There is, she says, no doctor left who can confirm this improbable story “It was years ago!” but she swears it is true.
She refused medical treatment, she says, and with a regimen of forgiveness, therapy, nutrition, reflexology and occasional enemas, she claims she rid herself of cancer. In 1977 or 1978 she can’t remember which Hay found out she had cervical cancer, and she concluded that its cause was her unwillingness to let go of resentment over her childhood abuse and rape. She became popular as a workshop leader, and soon she moved beyond Religious Science, studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his university in Fairfield, Iowa. In the early 1970s Hay became a Religious Science practitioner, leading people in spoken “affirmations” meant to cure their illnesses. I said, ‘ Really?’ And I, who had never been a student, became an avid reader.” What she read were metaphysical tracts by 1920s-era authors like Frances Scovel Shinn, who said that positive thinking could change people’s material circumstances, and the Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body. “I heard somebody say there, ‘If you’re willing to change your thinking, you can change your life,’ ” Hay told me. But soon she found her way to the 48th Street home it’s still there of the First Church of Religious Science, one of many early-20th-century groups that heralded the transformative power of thoughts. When after 14 years of marriage Andrew Hay left her for another woman, Louise was devastated. In 1954 she married the English businessman Andrew Hay, with whom she “traveled the world, met royalty and even had dinner at the White House.” She moved to Chicago, worked at menial jobs and in 1950 left for New York, where she took on a new name she was born neither Louise nor Hay and was, to quote “You Can Heal Your Life,” the 1984 book that made her rich and famous, “fortunate enough to become a high-fashion model,” working showrooms for Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini and Pauline Trigère. Ten years later she dropped out of high school, became pregnant and, on her 16th birthday, gave a newborn girl up for adoption. There was violence within the house and without: when she was about 5, Louise was raped by a neighbor. She was born in Los Angeles to a hard-luck mother who soon married Louise’s brutal stepfather. Over the next hour and a half, Hay told me the story familiar to tens of millions of her devoted readers. Once back inside she sat me at her glass-topped dining-room table, gave me a plastic bottle of spring water and insisted I could ask her anything, anything at all. She swept me through the house to the back door and onto the patio to look at the view of Batiquitos Lagoon only then did she let go of my arm and brought me around the side to see her organic garden, where she has planted broccoli, brussels sprouts and a Meyer lemon tree. She is 81 years old, thin, blond and ebullient: the hip older aunt rather than the sensible grandmother. I felt we were together in a conspiracy that might end in mischief. Late in February, Hay greeted me at the door of her small weekend house in a new subdivision outside San Diego, grasping my biceps rather sensually, then pulled me across the threshold, hooked her arm into mine as if I were her escort and moved me along. In any event, none of them ever touched my arm so intimately. Finer writers they may have been (depending on your taste), and wealthier women, but it would be hard to argue that any was more interesting than Louise Hay. They were not pregnant at 15 and they did not lack high-school diplomas. They did not change the spiritual landscape of America and several of its Western allies. Rowling, Danielle Steel and Barbara Cartland owned a publishing empire. LOUISE HAY IS ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING AUTHORS IN HISTORY, and none of the women who have sold more like J.