Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir

Bestselling author and teacher Julia Cameron, known worldwide for her book The Artist’s Way, finally comes clean and tells all in her new memoir: Floor Sample. And when I say tells all, it’s not a cliché. I must admit when I first picked up this book, I feared I’d somehow lose my champion of creativity. How could she really live up to all she taught? How could she really walk the walk? I feared my mentor’s lessons would lose their impact within the story, behind the story.

Floor Sample will not disappoint. Cameron surpasses all of her previous work. The reader is allowed into her private past of alcohol and drug addiction, her fight to become sober and her battle with mental instability. We watch her struggle to be taken seriously as writer and then again as a composer of musicals in a male dominated art form. Her relationships, including her marriages to Martin Scorsese and Mark Bryan, are painfully revealed with an honesty that will break through the thickest of skeptics.

Her art unfolds as she describes the beautiful country side of her beloved Taos and the stimulating muse that exists in New York City. Within these pages, one can see Cameron apply her beliefs. No, it’s not a sweet, little story, but it is a story of success even when it seemed no success existed. Though deaths, divorces, loss of home and madness threaten her creativity, Julia applies her own brand of guts not to be matched by most.

This book will be satisfying to artists of all mediums and the general public. You don’t have to be well read in Cameron’s work to walk away with a lesson learned from this effort. It is a book that will remain on my shelf for years to come.

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