Editor-in-Chief Gary Barg sat down with Helen to discuss her life’s work.
Gary Barg:
I know you retired from performing
in 2002 and now are a practicing
hypnotherapist. What caused the
change in your career?
Helen Reddy:
I had been in show business for
nearly 55 years, since I was five
years old. I wanted to do something
else and hypnotism was a lifelong
interest.
GB: You
explore the evolution of that
transition in your book. What
made you decide to write it?
HR:
I had been asked many times over the
years if I would write an
autobiography, and I really did not
have any interest because they were
stressing, “Tell us all about sex,
drugs, and rock and roll” so to
speak. That was not really my life.
But, I was already doing the
hypnotherapy and I was living on
Norfolk Island when I got a call
from the hospital saying that the
psychiatrist was visiting and he
wanted to meet me before he referred
patients to me.
So, I went down to the hospital
and I met him and it was very
serendipitous. His office was
in the building at the end of the
street where my sister lived.
It turned out that we had a lot of
mutual friends. His wife was
on the island with him and she was
the literary agent for my daughter’s
godfather. Her brother was
with them. He lived on the
street I grew up on. There
were all these connections.
I had dinner with him, his wife and
her brother and about a month later,
she sent me a whole pile of books
that she had either written or
edited or published herself with a
note saying, “Would you be
interested in doing a body, mind,
spirit book?” because we had talked
a lot about psychic things during
the dinner. I thought about it
and decided, “Well, yes, that is a
book I would be interested in
writing.”
And so, I set about writing it and I
found that I needed to place the
experiences that I had had in the
context of my life. I needed
to show the growth and the
progression and all the things that
surrounded those areas. Before
I knew what I was doing, I was
writing a memoir.
Helen Reddy has won a Grammy Award, appeared on Broadway and in feature films, and is credited with singing and writing one of the most iconic songs of the 1970s, “I Am Woman.” Her musical hits also include the well-known songs, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Delta Dawn,” “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress),” “You and Me Against the World” and “Angie Baby.” Helen is also a practicing clinical hypnotherapist based in Sydney and patron of the Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists.