The “Broken” Memories of Brandi Carlile (festschrift article)

For more than 40 years, psychologists have been indebted to William McKinley (“Mac”) Runyan for modeling an interpretative approach to psychobiography in his 1982 work, Life Histories and Psychobiographies. Runyan’s work reaffirmed that conducting a theory-based qualitative analysis to examine a given individual’s life can be a legitimate and informative scientific enterprise. In this spirit, we offer the following study of the influential singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile. Carlile, winner of multiple Grammy Awards and admired for her LGBT+ advocacy, published a best-selling memoir, Broken Horses, in 2021. “Broken Horses” is also the title of one of her most powerful anthems.

Our analysis centered on the concept of “brokenness” as a unifying metaphor in her life story. To conduct this analysis, we relied on a particular theoretical perspective within psychobiography—“narrative identity,” as previously applied by McAdams in studies of U.S. presidents, including Donald Trump, and by Singer in analyses of the autobiographical memories of 19^th century writer Robert Louis Stevenson and the 20^th century rabbi, philosopher, and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel. Singer’s memory analyses build on a tradition dating back to Adler and continuing through the work of Mayman, Tomkins, and Arnold Bruhn, and it is informed by his collaboration with the late Martin Conway.

Brief Overview of Carlile’s Life and Work

Brandi Carlile (born in 1981) is an American singer, instrumentalist, and producer who grew up in a countryside trailer home southeast of Seattle, Washington. From a musical family, she began performing at an early age. At age four, she nearly died from

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meningitis and subsequently suffered from bouts of poor health throughout her school years, eventually dropping out of high school to focus on her musical career. Raised in an evangelical community but openly gay by early adolescence, she often experienced discrimination but did not back down from expressing her sexual orientation. Quickly gaining a local following in the Seattle music scene, she parlayed this success into a recording contract and began to chart country music hits by the early 2000s.

Her music draws on folk, country, and rock ‘n’ roll influences within the broad “Americana” category, and she has won six Grammy awards. She has broken down many barriers as an influential LGBT+ artist, but her music reaches all kinds of audiences, and she has had extensive collaborations with the most prominent musicians in the industry, including Elton John and Joni Mitchell. Carlile has become known for her identification with those who suffer from injustice and conflict, as well as for her advocacy and activism. Through her early adulthood, Carlile was only able to own horses that were broken down and unwanted. Aware of this, her young daughter proposed the apt title, Broken Horses, for her memoir.

Narrative Identity and Self-Defining Memories

In the last decade, Singer has brought a new theoretical perspective to psychobiography, blending the narrative identity model of Dan McAdams with his longstanding research on a specific form of autobiographical memory, the “self-defining memory.” In his analyses of Stevenson and Heschel, he identified specific memory narratives from these subjects’ lives that are vivid, emotionally intense, repetitively referenced, linked to networks of similar memories, and expressive of enduring concerns or conflicts. These self-defining memories often coalesce in more abstract patterns of emotion, behavior, and response that serve as “narrative scripts” influencing the subjects’ self-understanding and interactions.

Examining Brandi Carlile’s memoir, we asked the question, “Might we find emblematic self-defining memories that encapsulate major life themes or conflicts in her life?” It was clear from her choice of the memoir’s title that Carlile intended to foreground the concept of “brokenness” as a crucible from which her songwriting and performance emerge. As a person with chronic physical ailments, a high school “drop-out,” and with an openly gay identity in an evangelical Christian community, there were clearly many resonances to a sense that she felt “damaged” or ill-fitted to a world

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in good working order. At the same time, the lyric in “Broken Horses” declares, “Only broken horses know how to run.” In other words, Carlile sees brokenness as the wellspring of resilient creativity. It is suffering that has made her a “tried and weathered woman” who “won’t be tried again.”

In looking for emblematic self-defining memories, we loosely applied the criteria recommended by Todd Schultz for identifying the “prototypical scene” from an individual’s life. Schultz sees the prototypical scene as an uber-self-defining memory that manages to convey the most powerful themes of an individual’s life. Through repetitive recall and retelling, it becomes a compressed placeholder for the expression of these themes in the individual’s psyche.

However, with our interest in the narrative script of “brokenness,” we were seeking to identify a series of critical self-defining memories that share a particular template of similar affect-action sequences. This means we were looking for multiple memories rather than the prototypical scene. Nevertheless, to identify the key memories, we applied his criteria: one, vividness/specificity/ emotional intensity; two, interpenetration (emergence of this narrative across different media of self-expression); three, developmental crisis; four, family conflict; and five, “thrownness” (a unique occurrence in the narrative that violates the status quo).

The second author culled the entire memoir and generated a series of memories that might be candidates for these prototypical self-defining memory characteristics. Given this essay’s space limitations, we have selected two key memories to which Carlile gives substantial attention, not only in her memoir but in interviews and, explicitly and indirectly, in a number of her song lyrics. In a nearly archetypal fashion, these two memories deepen and expand the theme of brokenness.

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A First “Broken” Memory

Carlile calls attention to this memory in the third sentence of her memoir, “I contracted meningococcal meningitis at age 4.” Her account of falling ill, being hospitalized, going into a coma, and gradually awakening and recovering, runs across five pages and is rich in both painful and darkly humorous detail. What emerges from her retelling is that her frailty in that experience gave her insight into aspects of both powerlessness and power that form the defining parameters of her brokenness.

Watching her very young parents’ helplessness during her hospital stay galvanized a sense in her young mind that she was on her own in this world—that whatever mending was going to happen had to be done by herself—no one else could do this for her. At the same time, seeing their pain and, even more acutely, the despair and fear of her little brother, just 11 months younger, crying at her bedside, she felt an overwhelming empathy for all of their suffering. Added to these two insights—of her own power and her deep reservoir of feeling for others—was a third recognition: “But everyone agreed that God kept me alive because He had a plan for me.” Carlile calls this her “grossly inflated sense of self-importance.”

Thus, in the first chapter of her memoir, using a self-defining memory of her illness as the primary vehicle, Carlile sets out the terms of her brokenness. It begins with an acknowledgment of being shattered—of breaking down. From that moment of collapse emerges an ironic awareness of one’s own resources—the power of mind, will, and talent. This self-propulsion is driven by God’s plan and, for exactly this reason, is suffused with a deep empathetic responsibility to others. There is grandiose self-importance, but it is driven by love and not self-aggrandizement. As she wrote in her first major hit song, “The Story”:

All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I’ve
been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don’t mean
anything
When you’ve got no one to tell
them to.
It’s true…I was made for you.

A Second “Broken Memory”

By age 17, Carlile had reached a crossroads in both her developing sexuality and her Christianity. Although out to her family and about to move in with her first girlfriend, she had still been a faithful attendee of Church and Christian summer camp and clung to a belief that she could reconcile her lifestyle with a place in the congregation. Close to the young pastor, she prepared for a late baptism. Yet on the very day of the ceremony, even at the point of waiting in the vestry in her swimsuit, she was not prepared for the pastor’s request that she repent from her homosexuality. He had

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 allowed her to go through the training; she had hidden nothing from him. He was apologetic but insistent. She fled from the Church and found support from her family and many others in the town. In fact, this second key moment of seeing her ultimate “defectiveness” in the eyes of the conventional religious world taught her a kind of larger grace, more in tune with the ennobling dimension of Christ’s suffering on the cross than the pieties of any ceremony.

There was grace in the outrage my public rejection incited in my family and in the tiny town. I hadn’t fully seen it until then. That’s how real “heart change” is made. Consciousness that shifts not as a result of triumph, but of sacrifice, even sometimes humiliation. That’s where the mercy creeps in. (Carlile, 2022, p. 86)

Once again, she linked this memory narrative to her narrative script of empowerment in her creative enterprise—self-importance with a mission for others, emerging from a confrontation with brokenness, “I would take the leap, move out of my parents’ home, and find salvation where the rest of the misfits and rejects find it. Through twisted, joyful, sexual, weird and wonderful music” (Carlile, 2022, p. 87).

Discussion      

In this brief tribute to Mac Runyan, we sought to demonstrate how one can apply a psychological theory to elucidate the understanding of key aspects of individual life (and individual lives in general). Our analysis illustrates how investigation of specific self-defining memory narratives in a life story can provide crucial material for extracting a narrative script that expresses the organizing thematic motif in an individual’s self-understanding and sense of identity. Although space limitations only allowed for two examples, there are at least a half-dozen more vivid self-defining memories provided by Carlile’s memoir that illustrate the same pattern:

Brokenness——Awareness of both Powerlessness and sudden Empathic Power——Rising to a State of Grace and Creative Purpose.

In our work as both personality and clinical researchers, the valuable synthesis that this psychological theory provides within a framework of narrative identity makes for a greater understanding of individual motivation, psychodynamics, and behavioral patterns. Since our application of self-defining memories and narrative scripts draws on a body of both experimental and clinical research, it brings the benefit of multi-method rigor to our forays into psy-

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chobiography. That it can provide fruitful insight into the life of a contemporary popular artist only illustrates that the field of study Mac Runyan championed those many decades ago is far from broken, but richly vibrant and fertile.

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