[This interview was originally published on Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper. To read
the whole interview, please click here.]

(from left: Steven Petrow and Banning Lyon)

At least once a year I post a meme that says, “You never know what someone is going through. Be kind.” It clocks high on “likes” because it speaks truth. What’s on the surface can hide a world of hurt.

That’s certainly true of Banning Lyon.

Looking at his Instagram feed, chock full of photos of his wife and young daughter, you’d never imagine what he has endured. At 15, a self-described skateboarding nut, his life changed radically when a guidance counselor in his Dallas high school suspected that Lyon was suicidal because he gave away his board to a friend (not believing what he said, which is that he was planning to buy a new one).  At the urging of the counselor, his parents admitted Lyon to a psychiatric hospital for a two-week stay, which turned into 353 days.

In his new memoir, The Chair and the Valley: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and the Outdoors, Lyon, now 52, reveals the mistreatment he endured. The chair in the title refers to “chair therapy,” supposedly intended to help him think about his problems but instead, consisted of 11 months sitting in a chair facing the wall, sometimes up to 12 hours a day. By the time Banning left the hospital, he writes, “I was the scattered wreckage of a teenager,” full of rage and fantasizing about hanging himself.

Lyon takes readers on a gut-wrenching story of trauma and healing, including his lawsuit against the facility’s owners who bilked insurance companies (like his father’s employer). Now, with a family of his own, Lyon finds peace in the wilderness and has found peace within himself—although you’d never understand the world of hurt he endured by looking at him: a middle-aged dad with hair he describes as “defiant,” who now works as a backpacking guide in Yosemite National Park.

This beautiful book is honest and raw. After all this time, why did you decide to write your story? 

The book began as a product of working with my therapist. She told me to “free write,” but I wouldn’t do that. I just kind of rolled my eyes at all of it, but eventually, ultimately decided to start. I wrote a lot, about 200 pages in four weeks, and that was it. It was done. It was just this cathartic surge of emotions and, really, had no cohesive narrative.

How did that mess of pages become a book Kirkus Reviews described as a “heartfelt memoir and an urgent demand for higher standards of juvenile mental health care”? 

An event during my work as a backpacking guide left me feeling very strongly that I had a moral obligation to write a book, that I’d be committing some kind of sin by not writing it. After spending days in the backcountry with clients I realized I wasn’t different from them. They weren’t better or more normal than me. Among them were alcoholics and cutters, people who had lost siblings and spouses to cancer and suicide. I realized then that I’d found my place in the world, and that I needed to come to terms with my past. I never would have found the courage without the serenity of nature and the help of my clients. So I committed to writing the book and it has been a long, difficult, and painful process.  

[To read the full interview, please click here.]