One of the core beliefs in first-time author Cynthia Bond's best-selling novel Ruby is that it is possible to heal from nearly anything. As an adult, Bond says she was flooded with painful memories of sexual abuse from her childhood. It was in a writing class that she found solace, and eventually, the idea for Ruby -- a story about a beautiful girl born into a life of devastating violence. The deeply soulful story caught the attention of Oprah, who chose Ruby as her latest Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection and sat down with Bond on "Super Soul Sunday" to discuss how she was able to finally work through her personal pain through fictional writing.
"It is the reason I am here," Bond says about writing. "At times, I felt that my mind, my spirit, all of it was like a fine gold necklace, and it was tangled. It was too tangled to ever parse apart. I never saw how I was going to be able to do that. But I wrote. I just wrote."
Regardless of whether you want to make writing a career, Bond believes that putting the story of your life on a page can be cathartic and therapeutic for anyone. She has witnessed it firsthand over a period of years teaching writing classes to homeless and at-risk youth throughout Los Angeles. Once the words are on the page, she says, negative thoughts can leave your body.
"That's why writing in a journal helps if you're not interested in being an author or a novelist," Oprah says.
"And that's why the young people I've worked with for so many years, very few of them have dreams of publishing a book," Bond adds. "But once they put it on the page, they are able to identify their life and see their lives."
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