This is one of the most fascinating and original spiritual autobiographies since Dan Wakefield's Returning: A Spiritual Journey. Nancy Mairs is an essayist and poet whose mettle has been tested by multiple sclerosis and frequent bouts of depression. In this brutally honest account of her upbringing, marriage, and role as a parent, she refuses to hide her shortcomings. Or as she puts it, "I don't want to be taken for some spiritual Julia Child, cooking up a main course of faith judiciously balanced by good works, with grace for a garnish, and salvation for a sweet."
Raised as a Congregationalist, Mairs found that church membership met her pragmatic and social needs but slighted her spiritual impulses. She characterizes a later falling away from faith as a time when her relations with God were "civil, if not always cordial." The day after her 34th birthday, Nancy Mairs and her husband decided to become Catholics. Since then, they have been social justice activists in the Southwest.
The author's salty views on marital fidelity, birth control, attending Mass, and the importance of charity are thought provoking. Her attention to God's body, her own body, and her husband's body is quite refreshing. "In the flesh," she writes, "we're something else. In the flesh, everyone is always something else. That's incarnation for you."