Author Bio
I'm sitting here at the computer in my wife's office in our home in suburban Boston. It's the end of January, 2006. In two months my new book It's (Mostly) His Fault will be published, so there's an air of anticipation around here. It's a book about how to become a good husband. My wife Jane just ran into the room for a second to get something, and I asked her what I should say about myself in this biography. She said, "Say that you're a great guy and a good husband!" and then ran out.
I was born on December 23, 1945 to Sylvia and Jack Alter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second of two children. My father owned a small furniture store in Boston, my mother was a homemaker. When I was three, we moved to a suburb of Boston, where I grew up on the top floor of a two-family house and attended the public schools. I did well in school, and liked it. I was also a good athlete, and spent most of my boyhood on baseball fields and basketball courts and frozen ponds, playing football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with my friends-glory days!--as the seasons revolved. It was on those playing fields that I learned the voice that we males speak to each other in-boy to boy, man to man-a voice that men will listen to--and it's the voice I speak to husbands in in my therapy office, and the voice I wrote It's (Mostly) His Fault in.
I graduated from high school in 1963, and went to Cornell University as a chemistry major because I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then the sixties fell on my head. Folk music, rock and roll, Dylan (The Freewheeling), Vietnam, demonstrations, drugs, more Dylan (Blonde on Blonde)-and before I knew it I wasn't a chemistry major anymore and didn't want to be a veterinarian, I was an English major and didn't have a clue what I wanted to be. I enjoyed reading great writers-Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, Thoreau-and decided I wanted to be a great writer. I spent my college years writing opinion pieces for the Cornell Daily Sun, short stories, and bad poems.
In the fall of my senior year, I was walking across campus and saw a girl in a pink turtleneck sweater sitting on a low stone wall, gazing down. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. Waves of long blond hair around a quiet, oval face. Straight out of a Botticelli painting. I heard a voice say inside my head, "Someday I'm going to marry that girl." That was Jane.
I graduated Cornell in 1967 and went to graduate school at Brandeis University to study literature. Jane (who was still at Cornell) and I found ourselves sitting next to each other on the steps of the Pentagon the night of the March on the Pentagon in October, 1967, and we talked while I rubbed her cold feet. I got my masters degree in 1968, and spent the next two years teaching writing to Brandeis freshmen. In 1970 Jane graduated Cornell and came to live with me outside of Boston. In 1971 we bought a blue Ford van and headed to the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts, where for the next five years we lived a country life. Jane started and ran a daycare center in Great Barrington, met with her women's group, gardened. I worked for a local farmer, got good with a chainsaw, drove a forklift in a plastics factory, ran a drop-in and counseling center for local teens, played hockey in a men's league. In the fall of 1972 we got married in the field behind Molly's barn. Our daughter Greta was born the next summer. We loved being parents. I was still listening to Dylan (Blood on the Tracks), and still wanted to be a great writer, and was still writing essays and short stories and bad poems, except for two poems I wrote about Greta that were good.
In 1976 we moved to Spring Hill, a conference center high on a hill in a small town fifty miles west of Boston, where a group of new-age, spiritually-minded psychotherapists from Boston were putting on nationally known weekend workshops called Opening the Heart. After training in the Heart-Centered Method of counseling, Jane and I joined the staff of the Opening the Heart workshops, and for the next seven years spent our weekends helping participants open to their childhood wounds, their feelings, their inner wisdom, their spirituality. I got good at making therapeutic interventions with people. I particularly liked the Heart Workshops for Couples, helping partners open to each other. After the workshops individuals and couples would call me and ask if they could do therapy with me. I was not a traditionally trained therapist-the training and experience I had was all at Spring Hill-but I took these people's confidence in me as a sign that I was supposed to do this work, and people started coming to me for therapy. That's how I became a psychotherapist. Soon I had a thriving practice. From 1982 to 1985 Jane and I were clinical co-directors of the Opening the Heart workshops.
In the meantime I was refereeing hockey games for the local youth leagues, teaching English at nights in the adult education program at a local community college, still listening to Dylan (Slow Train Coming), and still writing. After submitting an article to the magazine Mothering, I was asked to become a contributing editor and write pieces about fathering. My column was called "A Father." In 1981 I published my first book, The No-Nibbling Book: 128 Things to Remember Or Do at the Refrigerator Door So You Won't Open It: A Guide for All Compulsives, Addicts, and Other People Out of Control (Putnam, 1981).
It was also in 1981 that Jane and I met the Siddha Yoga meditation master, Baba Muktananda, and became students of Siddha Yoga meditation. When Baba passed away in 1982, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda became the meditation master. We often went to her ashram in the Catskill Mountains of New York to study the Siddha Yoga path, and spent many summers there with Greta. Jane and I both meditate every day, and Jane is now a Siddha Yoga meditation teacher.
In 1986 we moved back to the Boston area. We bought a house in 1988, and I set up a home office for therapy. My practice kept growing, and before I knew it I was seeing 35-40 people a week. In 1992 I was approved by the state of Massachusetts as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. Jane went back to school and received her Masters degree in social work and became the associate clinical director at Harvard Medical School's Families and Addiction program. Greta went to high school, hung out with her friends, wore Benneton sweaters and Swatch watches, listened to Phil Collins, Madonna, and Wham. Jane was listening to Bette Midler and Bonnie Raitt. I was still listening to Dylan (Oh, Mercy).
In 1991 Greta went off to college to study psychology. While maintaining my fulltime therapy practice, I started writing my second book, How Long Till My Soul Gets It Right?: 100 Doorways on the Journey to Happiness. It's a collection of all the things I say to clients during the course of a long-term therapy with me, the fruit of twenty-five years of seeing individuals and couples. There are chapters on childhood, feelings, addictions, meditation, marriage, and the psychological-spiritual inner journey. It took me nine years and countless drafts to write, and it was published in 2001 (ReganBooks).
Now it's 2006, and Jane is still working at Harvard and I'm still a psychotherapist, helping people have happier marriages and happier lives, especially enjoying helping men open up in love and connection to their wives. Our daughter Greta is now a doctor of psychology, married to a wonderful man, and they have two daughters of their own. They live nearby, and we see them a lot and help out with the kids a lot. There may be better things on this earth than grandparenting, but if so, I don't know what they are.
I turned sixty in December. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I have discovered that if you say "sixty" real fast and kind of slur it, it sounds like "sixteen."
It's (Mostly) His Fault is about to be published. Jane says in her Foreword to it, "I think Robert's whole life has been leading to the writing of this book," and she's right, because it's about how to become a good husband, and after thirty-five years of marriage, I've become one. I'm proud of that, and proud that I've helped hundreds of other men become good husbands too. I'm still here at the computer in Jane's office, still writing, still wanting to be a great writer. On the stereo Dylan is still playing (Self-Portrait).