Readers of Jeanne Malmgren’s engaging memoir, Good Eye, Bad Eye, will find the universal themes and the clarity of her writing style appealing. From her personal story of trauma following a childhood eye injury, life truths emerge as Jeanne struggles to find her way in the world. This is not another poor-pitiful-me memoir. Instead, it is a story of growth, of strength. A story of finding inner peace.
Jeanne’s tale begins in South Carolina, where her father worked in the textile industry. When Jeanne was two years old, her mother left a knife used to peel potatoes on the countertop. She turned her back for an instant, and baby Jeanne picked up the knife and stabbed herself in the eye. Considerable time in the memoir is devoted to her parents’ tortured efforts to try to save the vision in the injured eye, shuttling her from one specialist to another. Mothers will immediately understand the enormous guilt Jeanne’s mother feels, guilt that motivates her to lie to nearly everyone about the accident’s cause.
Jeanne’s life is irrevocably changed by the disfigured eye:
“From then on, and for the rest of my life, I would have a ‘good eye’ and a ‘bad eye.’
There’s the good eye, which behaves beautifully, drawing no attention to itself, looking just as pretty as anyone else’s. Then there’s the bad eye, a misbehaving, disfigured mess that turned me into a cyclops. It separated me, permanently, from normalcy. . . .
I was flooded with shame and self-loathing, long before I had the words to name those feelings.”
In her home, her injured eye became a taboo subject. Her family showered her with love and ignored her injury, even as the eye shriveled in the socket over time. Eventually, she was fitted with a prosthetic eye, but she remained self-conscious about her appearance, worried that the prosthetic didn’t look natural enough and people were staring at it. However, she heaps praise on the ocular doctors who created the prosthetics, which had to be replaced periodically.
As she grew up, Jeanne found solace in nature, in writing, and in spirituality—but finding peace was a long and winding journey. It was difficult to find love because she didn’t feel she deserved it as “a defective person.” Yet after a failed first romance, she tried again:
“The human impulse to pair off, to find a life partner, is deeply embedded in us. Even after heartbreak we press on against all odds, in search of the person who will be by our side. We are a species that seems to need another. . . .
For many people with disabilities, that search is even more intense. I cannot speak for everyone who lives with a disability, but I think I can say this with some confidence: We crave not only love, but also confirmation that our defect doesn’t disqualify us from this most basic human need. We long for a partner who will love us enough to prove our worthiness.”
Truisms like this lend Jeanne’s memoir far more significance than simply the story of one person’s struggle. All humans have defects of some sort and all of us long to be considered “normal” and loveable.
Jeanne’s successes are inspiring. As a journalist she covered fascinating people like Timothy Leary, Jesse Ventura, and David Attenborough. When newspapers began to shrink and disappear, she went back to school and built a second career as a psychotherapist. She worked in women’s domestic shelters, as a hospice grief counselor, and at a university campus health center, later establishing herself in private practice. Yet as interesting as Jeanne’s career path is, her spiritual path is every bit as inspiring. She becomes a Buddhist, meditating and focusing “on the inner landscape.” She studies the source of suffering so universal to the human condition: “ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows.”
All too often memoirs seem to be written to throw shade on the truth, to hide the memoirist’s dark side. Jeanne’s remarkable story instead throws light not only onto her own journey, but her story also illuminates a possible path for each of us to examine our own joys and sorrows.
Jeanne Malmgren
Jeanne Malmgren was born in South Carolina and lived many places before returning home to the Blue Ridge Mountains twenty years ago. She holds two degrees from Clemson University: a B.A. in Modern Languages and an M.Ed. in Clinical Mental Health. During her first career of journalism, she worked as an Associate Editor at The Mother Earth News magazine, then spent twenty years as a feature writer and editor at Florida’s largest newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times.
Jeanne is a longtime Buddhist and co-founded a meditation center in Florida. She co-authored Journey to Mindfulness, the autobiography of her spiritual teacher, the eminent meditation master Venerable H. Gunaratana. She now has a private practice of psychotherapy where she specializes in mindfulness- and nature-based treatment. You can subscribe to her free newsletter here.
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