Fresh Air - A former nun on why she ran away from her 'Cloistered' life

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Poverty, chastity, obedience, total devotion – and rebellion. Catherine Coldstream talks with Terry Gross about her years as a Carmelite nun and why she left the monastery. Her memoir is ‘Cloistered: My Years as a Nun.’ John Powers reviews the series ‘The Hawk,’ starring Will Ferrell.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris, where she studied composition, worked on experimental music, and performed on viola. At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God. entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work, and obedience.

To her, this new life seemed transcendent. But eventually, she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her persistent questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality, were rejected. After 12 years, she left the monastery. She went on to study theology at Oxford University, and she got married. Today, Catherine Coldstream. She spoke to Terry Gross in 24 when her memoir, Cloistered, first was published. It's now out in paperback. Catherine Coldstream, welcome to fresh air. Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for 10 years. I know you had a half hour each day. I know you had a half hour each day.

where you're allowed to speak, but what was it like for you to not speak? Well, it's a really strange thing because we, we, when I say we, the Carmelite order is often described as a silent order. And of course, there's a huge amount of silence in the daily life. But if you look at it another way, words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life, because you are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms, for example, for hours every day. and other sort of theological books. So there are a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, a lot of prayer bounces off words or has resource or recourse to words.

So, yes, we were very silent, but in another way internally, words were very important. But it's like a dialogue with God and a dialogue within yourself. It's not direct interaction with people. Yes. Why is talking considered taboo except for small, amounts during the day. Oh, gosh. That's a very good question. It wasn't speech itself that was taboo.

I think I mentioned that certain subjects were taboo when we did talk, say, in community meetings or recreations. So speech itself wasn't taboo, but there were loads of things that you weren't supposed to talk about. But there was a very strong culture of silence, which could feel like it was sort of anti-speech because the Carmelite order originated in the Hermit ideal. So this goes right back to St. Anthony of Egypt. And in the Alexandrian desert, people went out and lived in caves.

And then a few centuries later, you find people living in caves on Mount Carmel. And these were people who wanted to dedicate themselves to seeking God in solitude. It's called the Desert Monasticism or Desert Spirituality, which is like a sort of a subgroup within Catholic. spirituality that's very much dedicated to seeking God through silence. What drew you to that? I mean, just to fill in your background, you're from an artist's background. Your father was a painter, an art professor, your mother, an actor, an opera singer, who was often on the road. And there was a 28-year difference between them. Your father was considerably

older. It was a second marriage. You've called it a midlife crisis when you got married. The marriage didn't work out well. But you grew up in the arts. And you're a viola player. You were then. You are now. You've done it professionally as well as just for, you know, for the pleasure of it. So why did you feel called to live this life of isolation and silence? Wow. That's the million-dollar question. I mean, I did grow up in what, you know, we call it a sort of arty household. It's quite bohemian. And yeah, there was a big age gap between my parents. So I had grown up, you know, very sort of expressive kind of family. I loved ballet, I loved art, I loved poetry, I loved music.

I was very emotional. Yeah, I mean, people couldn't understand it when I suddenly went really kind of pious and, you know, kind of quite penitential after my father's death. I think what it was was that when my dad died, I was 24 and he had been going downhill in really kind of a very, a very, very painful decline that lasted four years. So from the age of about 20, I'd been going through an awful lot of sort of angst and, you know, the word trauma is overused, but, you know, I'd been going through a very unhappy time, my family more or less disintegrated. And I think I needed something radical. I was looking for something radical. And, you know,

I was looking for it through music at first. I was really into the whole kind of experimental music stuff. Stockhausen, John Cage, Boulognez and all this sort of stuff. So I probably always had slightly extreme tendencies. When the kind of hammer blow of bereavement came, I was

utterly thrown and completely bereft, obviously, and devastated. And I think I just started another kind of radical search which took me to different kind of churches. I looked at, you know, I spent time sitting in Greek Orthodox churches. I spent time

going to Catholic churches. charismatic churches, all sorts of churches. I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died, and that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key. I think that transcendent experience you're referring to after your father died was seeing his body. Can you describe why that was a transcendent experience? I think it's the sort of combination of familiarity.

and completely alien things at the same time. So you go into the room, and it's the dead body of your beloved parent. It was the first time I'd seen a dead body. And I think obviously there were familiar things about this body. The irony was his hair was moving in the breeze. It might have been a ventilator system or it might have been a window open, but his hair was moving as though he was still alive. But everything else, of course, was utterly static.

And it's just the shock. of seeing the complete vacancy of a body that you're used to seeing in life. And I think I just felt immediately that he couldn't possibly have died. He was somehow present in the room. And there was some sort of huge sense of presence, I suppose, divine presence, that just surged through the room that hit me at that point. The fundamentals of the Carmelite life revolve around total devotion to God, pretty constant prayer and reflection.

and total self-denial, would you describe how that translated into daily life? Yes. Well, I suppose one of the big aids, as we would have called it, to self-denial and discipline and virtue and all these other things, was the structure of the rule and the constitutions. So there was this ancient document called the rule from the 13th century, but it was supplemented in the 16th century by the constitutions of St. Teresa of Avala. So there were these kind of written texts that, you know, were meant to govern all aspects of your life. How did it translate into actual everyday life? Well, we had a very disciplined horarium, we called it, like a sort of timetable, which started at 515 with a mat track, which was this kind of really loud rattle that shook the whole house almost and jumped out of your bed.

You weren't allowed to lie there. You just had to get straight up on your knees. You washed in a bucket of cold water. you went straight down to what we called the choir, which was our monastic chapel. And you were praying 25 minutes later. And this went on throughout the day. There were bells.

There were times of prayer that alternated with times of work. But it was all very strictly regulated. You knew exactly where you had to go when. And you were silent most of the time and very focused on what you were doing. So there were all these kind of external structures like the texts and the timetable and the bell that, meant you could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always needing to talk or sort of make decisions. It just strikes me you chose an order that was like the opposite of the family that you were brought up and which you described as free spirited, totally artistic.

You were totally artistic. You'd been you'd been in Paris before returning to England and joining the monastery. You know, yeah, you were reading books of philosophy. You were playing avant-garde music, in addition to more standard repertoire of classical music. And so you chose this order where it's all about structure and all about discipline and self-denial. And the arts aren't about self-denial. They're about expressiveness and creativity and trying new things. And especially the avant-garde that's about breaking the rules and seeing what life is like,

what music or literature is like outside of those borders. And you entered a world that's all borders. And how did you fit yourself into that? Well, it was difficult, obviously. But I think the key thing is that that part of me, and obviously a huge part of me, which was searching for expression or for something transcendent through the arts, that was the part of me that found a kind of freedom in the interior life.

So although the outward life for Carmelite is regulated and full of boundaries and borders and structures, the silence and the solitude that facilitates is actually like a huge expanse of freedom in terms of like your interior life. So basically we'd have two hours a day of completely silent prayer and times for reading. And although our reading material was pretty restricted, you could be as free as you liked in your prayer time. and I think we focused on prayer, which sounds really uncool and really kind of weird to people, I guess, if they're not used to the idea. But prayer was, I think, I approached it like an art form.

Well, not an art form, but I think I approached it like a philosophy. For me, I wanted to plumb the depths of this kind of way of silent prayer because I felt, you know, almost in a philosophical sense that this was the answer. And so I didn't, I think I went in with a kind of quite intellectual attitude to it thinking, you know, this will follow on for my interest in, you know, in transcendence through music or searching for the truth through reading. I would be following the same sort of search, but through prayer. But of course, once you get really deeply into it and you're in a very confined and restricted world, it's not all plain sailing. But I think that the prayer life was where we had freedom

and a sort of sense of something really special going on on a personal level. I'd like you to describe the physical building that you were cloistered in and what the grounds were like around it? It was what we think of was like a sort of grand old manor house, really. It was a large rambling, Gothic building with loads of outbuildings and sheds. But it was like a very large grand family house from the days when minor aristocracy lived in these kind of beautiful buildings and had lots of grounds. So it was a house that had staircases, you know, great big sweeping staircases and stained glass windows and high ceilings. I mean, it had grown derelict after the war. And so when the nuns took it over, I think they needed to do a lot of cleaning up.

And they basically would have just kept it really bare. So it was like a sort of, if you think of somewhere, not as grand as like Brideshead revisited, but on a much smaller scale or down to now. Abbey, but it was a smaller version of that, but completely bare inside in a very sort of stark or steer way that was actually really kind of spiritually inspiring. You know, there's a lovely sort of echo and lovely light and a sense of space. And cold, cold floors, cold rooms. Yeah, it was very cold.

We didn't have central heating. It was really the far north of England, very draughty in winter. The windows rattled and the, you know, cold air would come in. but there was something really beautiful about it. I think it was very, because it was very isolated, and it was in beautiful countryside, farmlands everywhere, lakes and trees and meadows and hills in the distance. So you had a sense of being protected, actually, from the modern world.

You felt like you'd gone back in time to somewhere that was sort of almost magical in its beauty. I want you to describe yourself. Because each of the nuns had a cell that was just for them. And why it was so important to have this like totally private space. Okay, well, I suppose the cell idea had come down from the caves, the hermits used to live in. So the idea was you had your own space that was completely dedicated to your relationship with God and to your solitary life of being a hermit and seeking God. So each of us had basically, it was like a,

medium-sized or smallish bedroom. Some monasteries have much smaller cells because their purpose-built. But because we were using this, we had this great big old period house. The rooms were quite big actually. So we had a sort of medium-sized bedroom and it was like, you know, plain.

When I first went, I think it was wood floor. And then at one point I think they put some lino down, which seems awful today. But the walls were plain, they were like a creamy, we called it distemper. It was like a sort of creamy chalk paint, off white. We had no images or decorations or anything like that. There was an enormous great black wooden cross on the wall. When I see enormous, I mean, it was kind of about four foot, four foot high. I mean, it wasn't like a little crucifix. And there was no, there was no figure of Christ on the cross.

And this was because you yourself were meant to become the sacrificial figure on the cross. So you were meant to think all the time in terms of being crucified with Christ, offering your life as a sacrifice. So can you describe the first time you put on a habit and what it meant to you and if you felt transformed by it in any way? It was a rite of passage. And taking a new name, taking new clothes, these are all sort of quite, I guess, probably universal. accoutrements of major life changes or rights of passage. I mean, if you think of it, getting married is like that. So, yeah, it did trigger a sense that you were somehow changed at quite a deep level. I mean, putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you,

but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way. It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down because there were layers and layers of stuff. The main habit was made of this brown sun. which is like a rough, thick wool. And we had sort of basically two layers of that, the main habit and then what we call the scapula, which was like an extra sort of aprony bit on the front. And then we had, under that we had a tunic, which was a kind of thick cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads.

So you did feel kind of really, you felt encumbered by a lot of sort of cloth at first. And all these pins, which you could easily stab yourself with. did, you're always by mistake sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit. But you felt weighed down, but quite quickly, like with all these things, we are a very adaptable species, you quite quickly get used to it and find new ways of sort of, if you've got to work in the garden, you tuck up the habit and pin it up the back. The actual right of being clothed, of course, was a great sort of transition from being somebody who was hoping to become a nun to somebody who really felt she was and belonged to the community. and you often got given a new name. Mine wasn't very different. I went from being Catherine to being Sister Catherine Mary.

In the book, I'd just say Sister Catherine as a sort of simplification. But my name didn't really radically change, but some people did want to have a new name. In the older days, you had to have a new name, and you were just given a name, often a man's name. So, yeah, you were taking on a new identity. You were putting yourself aside in a way and putting on this new identity

with these new clothes? Yeah, because I was wondering, what's the point of a habit if you're cloistered? Because in the outside world, the habit, when nuns wore habits in the outside world,

the habit signaled certain things. It signaled a modesty. It signaled that you were a nun and were worthy of being related to that way. And it was a symbol of a certain amount of respect that you should just ought to automatically give to that person.

But inside, when you're all nuns, you don't have to communicate that to each other. So what's the point? Yeah, that's a really intelligent point. And I've never thought of it like that, but I think you're absolutely right. It's a symbol of having been set aside, consecrated was the word we use. So you had somehow left the main body of humanity and you're especially set aside. Why signal that when you're all doing the same thing? I think part of it is that there were strangers or visitors to the chapel

who would see you glimpse you in the distance through the grill and they'd see you floating around sometimes, you know. You'd catch the old glimpse of them. So you wanted to signal that to outsiders, just as the grill signalled to outsiders that you were people living a set apart kind of life. But within our own world, I think it was really a powerful thing that we all wore exactly the same clothes. When I say exactly, one or two people had slightly different shades of brown

and you know, you really notice the tiny differences. Like some people had special shoes, you know, whatever. But basically, we were wearing the same habit. And I think that was a very powerful symbol that we were, well, the idea was we were equal. We were meant to be differences between us were meant to be eliminated. And that extended to other areas of the life. You weren't supposed to talk about anything about your own identity from before you'd been a none that would be in any way likely to sort of set up, set yourself up as different or special

or to trigger any sort of envies or rivalries. So you were subsumed into this new identity. And I think the fact that you all wear the same clothes was just a way of making everyone, trying to make everyone as equal as possible, which was a great idea, of course, in reality, groups of people are never equal. Catherine Coldstream, speaking to Terry Gross in 2024.

The former nun wrote a memoir about her dozen years in a Carmelite monastery. The book is now out in paperback. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. And critic at large John Powers reviews The Hawk, the new TV series starring Will Farrell. I'm David B. and Cooley. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. Let's get back to Terry's 2024 interview with Catherine Coldstream.

Her memoir, now out in paperback, is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun. It's about her 12 years as a Carmelite nun in the north of England. The Carmelites are an order that is focused on silence, prayer, song, and work. It's a very disciplined order, and it's also a cloistered order. As a nun in the Carmelite order, you were married to Christ. Yeah. What was your interpretation of that? And did that interpretation change over the years that you were cloistered?

That's a really good question. It certainly changed, yes. I think when you start out, it's all a matter of aspiration. You know, you want to be a bride of Christ. I mean, it all goes back to this thing of before you've actually even crossed a threshold. You somehow were rather fallen in love with this whole idea of, you know, you might have fallen in love with the monastery, you might have fallen in love with the idea of monastic life. But, you know, strange though it may sound to people, on some level you had fallen in love with God,

you know, it was an obsessive vocation. and I think that all-consuming desire to get closer to God, it goes really deep once you really sort of go with it. We had this idea that, you know, for us, Jesus was a real person and he was the embodiment of perfect love and, in a sense, the answer to all our deepest desires. And we wanted to be united with him. So there was a sort of analogy in romantic love that is a really,

ancient tradition in the Old Testament and as well as in the New Testament, whereby God is kind of the spouse, the lover of the people of Israel or the community of the faithful, however it's conceived. The Song of Songs in the Old Testament is all about this. And of course, the song of songs was, you know, largely based on ancient marriage ceremonies from other cultures, Syrian or Mesopotamian or Egyptian. I can't remember, but I mean, I think it had drawn on other ancient cultures and it was basically a text for celebrating a marriage between man and wife. So the Carmelite relationship with God was a sort of sublimated version of marriage. You were married to Christ and he was real for you. So you refer to the romantic side of being married to Christ and I want

to read something from the Bible that you quote in your book and this is from the prophet Josiah, I will block her way with thorns and lure her and lead her out into the desert. And you're right, I think many of us felt it was quasi-erotic. And some translations went even further and said, I will seduce her and speak to her heart. Did it feel erotic to you or do you sense that it did to other young women in the order? I think it's not necessarily just that passage, of course, but that passage, I think, I think shows in a particularly clear way and vivid way that the extent of the sort of romance we were having with God. So in the Prophet Josea, he has a whole section where he's comparing

the chosen people, as they were called all the people of Israel, to a faithless wife. And he was the loving husband pursuing her and forgiving her and all this sort of stuff. So there's a very strong sense of nuptial, we might call it, or spousal relationship. It was a sort of metaphor for the relationship with God. And yeah, I think we felt that very strongly. We felt a very strong sense that we were in a romantic relationship with Jesus. I mean, it was very, very personal. And just because you are wearing a habit and you're a nun and you've taken vows of chastity

doesn't mean you never have erotic feelings. We were supposed to, of course, deny them and do not encourage them. And so we were very sort of controlled and very strict about, all these sort of things, but I think there were involuntary feelings that might sort of arise. And it wasn't necessarily arousal in a specifically sexual sense that you might feel towards Jesus. But I think there was definitely a very strong sense of romance. I think if you read some of St. Teresa's writings on her relationship with Jesus in prayer, you do also get the sense that really deep prayer can actually be quite romantic.

And I think, yeah, there might be a sublimated eros going on, definitely. I want to ask you about the different views of an authoritarian community. One of the older sisters referred to the supernatural spirit of obedience. But then there's a question of, is that just authoritarian or is that something that could lead to any form of transcendence? And I suspect you saw both sides of that. Yeah, I mean, that's such a good question. I mean, it's a really intelligent question. I mean, the supernatural spirit of obedience was a phrase we used a lot.

It was very common currency. The idea was that we weren't living lives that were merely natural. We were living supernatural lives. And supernatural was the kind of the effects of the Holy Spirit and the effects of our relationship with God. So obviously you can reframe authoritarianism as, I mean, you could reframe anything really in supernatural terms, and we did. So was talking about a supernatural spiritual spiritual,

of obedience, which meant we saw God through the prioress, and whatever the prioress said, we saw us coming straight from God. Was it supernatural? Or were there elements of control going on that were actually less benign? It's impossible to know, but obviously if you accord all power and agency and authority to one person in a group of 20, and that person is continually re-elected and never challenged, never questioned, never open to discussing or reviewing things, you've obviously got a setup where it's very, very open to abuse because you've got one person who's basically given carte blanche and everybody else will let her do whatever she wants.

And I think it is a real danger in very isolated religious communities that what starts off as something that's conceived in a spiritual way can become all too human in that human beings do, you know, they've given power, they can abuse it. And communities can be very complicit in that too, especially vowed communities of nuns can be, you know, can be very, in those days, very compliant and very unquestioning and timid. So I think there was a timidity that gave free reign to one or two people.

And at one point that kind of expanded into a sort of clique. There was a sort of coterie of people who were really like the sort of power group who were driving everything. And their agenda was to keep everything unchanged as it had been and were very resistant to any suggestion that we should have more dialogue, more questioning or more discussion. So yeah, it was really difficult. I want to ask you about something very extreme and shocking and horrifying that happened to you, which is that the sister who had become, you know, basically the mother superior of the monastery, although the word is a

prioress? Yeah, the prioress. She beat you. She kind of like dragged you out of bed across the floor and beat you. What happened? Yeah, well, this was not the perennial prioress. It was quite strange. We had a

sort of pariris who was the sort of natural leader who everybody was everybody loved basically, but had quite big problems with as well. I think some people did. This was another process. This is a relatively new priorist that in my later years when there had been some changes in the structure of the community. And I think she was having a breakdown.

I think she was, I mean, I've often wondered why she took it out on me so physically. But what was happening was this was an expression of a much wider kind of thing that was going on in the whole community. There were breakdowns happening. There were tempers flying. There were people, you know, being carted off the community. to the infirmary having had physical breakdowns. I mean, the community went through a time of sort of sickness, if you like, when there was this massive stressful eruption of disagreement about, you know,

who should be prioress and how the authority of the priores should be mediated. And basically there were two points of view. There were two groups and there was a sort of breakaway clique who resisted the rest of the community. felt like the community was split in two. And I think people were just struggling so much. This particular moment when I was beaten, I think that the prioress who did that to me was basically somebody who was experiencing such extreme frustration.

She just didn't know how, you know, she was just taking it out on me. I don't know. But when you said it was an extremely shocking thing, I know it reads as shocking when I describe it in the book and people notice that. Of course, it's a dramatic moment in the book. In reality, I think that there were other things that were far more shocking. I think that the fact that somebody cracked out and beat me, yeah, of course it's horrible. But, I mean, basically, I felt that the psychological sort of psychological cruelty was much more, much, much more difficult to cope with.

Because this was something that lasted 10 minutes when I was dragged out of bed and beaten. And nobody knew that we were alone, again, you know, behind closed doors in an infirmary cell. And, you know, I wasn't deceased. I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't sort of, you know, I could still function afterwards. I was just a bit bruised and a bit sore and a bit shocked. But basically psychological sort of cruelty, I suppose, for want to a better word, is something much harder to deal with when you're very isolated and you've got nobody to talk to about it. So when you talk about the psychological aspects being worse, can you give us an example of what you mean?

Well, I think there was a sort of withholding of human war. warmth and affection and there was also lots of deliberate little humiliations that certain people might in authority administer to younger sisters in order to quote unquote keep them humble

or break their spirit. This was a very traditional thing in monastas and that you would be made to feel small, that you'd be made to feel unloved or rejected and it was all part of the sort of character formation. It sounds stark just saying it in the cold light of day but it was like that and you felt

terribly lonely and terribly crushed by some of these sort of things. Catherine Coldstream, speaking to Terry Gross in 2024. We'll hear more after a break. This is fresh air. This is fresh air. Let's get back to Terry's conversation from 2024 with Catherine Coldstream. Her memoir, Cloistered, my years as a nun, is now out in paperback. At some point you decided to literally run away.

So briefly, look, was there a breaking point for you? We decided I can't handle it anymore. Well, I think the night I ran away, I'd obviously reached breaking point. But I didn't break. I actually, I think I ran away to force to all breaking point. I'd seen others breaking and I thought, why are so many people in my age group? We were the younger ones, you know, why are so many people having breakdowns? And a few people who had to go to hospital and had to leave because they were having

you know, mental breakdowns and things. And I thought, I thought, gosh, you know, the pressure is so great. Maybe I'm going to have a breakdown. So I kind of ran away to maybe avoid reaching breaking point, actually. Yeah, but I did go back after that for two years. So I hadn't reached breaking point. I don't think I did reach breaking point in the sense that, you know, I was ever made, you know, I think I always retained a sense of buoyancy and hope somehow on some level.

And maybe that's why. I had to leave. I was worried that I'd be broken if I stayed. You explained why you ran away from the monastery and then you returned for two more years but decided after those two years to leave for good and to do it, you know, the legit way. Why did you leave the second time around? I think going back to monasticism after having done something as dramatic as running away meant it was never going to be the same again. And although there was a large part of me that was very at home in the common light life in that later stage, I think I eventually realised that part of me had moved on, part of me had developed beyond what could really be held

within the cloistered life. I'd done too much questioning by then, and I felt, I think I just felt ultimately that it was the right thing to do. Yeah. But it was very difficult. When you first entered the world and you knew it was for real and it was permanent, what were some of the hardest things to adjust to and some of the most joyful things to welcome? Again, beautifully put question because it was dual. It was too urged. The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world. So I found noise very difficult and I found talking to people very difficult. Actually, I mean, now I... You were out of practice.

Yeah. I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact. I liked being left alone and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on. So that was really difficult. And I didn't like the sense of, well, obviously I got used to a very ordered and structured world that had a kind of peaceful vibe although of course

as I described things were simmering and seething under the surface because we were human beings but outwardly it was a very quiet and peaceful way of life but there were things

of course I hugely enjoyed I mean I love the feeling of just being the physical freedom of just being able to just go wherever you wanted to I remember the first time I went to the sea and you know just sort of running along the beach hair flapping in the wind

jumping into the waves, you know, I mean, the physical freedom was wonderful. You know, I enjoyed going for a drink as well. I mean, you know, this is, I remember I spent a bit of time in a sort of halfway house outside the monastery where I was having a bit of counselling and there was another nun there. It was some sort of more secular type of religious order. And there was another nun from a much more outgoing sort of apostolic order. And I remember we went to the pub together and that was brilliant. I mean, I really enjoyed having a pint and I really enjoyed going for.

an Indian meal, that was amazing. So there were things I enjoyed, like just nice food and just freedom and being able to lie in the mornings and have baths, you know, just creature comforts that I'd been denied, that I was, my body was aching for relief and rest and, you know, I hadn't had any form of, you know, pleasure was all really paired, you know, drained out of our lives. So those pleasures were great and I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by, yeah, a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on. Thank you so much for talking with us. And I have to say, I admire your courage entering a monastery because you give up so much to do it. It's such a stark life. No matter how rich it is,

you give up so much. So I imagine I admire your courage in doing that. I also admire your courage. in leaving and at some point knowing it wasn't the life you wanted to live any longer. And I thank you for talking about all of that with us. Well, thank you, Terry. I mean, it's been fantastic having this conversation. Thank you so much for your interest in the book. And, yeah, it's been really good talking to you. Catherine Coldstream, speaking to Terry Gross in 2024.

Her book, Cloistered My Years as a Nun, about her religious and emotional journey while spending a dozen years at a monastery in England, is now out in paperback. Coming up, Critic at Large John Powers reviews The Hawk, the new TV series starring Will Ferrell. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. In the new TV series The Hawk, Will Ferrell stars as a zany former golf star who's trying to regain his mojo and regain champion status. Our critic at large, John Powers, says that the show has its flaws, but delivers exactly what you would expect from Farrell, goofy good humor that's too wild even to be a parody of the traditional comeback story. Here is John's review.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the daunting intellects of the 20th century. But when it came to entertainment, he liked dumb comedies. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, he wrote. but come down into the green valleys of silliness. Few stars have spent more time roaming these valleys than Will Ferrell. Ever since becoming beloved on Saturday Night Live, he specialized in a brand of surreal, light-hearted goofiness, striking for its lack of meanness.

His trademark role is that of the blusterous man-child or overgrown boy. In Hollywood hits like Elf, Anchorman, and Talladega Nights, he used that persona to create carnivalesque movies. They blend genre parodies, musical numbers, physical schick, mockery of male bravado, and moments of bottom-bearing slapstick, far bolder than you find in his more guarded peers, like Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller. But movie comedy has fallen on hard times, and like many others, he's turned to Netflix for a new series, The Hawk. Working a similar turf, if not style, to Sandler's Happy Gilmore,

it's an amiably shambly golfing comedy that finds him doing all the familiar Will Ferrell things. Although he's an acquired taste I've never fully acquired, I found myself laughing enough to watch all ten half-hour episodes. He plays Lonnie Hawkins, aka The Hawk, a self-absorbed pro-golfer who was number one in the world, in 2004. Then he choked on his final put of the U.S. Open and went into a tailspin

that's kept him off the PGA tour for years. Still hoping to get back to the top, he plays small tournaments along with his new caddy Sam. That's Fortune Feimster, a freewheeling lesbian he stumbles across in a Walmart parking lot. With her help, Hott goes in a hot streak

and gets back on the tour. Much of the delight of his adoring fans, who always loved the braggadocio and crowd-pleasing antics that enraged the stuffed shirts of the golf establishment. Not everyone is delighted by his return. His mere presence annoys his foul-tongued ex-wife Stacey, that's Molly Shannon, and unleashes an edible meltdown on his son Lance.

That's Jimmy Tatro, also a professional golfer, a muscled up ball of tension, engaged to a wellness influencer who, in a witty twist, is the one character who isn't bonkers. Lonnie and Lance head toward the inevitable golfing showdown, alongside their smug nemesis, played by Luke Wilson. The question becomes, how can Lonnie win the open and reconcile with his son?

Naturally, Lonnie's golfing methods are certifiably inane. Here at the team, he has an imaginary conversation with his golf ball before unleashing a mighty drive. I hear, little Callaway 1. Want to go for a little ride? Huh? What's that? You're going to have to speak up louder than that.

Oh, you want to go far. You want to go into outer space. You're going to go flying through that air, screaming your head off with pure ecstasy as you explode into the cosmos. Okay, let's do it. Let's go for a ride. Now, silly comedies need to be short.

the hawk clocks in it nearly five hours, more than three hours longer than any of Farrell's hits. The story's too thin to support such length, even when buttressed by amusing shenanigans, of which there are plenty. There are songs and fantasy sequences, surprise cameos, and insults whizzing around like gunfire. There's a ludicrous scene at a urinal, a hilariously deployed pickle jar, a nifty gag about a tower made of donuts, even a throwaway joke about E.M. Forster's novel Morris. A reminder that dumb comedies are made by smart people.

And of course there's Farrell. A famously nice guy whose annoying comic style is as polarizing as he himself is not. Lonnie is a good role for him, in part because he's a devoted golfer, who often turns up at celebrity pro-ams. and partly because he may identify a bit with the hawk. Although his fans still love him, his biggest movies were back in the aughts.

With his large frame and suburban dad's bland face, just perfect for portraying self-delighted narcissism, Farrell gives Lonnie his all, whether flying into a panicked frenzy when he's trapped inside a car for ten seconds, singing the baby-back ribs jingle, or looking stunned when people say he's heartless, for doing something heartless. Where there's usually something nasty

lurking within comics who play overgrown boys, Sandler excels at dark, dramatic roles. Farrell always exudes innocence. Even though Lonnie lets everyone down who loves him, he never really feels like a bad guy. As the hawk sloped toward its sneaky, quasi-sentimental ending, I found myself respecting Farrell's love of and commitment to unabashed silliness.

Although, like Lonnie Hawkins, he's a bit too old for the young man's game he's playing. He still pulls off some unreal shots. John Powers reviewed The Hawk, Will Ferrell's new Netflix series. On Monday show, novelist Lela Slimoni, her trilogy is inspired by three generations of her Moroccan family. She writes from her dual perspective as biracial, with members of her family representing the countries of the colonized and colonizer.

In Morocco, it's illegal to have sex outside of marriage. She grew up associating sex with danger. Hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash This is Fresh Air. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorak. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Stanischeske. Our interviews and reviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean, Cooley.