I didn’t think I’d enjoy this memoir as much as I did. There are so many nowadays, and I’d recently read another nun’s: For Love of the Broken Body, which we honored as a “Best Book of the Year” for 2024. And just a month ago, Kelsey Osgood’s Godstruck told the stories of seven women’s journeys to religious conversion. A Change of Habit seemed perhaps too similar.
There was also the promotional material telling me that this nun is a TikTok star. I wasn’t sure her memoir, then, would be all that important. (I pre-judge books as much as anyone!)
But I couldn’t stop reading. Sister Monica Clare only recently, in her forties, struggling with menopause, became the nun she is now. And the book she’s written in her late fifties is well-worth your time. She’s honest, funny, and — one gets the feeling as the pages turn — true. This is a book to remind you that it is never too late to be the person you are meant to be.
Sister Monica Clare is an Episcopal nun who began life as Claudette Monica Powell, growing up in the Baptist church in Georgia. She also spent time in her late teens as a Mormon convert. She remembers early religious experiences, sometimes, fondly. Her grandparents were often the ones taking her to church. But her home life was turbulent and dangerous. She confesses that she often felt her father would kill her. She attended Al-Anon meetings.
She was once a struggling actor, stand-up comic, and comedy writer who, with the encouragement of Cheri Oteri nearly became a comedy writer at Saturday Night Live. At one point, she tells a story of attending Jimmy Fallon’s birthday party. But at other times, she’s changed names to protect the living non-famous. The chapters about her marriage to a man who never once said “I love you” are unflinching and painful.
From her years in formation as a young nun, I also found profound the honest recounting of a very difficult relationship with an older nun, Sister Kristina Marie.
The author’s journey toward what is called “religious life” is told in a way that many readers will welcome because of how “non-religious” it seems. But the beauty of this book comes from the ways she shows all of life to be, not just spiritual, but religious too.
Now, she’s doing very “nunny” things, as the superior (nun-in-charge) of a community in New Jersey just outside New York City. In addition, she’s been ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. Stories of life behind convent walls will intrigue readers. But it’s also clear that her commitment to the religious life has an outward focus, for helping others.
