she leaves the best lines about this matater for Katagiri, himself. In response to a question from a student, asking if "it's okay to just listen to yourself?", Katagiri responds: "Ed, I tried very hard to practice Dogen's Zen. After twenty years I realized there was no Dogen's Zen." Dogen was the 13th Century Zen monk who founded Katagiri's sect, and Katagiri seems to be saying that real spiritual growth involves taking responsibility for our own growth, and freeing ourselves from the grip of childlike fantasies of perfection. This by no means excuses expoitive misconduct by spiritual teachers or, for that matter, parents. It does mean that if, at least in adulthood, we know it's "okay to listen to yourself", the teacher's power to harm is diminished. While there is no sign the author has quite learned this lesson, she at least understands it well enough to make it available to the reader.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Poignant and Insightful, April 4, 2006

By	Katherine Masis - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Failure : A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Hardcover)

Idealization of spiritual teachers can be so strong that news of their ethical misconduct is just as shocking after their death as while they are alive. In her latest book, The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Harper San Francisco, 2004) Natalie Goldberg poignantly reveals her dismay and disappointment at finding out, several years after his death, that Katagiri Roshi, her Zen teacher, had slept with some of his female students. Similarly, Goldberg shares her dismay at finding out about her father's extramarital affair after his death.

Psychotherapists, doctors, school teachers, college professors, and supervisors at work may represent parental figures from the past to their clients, patients, students or employees. These relationships may evoke yearnings and expectations in clients, patients, students or employees that may or may not be met. "I needed to be reflected in another," Goldberg admits (p. 101). This is what Freud had called "transference," and the relationships between spiritual teachers and their students are fraught with potential for sticky transferences that may become very difficult to work through-especially since they are rarely, if at all, acknowledged or commented on in the spiritual teacher-student relationship. "Unknowingly, Roshi became my mother, my father, my Zen master" (p. 102).

Not only do spiritual teachers represent parental figures for their students-in a very real sense, they represent, for want of a better term, the Divine. For example, Zen students may believe that their Zen teachers are deeply enlightened individuals who, because of their many years of meditation and training, and because of the authority vested in them by virtue of ceremonies that sanction the transmission of the Buddha's teachings, are infallible spiritual heroes. "I had made him [Katagiri Roshi] perfect," Goldberg confesses. "Because of my family abuse, I was driven to get what I had longed for in my family" (p. 101). "He spoke to me evenly, honestly. My hunger was satiated-the ignored little girl still inside me and the adult seeker-both were nourished" (p. 118).

As Goldberg looks back on her six years as Katagiri Roshi's student, she identifies moments when her idealization was weakened:

"I had a glimmer then of the chasm between the Zen master and the lonely, insecure man. That moment was an opportunity to hold contradictory parts of him, to understand life doesn't work in a neat package the way I wanted it to. I could have come closer to his humanity-and mine. But I wasn't ready or willing. I had a need for him only to be great, to hold my projections. In freezing him on a pedestal I had only contributed to his isolation" (p. 115).

As a former Zen student of fifteen years (eleven under the direction of one teacher), I recall how I, too, needed my former teacher to "be great." Would I have idealized her less if my own personal needs had been less, or if I had acquired enough perspective of how the Zen institution had contributed to mythmaking through the centuries? Goldberg was fortunate to have that glimmer. Was Goldberg an unusually perceptive student, or did her Zen teacher allow himself to be revealed in some ways, however small? Many Zen teachers in the west seem to do everything possible to avoid being seen as real people: they put on a façade that is impossible to live up to, or hide behind their role, or discourage reading and study about Zen-a necessary element for placing the Zen institution and the teachers who represent it in an appropriate historical and cultural context.

Sooner or later, façades come tumbling down, hypocrisy and secrets reveal themselves. One would expect that long-term idealization would come to an end, or at least be compromised. "Eventually, as the teacher-student relationship matures, the student manifests these [projected spiritual] qualities herself and learns to stand on her own two feet. The projections are reclaimed. . . . We close the gap between who we think the teacher is and who we think we are not. We become whole" (p. 91).

One would hope. Goldberg describes the best-case scenario, and rightfully points out the student's role in growing up spiritually. But spiritual teachers themselves have a part to play as well. If Zen teachers are savvy enough, their relationships with their students will become more down to earth and horizontal-and not just regarding the meditation practice itself. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Many longstanding western Zen students are unable to reclaim their projections, precisely because their Zen teachers, threatened by such reclaiming, do not foster it and cling to authoritarian, top-down ways of relating to their students.

Goldberg describes her struggles with deep loneliness and lack of a sense of purpose after losing her Zen teacher and her father. Years after the death of Katagiri Roshi, Goldberg realizes that the "regimented practice" of formal Zen meditation no longer fit her (p. 97). Goldberg goes on to share her ongoing process of making peace with her Zen teacher's and her father's past in her journey toward writing as spiritual practice.

Although at times Goldberg leans a bit too heavily on the individual student's role in idealization and subsequent disappointment in Zen teachers, The Great Failure offers solid insights into the often problematic transferences that develop in students with respect to their spiritual teachers. Written with honesty and sensitivity, this book is recommended reading for anyone who has ever left a spiritual teacher for any reason, and for those who wish to understand the nature of the relationships between spiritual teachers and their students.