Good Life Project - Sue Monk Kidd | How to “Change Lanes” & Reclaim Your Narrative

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

How does a surgical and pediatric nurse become one of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time? This was the jumping-in point for my conversation with Sue Monk Kidd. From her earliest memories, Sue wanted to write, but growing up in a small town in Georgia, she was channeled into a much narrower set of career offerings that were offered up as the “only appropriate kinds of work for a woman.” That never sat well with Sue, but not quite having found her own voice yet, she ended up following the thread into nursing school, then into a season of life where she built a career in medicine while raising a family. But, when she turned 30, that stifled yearning to make writing her devotion was reawakened. She literally announced she was going to be a writer out loud to her husband and kids at the kitchen table, who didn’t quite realize the seriousness of what had just happened. Profoundly influenced by contemplative writers, like Merton, Sue began to pen essays, meditations and stories and see them published, which led to books about her own take on life, feminism, and a more expansive and inclusive spirituality. Then, more than a decade into her writing life, she did what writers are so often cautioned away from. Sue changed lanes from nonfiction to fiction, writing short stories, and eventually, going all-in on a novel that would become the mammoth, international blockbuster, A Secret Life of Bees, the writing of which was its own 5-year odyssey. As we sat down, we explored this incredible journey, and how she navigated major shifts in both career and life. We also dive into her most recent novel, The Book of Longings, a fictional imagining of the early life of Jesus, told through the eyes of an equally strong and vibrant wife, whose presence would never “make” the pages of history. You can imagine, this book stirred a lot of conversation and served as a provocation to explore not only this story, but also the frame that is brought to the way stories of women have, and have not been told throughout history, and who holds the power of the pen.You can find Sue at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Elizabeth Lesser about the writing life and the role of women in historical narratives.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm very interested in enlightening someone's mind if I can possibly manage it. But what I want most of all is to touch their heart. I want to jolt their heart because I really think that's the way in to other human lives. The shortest distance between anything is a story that jolts the heart. So how does a surgical and pediatric nurse become one of the most widely acclaimed and beloved writers of our time? This was the jumping in point for my conversation with Sue Monk Kidd. From her earliest memories, Sue wanted to be a writer, but growing up in a small town in Georgia, she was kind of channeled into a much narrower set of career offerings that were offered up as the, quote, only appropriate kinds of work for women. And that never sat well with

Sue, but not quite having found her own voice yet, she ended up following the thread into nursing school and then into a season of life where she built a career in medicine while raising a family. But when she turned 30, that stifled yearning to make writing her devotion was reawakened and she could not walk away from it any longer. She literally stood up in her kitchen and announced out loud to her husband and kids that she was going to write, who didn't realize the seriousness of what had just happened. And profoundly influenced by contemplative writers like Merton, she began to pen essays and meditations and stories and see them published, which then led to books about her own take on life and feminism and a more expansive and inclusive

spirituality. Then, more than a decade into her writing life, she did what writers are so often cautioned away from. She changed lanes from nonfiction to fiction, writing short stories, and eventually going all in on a novel that would become the massive international blockbuster, The Secret Life of Bees, the writing of which was its own five-year odyssey, which we dive into. As we sat down, we explored this incredible journey and how she navigated major shifts in both career and life. We also dive into her most recent novel, The Book of Longings, a fictional imagining of the early life of Jesus told through the eyes of an equally strong and vibrant wife whose presence would never make the pages of history.

Now, you can imagine this book stirred a lot of conversation and some controversy and served as a provocation to explore not only history, but also the frame that brought this story to the way stories of women have and have not been told throughout history, and who holds the power of the pen. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot?

Flight Risk. Growing up in the South, in a small town, it sounds like the early days of your spirituality were fairly traditional, but it's been really interesting to see how it has evolved in a really open and very contemplative way. And I was just curious, when you look back at your earlier years, did the faith tradition, did the spiritual presence that you grew up in resonate with you in the early days? Or was it something that even early on, you in the early days? Or was it something that sort of like even early on, you were sort of asking questions about? I think probably I was asking questions early on. And yet at the same time, this is going to sound very paradoxical. At the same time, I was all in. I think growing up in

a small town in the South in Georgia, in the Baptist tradition of the 1950s and 60s, that's quite something. And it really, well, I guess I really took that in and integrated it in a strong way. Because when I really began to break out of that orthodoxy and those structures and concepts, it took a lot of doing. It took a jackhammer to do it. But at the same time, I was always asking questions about things. So I think there was that element of doubt that was working in me from the beginning. Yeah. I often think about sort of like, whether it's a spiritual evolution, whether it's just relationships, whether it's work, that oftentimes, you know, when somebody lands in a place which is very different than they began,

it's actually really important that they go pretty deep into that early place because it lets them understand, you know, like what really is resonating. You get the, you know, you go deep enough to really understand where it came from and why it's maybe not aligned with where you want to be or sort of like how you want to step into the world in your own personal life. Absolutely. And I think for me, shedding that skin was extremely important, but I understood that skin. I understood where I had been and still do. And there are gifts in it, you know. I still have kind of nostalgia at times. I'll see a stained glass window in a cathedral in Europe, and I feel that welling up of nostalgia and beauty, and it touches something

in me. So I think I carry a kind of cultural Christian experience inside, and I've tried to keep those things that are a gift to me that I can hold on to, but largely was quite a revolution for me. Yeah. Isn't that the gift of sort of like reaching a certain season of life also, that you get to reflect back and really kind of cherry pick how you want to be? Part of the overlay of when you were growing up also, beyond faith, was just sort of like a cultural assumption about the role of women. And I was reading a line that you wrote where you wrote, by the time I left for college, my real self was already beginning to disappear inside strictures of properness, pleasing, silence, and self-negation. Little cages everywhere.

Yes. Well, I did grow up in the 50s and 60s in the South in a very structured kind of religious experience. So you can imagine there was a lot of women being submissive and being on the peripheries and not being at the center of meaning making in the religion or having any kind of role. So it's kind of like you're a goldfish in a bowl swimming in water you don't see for a long time. And it's true. When I went to college, I had left behind so much because I didn't have the courage, I guess, to really break out of these structures that had raised me and that I had internalized so deeply. So it took, as I said earlier, the jackhammer. But I think that, well, I moved through epochs, I say. I kind of shed that skin slowly. And I can look back now at this point in my life and try to integrate all of these things together. But there was a movement, an evolution to all of

this. And it really started with not the feminist kind of dissident experience I had, but more of turning to the interior life. That's where it began for me, because I had no sense whatsoever of the inner life, the reality of that, until I read Thomas Merton and then Carl Jung. And I was overwhelmed with this idea. And my feeling was like, hey, why didn't anybody tell me about this? How could this be and nobody told me? So I had a phase where I was really exploring in depth this world, this contemplative inner life, and then came this sort of feminist awakening, and it just kept evolving over the decades, you know? Yeah, the contemplative phase. Did that touch

down for you in college? Or was it later on when you really started to step back into writing? Well, for me, I guess I'm a slow learner because I was 30 years old. As I said, I was really all in until around 30. And then I picked up The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton. Which has changed so many people. You know, it really has. And he was remarkably influential in my life and continues to be, actually. But his gift to me through that book was the awareness, as I said, of the interior life. And I read that book just astonished. It wasn't so much even his journey into this monastic world that he describes in the book. It was this world within. And so, yeah, I began to explore that. And that opened my creative life,

actually. Yeah, because up until then, I mean, you end up going to TCU or university, which in itself was an interesting, from the outside looking in, that looked like a bit of a rebellious act, because I'm sort of like the family tradition up until that point was University of Georgia. And I'm assuming certain expectations being a Georgia kid having the whole family go there. But then you also, instead of writing, you say yes to nursing for the better part of a decade before this awakening that you start to describe. I'm curious, I want to dive into sort of like this, what happened around the time of 30 years old. But I'm really curious about the journey in nursing and saying yes to that. And then what led you to say, okay, so after like eight, 10 years in this space and being deeply of service and building a life and a living around it, it's time to be done with this. I would say that it probably turned for me somewhere in my adolescence because up until I was maybe 15 or 16, I was going to be a writer.

I'm not sure it was innate in me, but from a very early age, I loved story. I loved my father's storytelling. I loved writing. I was going to be a writer. And then I was sitting in home economics class one day, and the teacher wrote a list on the blackboard of professions for women. The topic of the day, now this is like 1963, maybe, or four. The topic of the lesson for that day was something about women working outside the home. Oh, horrors, you know. So I remember sitting there with bated breath, waiting for her to write her on the board, but she never did. There was teacher, librarian, stewardess, wasn't even a flight attendant, nurse, and so on. This made a deep impression on a very impressionable girl, myself.

And I worried about it. I remember going around worrying about this. Well, what am I doing? Is this going to work? And I went to see the guidance counselor, and I asked her about it. And she said, oh, I think you could write as a hobby. But it would really be smart to take up a profession that you could fall back on in case something happened to your husband. This is where we were in my world anyway, in that small

world. And so I said, okay, I guess that's what I do. And so I tossed over this dream, this idea with great pain, actually, and decided what should I be, a teacher or a nurse? I picked nurse. I'm not sure I was a terribly great nurse, but I didn't kill anybody. I mean, it worked out. But somewhere around 30, actually, it was after reading Merton and discovering this powerfully present inner life that my creative life woke up again. I wanted to carry on a conversation with my soul. And I wanted to express it. This desire kind of welled up. And I got really homesick for myself, I think.

You know, homesick for that part of me I had left behind and orphaned. And so I remember walking in the kitchen on my 30th birthday and making this announcement to my husband, who was sitting there with our two toddlers trying to, as I recall, get them to eat their cereal. They were singing something like Snap, Crackle, Pop or something. And I interrupted and told them, I'm going to become a writer. And that was it. I mean, I, of course, the next day I'm thinking, what did, what did, I don't know anything about writing.

What did I just do? But it somehow took from me. And I began to write and work. And within a year, I had left nursing behind and moved into writing full time. I'm curious about the moment that you make this declaration. Because as you reflect on this, you remember the day. You remember the scene. You remember the moment.

So it was clearly powerful. This was a flag in the ground for you. Have you talked to your husband or your kids about that moment also and sort of explored, was this anywhere near as meaningful for you? Or was this just kind of like, you know, another moment in the kitchen, sort of like in everyday life? I'm curious how different people experience a single moment where for one it's profound, but for others it may be very different. Yes, that's interesting.

For me, it was a big annunciation that had been coming and coming and saying it out loud. I was really making that annunciation to myself. This is your path and you're returning to yourself. And it was a home coming for me. And I'm sure that's why it was so powerful, because it was like returning or coming home again, the prodigal girl. My husband, I remember, he turned and looked at me and said, well, that's great. Good for you, something like that. And he was

always supportive. And yet, I don't think he caught in the least the profundity of that moment for me. I mean, later he did, and later we discussed it. My daughter, Anne, who has also become a writer, who was the two-year-old sitting at the table that day. Of course, they don't remember any of that, but we've talked about it many times since. And what became of that one tiny moment where I really never looked back, even though I was afraid and had a lot of fear about what I was doing and had to gather my courage over and over again to go out there and put my voice in the world, I was home and I was going to do it one way or the other. When you say yes to that and you start to write,

so it's interesting. I'm curious when you think about your time in nursing and then you're starting to write, even though over the course of that next year, you really, you sort of closed the door professionally on what you had been doing. I have to imagine that the time that you spent steeped in empathy, steeped in sort of like trained observation was in some way deeply informative to the way that you stepped into writing. And I'm curious whether from the inside out, that was your experience also. Yes, I think it made a big impact on me that time I spent in nursing many years. What I learned was that people suffer. There's pain. There's so much need in the world for those people I took care of on pediatric units, medical surgical units, even in nursing school on a psychiatric ward.

And I think I never forgot that. I'm sure it had to have made an impact on me somehow. Because what I came to later, I didn't realize quite how much I believed this until it finally formed in my mind, that really the point for me and the power of literature and of writing is empathy. You know, the highest value in my kind of world, I guess, ideally, is compassion. I think there's no higher value for me to aspire to in the world, not belief, compassion. And if we can somehow tap into this empathy, I think empathy is the portal into that. So I was looking around for a reason I wrote. Someone asked me that in an interview, why do you write? And I was maybe 40 years old. And I sat back and I thought, yeah, why do I do this? really? Is it just simply because I have a gift or I have a desire or I have a longing or it's

my true home or whatever? Somehow that became not enough for me. I wanted my work to serve something larger than that, even though I think that is actually enough, frankly, for us to, you know, experience our own gift and give it to the world. That's a great thing, but I wanted it to mean something. And there's a little story. I was in Chicago at a bookstore, and a gentleman, a really well-dressed, rather affluent-looking man, said to me, I read The Secret Life of Bees. He said, my wife made me. I really didn't want to read it, but my wife made me. And I said, well, was it very painful for you? And he said, no, actually, I made a connection to this world that I did not expect,

and I did not see coming. He said, I'm from this, he was a CEO of some important corporation in New England, and he came from, as he described it, a very wealthy family. And he said, I had nothing in common with this little girl from South Carolina and these African-American women. He said, but when I read your book for the first time, I felt like I sort of understood their world and I became them and they became me. And I went, that's why I write. It really hit me. That's it.

Because it creates empathy. And that is a reason to do it. Because it creates empathy. And that is a reason to do it. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's like a gateway to seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA.

That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. There's an early piece that you wrote, an essay called Severe Grace, actually, which was republished not too long ago, I guess, maybe in 07 and first light. That was a series of vignettes. I think Severe Grace you wrote in sort of like the decade or so following when you first started writing.

Is that right, timing-wise? That probably was around the time I was writing When the Heart Waits, which was, let's see, that must have been in the early 90s. It sort of grew out of that. Yeah. And it's so moving. And it's a series of vignettes, which really just bring you into this moment where the name of it in the first place, Severe Grace, is immediately I want to deconstruct that. And then just sort of like you flashing through these vignettes of moments where there's no sort of coherent story that starts in the beginning and then ends at the end, but yet you're drawn into the humanity of these different people and you. And part of it is you telling the story of actually your own health emergency and concern, and then relating it back to you then years earlier as a nurse sitting by the side of a

woman who passed and you getting the news that your diagnosis would be different. And again, there's no person in any of the vignettes that you shared that I shared a similar life to, and yet I was right there, breathing with my heart beating with them and with you and just feeling into it. And there's something so powerful about being able to do that on the page and bring others into the human experience. I love hearing that. Yeah, that's why I do it. And after I had that experience where I finally went, oh, this is a reason to write right here, not just to serve my ego as much as I have actually done that in my life, but

this larger thing, and I remembered exploring this really, and I remembered reading the great American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, you know, and he talked about the common heart. And I went back and read about that. And it's this idea that every human, every person has this intrinsic unity, this place we all share. And if we could just get there, that is a way, I think, for us forward in this world. If we can just find the common heart of the world and the common heart in ourself, if we can write or paint or make music or make dialogue or whatever we can do to create portals into the common heart of the world, I think that's a powerful thing, yeah.

So agree. There's another piece that you wrote, I think, during that similar season entitled Reborn to Love, which also really speaks to sort of, I think your evolving lens on spirituality. One of the things in there you write, the spiritual life is an expanding awareness of the divine as all in all vividly and actually present in all external reality without dualistic separations. And then you share this really beautiful, poignant moment between you and Sandy when he comes home and finds you in a state of distress. The whole thing really just spoke to sort of like what felt like this expanding view on how you understand this

thing called the divine. Oh, I'm still learning too. Boy, that sounded very mystical, what for me is more and more about love and consciousness and this beingness, this pure is-ness kind of thing. The more I explore that, the more I realize that it's beyond me totally, that I can't really describe it. In my novel, The Book of Longings, there's this place where I have a character say that we will explore the God behind God. And that's very Paul Tillich, the theologian, of course. But I really believe that. I think that God is ultimately this mystery. But for me, God is both imminent, here, now, present, manifesting in everything, very eloquent in our lives and in nature, and also transcendent. So all in all, as you said, and I keep exploring that, trying to connect to it.

And the other thing I'll say about that is that sounds very abstract, and it is. And yet God is not really relatable to us as an abstraction in a way. I was in Greece with my daughter years ago, and I was in the narthex of the cathedral in Athens. And I remember standing there watching this woman come in and bend over and kiss the icon of Jesus. And I watched this with a sense of kind of, well, that it was beautiful and it was a little nostalgic and lovely. It was just a moment of

her devotion to something. And I walked over to the icon after she left and there was this big imprint of lipstick right on the face of Jesus, which I just loved. And I stood there and thought, oh, for me, God has become the divine, has become more and more abstract, more being, more pure consciousness, more love, this abstraction. But she just planted a kiss on the icon of Jesus, and I'm missing something, you know. And that's when I realized that we all need a way, an image, in order to be personable with what is beyond our understanding with this great mystery. And so I realized that must be what William Blake was talking about when he talked about the whole, we can see the whole world in a grain of sand. She could see the whole transcendent, imminent reality of the divine in that one image.

And yet there's a God behind all of that that we can't even imagine somehow, that's when I understood that in order to relate to the divine, I needed a way. For me, that image largely became the Black Madonna. Yeah, it is interesting. The way that we tend to believe things more is through the path of reductionism. Like we kind of want the representation because it makes it more concrete. And it's, it's interesting also when, when,

when I have conversation, when I think about my own experience and then you think about like the evolution and when you notice a moving away from that and just like a connection with something more expansive becomes more of your truth and more the way that you find a conduit or a pathway to whatever it is and the way that you define it. I'm fascinated by how different people sort of seek that and hold themselves open to it changing over time. Because I think sometimes we want to lock it down and keep it that way for life. Yeah, we need a path, but we need to understand that it's just a path, a reflection, a way for us to tap into this larger reality that can be many different things for many different people. It's when God becomes that image for us, and we're literal about it, that we get into

problems, I think. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. You spent about a decade or so with your writing largely focused on a blend of memoir, storytelling, contemplative spirituality, really exploring a lot of nuances around that world. And then about a decade into your writing career, right around, I guess, your early 40s, probably, you make this really interesting decision, which is, I want to write fiction. And I'm curious, because especially in the world of writing, and those who sort of exist outside of it may not know, but it's probably the same in almost any domain. There's this sort of like common trope, which is, you know, stay in your lane. You're really good at this thing. You've got a following. You're known for

it. We know we can sell it. When you, over a decade into this process, decide, I want to do something. I want to write fiction, which is very, very different in a lot of ways. What's going on in your mind that makes you say, this is what I want to do and now's the time? Well, I said that very thing to myself, you just repeated about stay in your lane. I told myself that over and over because it was safe. I think the human being wants to stay safe. It's an instinct in us to sort of stay where we are. And yet there was an urge in me, this, I can't really describe it well, except to say it's some kind of interior, inner urging, some voice of your heart, some impulse of the heart, something that makes you want to do

something new and for yourself brave. I know that story has always been at the heart of what I love and what I believe in. I believe in the power of story. What was it? The poet Muriel Rukuser who said, the universe is not made of atoms, but stories. Well, I believe that. And that's who we are ultimately. And we're going to change the world one story at a time.

That's how it's going to happen, I think. But I wanted to take the story in a new way. I felt like there was the imagination that I wanted to explore, to tap into, that there was so much more I could reveal to myself if I could explore my own imagination. But boy, was I scared. I mean, I had a big fear that I was going out on this limb and I was going to fail. And so, I was very nervous about it. It took a lot of courage for me to actually scrape it together and do it. Well, you did it as a pretty powerful opening move, I have to say. When you step into that and you say yes, and you start writing, and I believe The Secret Life of

Bees was about a five-year writing and publication process from what I remember. Starting at around 48, it gets published when you're 53. On the eve of that book coming out, which we now know has become this global phenomenon, sold millions of copies, all sorts of various forms of storytelling built around it, visual auditory. On the eve of that coming out, after you spent, you made this decision, you did something which is very different, very bold, and you devoted years of your life to creating this thing. On the eve of that coming out to the public, how are you feeling? Doubtful. I mean, I did it in a very not unconventional way, I suppose.

I worked three and a half years on the first half of the book, and I felt like half the time I didn't know what I was doing, that I was flying by the seat of my pants. And yet I had this story I really wanted to tell. And I had met the only literary agent I had ever met in New York, had heard me read the short story I based this beginning of the book on. And she said, I hope this is the first chapter of your novel. And if you write it, send it to me. Well, I was electrified by that because I didn't have an agent and I didn't know whether this would work. But I went home and I worked for three and a half years on the first half. And then I thought, oh, my goodness, she probably will not remember me. I better send off half the book to her and see if she remembers who I am. And so I remember,

you know, printing it out and taking it to FedEx and sending it off and waiting and said to my daughter, I hope I haven't made a terrible mistake because I'm not sure this is really any good. And my daughter, who is my first reader and had read it, she said, Mom, it's really good. And I was like, yeah, but she's my daughter. What is she going to say to me? So I was nervous about it. And then the agent calls me up and says, well, I think I can sell it just right with half a book.

And I said, oh, really? And she said, yeah, we're going to have a little auction here and we're going to do it. And then the night before the auction, I'm going around saying, I sound like a terrible doubter and pessimist here, but the truth is, I said to my friend, what if no one bids on it? Well, that'd be terribly embarrassing. So, you know, I'm usually the last to know that something is working or good. Sometimes I need someone else to look at it and tell me, I don't know whether this is coming from self-doubt or what it was, but at the time, I was a total novice. And I didn't know. I've gotten a little

better with all this over the years. But anyway, that's how it began. And then, of course, they lower the boom and tell me, well, we sell the book, but now you've got to write the last half of it in six months. That was the payoff. Oh, dear. Yeah, it is such an interesting process. What I'm also curious about is, we set this up as, you know, like you made this decision, where are you going to change lanes, you're going to step into fiction. But the truth is, if you look at the fiction that you've written, including the Book of Longing, which we're going to dive into in a moment, you never left behind your exploration, observation, and commentary on spirituality and contemplative spirituality and the big questions of how do we live and what matters and who has power and who has voice and agency. I feel like you're speaking to all of the same things, but you've just chosen a different

structure to allow maybe others a different way into the conversation. That's interesting. Yeah, I hope that's true. I feel like my themes are pretty much staying the same over and over again. I do write a lot about race, gender. That all has to do with looking from the bottom up. I mean, I really kind of believe that what we have to do is go to the bottom and look up instead of going to the top and looking down. We have to have that empathetic kind of experience, you know, with everyone, with no boundaries between us. So that was part of it, yeah. It was that same spiritual lens, I guess. But I also write about belonging to one another and finding home.

And there's often a kind of icon, let's call it a metaphoric icon in my work, that kind of presents naturally where there's a black Madonna, or there's a, that has resonance and power in the character's lives. Or there's a spirit tree in The Invention of Wings, where the enslaved people could put their spirits and find a sense of strength and endurance and love. I want there to be that kind of core in the book, too. So, yeah, that matters to me. And in the Book of Longings, it's pretty obvious. And even in the mermaid chair, there was a mermaid saint where women particularly could find their connection to something beyond themselves.

I'm curious when you're writing, are you focused more on story on sort of like the craft of writing and just like this, I really want this story to resonate deeply versus sort of like having almost this meta intention of, and there's a bigger message that I want to come through it. Or is that meta intention even present in the writing? Or is it just kind of like a part of your overall ethos at this point and you know it's going to flow through it if you craft the story you want to craft it? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean here. My intentions are not present in my conscious mind at all. What I really want to do is to tell a story that captures the reader's

heart. I mean, I'm very interested in enlightening someone's mind if I can possibly manage it. But what I want most of all is to touch their heart. I want to jolt their heart, because I really think that's the way in to other human lives. The shortest distance between anything is a story that jolts the heart. And so that's what I'm after is a good story, you know. But I think that the authors, the novelists particularly, has a kind of universe inside of themselves that they're writing out of an ethos, as you said, or their own understanding of the world just kind of comes through like osmosis into it. And I think you can see the fingerprints of a novelist all over that story if you're really looking. I know mine are in there.

But as I'm writing, I'm not thinking about, oh, I've got to get in a metaphoric core that has a spiritual something, or I'm just trying to tell a great story and let all of that come through my own history and understanding. Yeah, that resonates. I remember speaking with Liz Gilbert a couple years back on the show, and she was basically saying, everything that you could want to know about me personally, you can read it through my fiction. She's like, it's right there on the page. Absolutely.

Not overtly, but just beneath the surface. And certainly when we talk about the book of longings, which is talking about jolting somebody. So it's interesting. I was about to say it's a re-imagining of the early years of Jesus through the lens of character who you write into as his wife. But is it really a re-imagining or is this just the left out part of the story? And I guess that's maybe where some of the early controversy was around just the core concept of what this book was. Well, I've heard this book described in so many ways. Some of them I can't repeat. But I think someone described it as an alternate history, a reimagining of history, just all kinds of ways.

I'm not sure what to call it, except I think I did try to do two things, and that was to recover the missing feminine within this Christian Western religion that is so violently missing with consequences. I wanted to maybe talk about the missing feminine, but I also wanted to reimagine that whole scene through the lives of women. How did they experience it? I wanted women to be centric for once in this biblical and religious telling. And what was their role? How did they see it? How did they feel? What did it look like through their eyes and through their hearts? What if we flipped everything and it was all about the women? How did they impact Jesus? What role did Anna, my main character, have on him? How did she influence him? And I wanted her to be a real partner. I wanted him to learn from

her. So that was all afoot, I guess, in my head somewhere as I was doing this. But I did, when I set out, I did largely see this as trying to restore something. Yeah. Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. I mean, when you look at literature, and I would probably say this is not constrained to Christianity. It's almost to any sort of heavily doctrine-based theological literature.

It is so rare. There's so much erasure of the feminine in almost every tradition. And certainly it's not that it didn't exist or women didn't exist in these traditions. They're just not written into it. Yeah, that is so true. And not only is the feminine, the female missing in the images of the divine, which is crucial for women and little girls and little boys and men, because when God is male, male is God. That kind of thing happens in the world. We can trace so much of patriarchy back to that central pillar in religion.

And it's going to be the last one to fall, believe me, I think, in the end. But it's missing, too, in the language, in scriptural stories, in religious stories, in leadership, in all kinds of symbol making, in all kinds of ways. And that has a cumulative effect, not only on individual lives, but on the culture itself. And it's hard to even measure the extent of that. So anything we can do to kind of offer other viewpoints and ways to look at this is important. And I mean, that was why I'll tell you the scariest book I ever wrote was The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. And that was my memoir of my own collision between feminism and my religion. And, you know, I was very worried about very controversial at the time, because that was 1996 before people were really doing these kind of deconstructions and all of this. We didn't even know to call it a deconstruction.

It was just my journey. You know, this is what I was experiencing. And I didn't know if there anyone else out there was. So I think the stories are important, not just our own individual stories of how we're coping, who is fierce and intelligent and has a deep DNA level yearning to write and tell stories, especially the stories of women who are not being told. And putting this in the time of the early life of Jesus and how they meet and connect and then form a relationship. It's interesting, right? Because on the one hand, it's fiction. On the other hand, you're saying to yourself, again, if women don't appear in scripture just en masse, could this actually have been the real story?

Why not? Right? You know, why not? You know, it's heresy on the one hand, but maybe not. Exactly. I mean, I don't know whether Jesus was married or not. I have no idea. And in the end, that did not become important to me. I started out with that question, but I realized that what mattered to me was imagining it. Can we imagine this? And what happens when we do imagine this? How does it affect the way we see things? Does it jolt the heart? Does it make us feel or see or act differently in the world? If

we could have a story where Jesus was married, that is, there was a feminine being present in his life and in the inception of Christianity that was important throughout the story, how would the world be different? Well, it would be very different, I can assure you. I mean, we could talk a long time about all the ways that there would be no celibate priest, probably. I mean, women would be more in the forefront. There would not be this chasm between spirituality and sensuality or sexuality or matter and spirit. And we could just talk about that a long time. So it has ripple effects. And it was just extremely important to me to throw that out there as a possibility and see if the culture could imagine it. And some people are very afraid of even imagining it.

Somehow we are retreating into these places of safety. We think we can keep ourselves safe through certainty, but certainty will not protect us. I am very skeptical of certitude. I am all about the questions and all about imagining what has not been. Yeah, I mean, what certainty protects is the status quo. And if the status quo is steeped in inequitable power, inequitable agency, inequitable voice, then yeah, to what end? Like who is served by that? And who is not served in the most profound ways? You describe, Hannah, in this book early on as having this largeness inside of her.

In fact, there's a prayer that gets recited, Lord, our God, hear my prayer. The prayer of my heart, bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I feel it. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. Which is, you're planting the seed early and you're saying, there is power here. There is fierceness here. There is something to be shared and valued. And it felt like also an invitation for all of us to consider that. Well, I hope so. That was something I hope the reader could take away from the novel, was this desire or need to find their own largeness. Because we all have a kind of particular genius in us that is in there. I

really do believe this. The Greek word for it is entelechy. You know, this innate thing in us that wants to grow and develop into our fullness, our potential. And I call it our particular genius. Anna calls it our largeness. And I think we all can grow into that. But we have to start somewhere. And that is to even recognize that we do have something in us that wants to become. And she felt very fierce and passionate about it. And she was brave enough and daring enough to go for it, which was important for her character. And it's important for us, which was important for her character, you know, and it's important for us.

I think, you know, I've said this so many times that the hardest thing about writing is courage, that actually writing is an act of courage. That was actually stenciled on my wall one time. Writing is an act of courage because it's what I've had to grapple with. But I've tried to write in widening circles where I have to call up more and more courage to tell my story and the stories that are in me to tell. Yeah, it's interesting also, as you're writing about the relationship, sort of building on what you were just saying, Anna is not positioned as a disciple. Her spiritual redemption does not rely on her becoming a disciple and joining this thing. Their relationship deepens, but it's not from a place of teacher and student. It's from a place of mutual respect and elevation, which I'm sure was quite intentional.

Very intentional. In fact, this is Anna's story. A lot of people describe it as the story of Jesus told through the eyes of Anna, but I always saw it as Anna's story and Jesus was a sidekick. In fact, he's not really the main character at all. She is.

And there's a whole section of the book where he's not really present except in her mind and heart and memory. So I remember some early reviews that criticized the book for not letting Anna be present during Jesus' ministry. He went off on his ministry, and she went off on her journey. And they felt like she should have been part of his ministry, and she went off on her journey. And they felt like she should have been part of his ministry. And I recoiled at that because I thought, no, no, that's just the same old story. She has her own powerful path to follow, her own largeness to pursue. And I tried to make that clear that she had to go and fulfill her own destiny just as

he did. And that was part of it. Yeah. And as part of that, I mean, you're also planting seeds along the way, just deepening these ideas and also really saying, going back to what you were sharing earlier, like what if women were actually a part of this story from the very beginning? How would things be different? And so you,

you bring into the conversation, her sort of being deep in the conversation, being not just a sounding board, but a, but a thought partner and a feeling partner as like this doctrine of radical love gets shaped, you know, like this is not something that comes just

from one person. There are more players and she's deeply involved in helping figure this whole thing out. There's a contribution that gets made at the earliest days to what becomes this bigger theology. Yes. One of my favorite scenes that I had fun writing was early in the encounters between Anna and Jesus when they were first meeting. And they had this conversation, and Anna throws out this idea. She says, what we have to do is free God. And he was struck by this. He was like, what do you mean? What do you mean, free God? And she said, from these ideas and concepts that we people have of him. And him is one of those concepts that we have to free God of. Not that we demolish it, but that we free God to be larger, because God has a largeness

too, right? So I think that was one of the examples of what you're talking about, maybe, where she tried to make her own contribution, and he really took that in and took it forward. As this story evolves, as she moves later into her life, and she really says, okay, so the writing needs to happen, the stories need to be told, I'm going to completely go deep into this. Writes what she considers her magnum opus. And then she's doing that in a space where she goes and she's first, you know, you position this in Alexandria and she's first in this like vast library and she's looking at all these different things and initially in awe and then realizing, oh wait, my language here. These are stories about dudes written by dudes.

And I'm not so in awe of that right now. Yeah, she has a kind of epiphany where she realizes that the whole, I think she says something like the whole known world was written by men for men, which was true at the time and is becoming less true now, but still largely that way in many ways. Yeah, she wants to write her own story. And she does. She makes her opus, The Thunder, perfect mind. I love that, which I love the play also,

because Jesus' name for her is Little Thunder. You know, what's interesting, though, as we start to come full circle in that story is that she writes and then a lot of her writings because of the sort of the politics and the social dynamics of the time. She gets concerned that society isn't quite ready for this and bur's writing. And it was striking to me because on just that story, but also in a very real world example, a couple of years back, I was actually walking the eternal spiral of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City with my daughter when we were looking at the life work of Hilma af Klint. And she is this stunning, stunning artist who started doing a lot of realist type of work and then started to be hidden because she believed that society wasn't ready for it. And it was something like 60 years later until finally after her, she basically said, this cannot be shared with the world until after my passing. And I think it was actually 20 years

after that, until finally this work was brought to the public. And it is breathtaking, breathtaking work. And there was, so there was this really interesting parallel, as I was reading the way that you described that latter decision by Anna and the very real life decision of this stunning artist who lived in our world. Yes, I think Anna was worried that they would not survive. And she wanted her voice, her voice in the world to survive. And so we're still waiting for that to be dug up out of the Egyptian desert, of course, Anna's words. So I tried to write them for her, but who knows, maybe she did exist. And there is no telling what was lost. I mean, it is incalculable what probably was lost of women's stories and voices that were never written or that were and maybe didn't survive. So she made the decision to just bury them and hope they were dug up like the Nag Hammadi text, maybe, or like this artist's work.

The title of the book itself, Book of Longings, is the word longing. It's interesting to me in a lot of different ways because it speaks to this yearning. I think everybody can identify something they long for. It makes it very, very universal. But I also, longings, I feel like, and this is part of what I got on an almost subtext level, is that longing can also be a profound teacher to us in a lot of different ways. Well, I think that's actually true in our own lives, that the soul is always trying to have a conversation with us, our own soul. And if we're really smart, we'll try to take up that conversation with this part of ourselves. And one of the ways the soul speaks, maybe most powerfully,

is through longing. So we should pay attention, maybe, to what we long for. So I think maybe it was Anna's aunt, Yaltha, the character in the book, who says to her, to Anna, return to your longing. It will teach you everything. It is a teacher. It does have something to say to us. Maybe cryptic, but it does have something to say to us. Which brings me back to something that you shared last year, actually, on your Instagram

account. And I'm going to read your words because it's a little long and I didn't give you a heads up so that you could pull this up and read it yourself. But you wrote, for the woman I overheard say she wants to write a memoir but can't help feeling it's self-indulgent. May I go on record here? Writing memoir is gloriously self-indulgent, and I'm perfectly okay with that. Women have been told so many times to be selfless that it can actually feel uncomfortable when we attempt to search for one. When I write memoir, I'm undoubtedly in search of wholeness. Maybe I'm trying to resolve something, heal a wound, redeem some part of myself that has

been orphaned or lost, or give a voice to what has been silenced. Maybe I'm trying to step into my truth. Maybe I'm trying to reveal myself to myself. But here's something I didn't expect. Writing memoir can also be gloriously other-indulgent. The process not only takes me into myself, it frees me from myself. I found that to be true.

That the further I go into my own story, my own deep, the freer I am because I'm not consumed with it. The unconscious world, as Jung particularly taught us, will be there to remind you over and over again what you don't deal with. And so we have to kind of be conscious of things. And one way to do that is to write about them. And it frees us from that. And we can kind of resolve it somehow, find peace and wholeness through it and move on.

So it's actually very other-oriented, I think. And when I finished writing The Book of Longings, I printed it all out, and I took the manuscript downstairs from my study and handed it to my husband, who hadn't read a word of it. That's our way we do it. I write it. He knew what I was writing. He knew that I was writing a story about the wife of Jesus. His comment on that was, oh, what could possibly go wrong there? But I handed it to him. And I watched him kind of out of the corner of my eye over the next day or so as he read the manuscript. And when he finished, he looked up and he said, the first words out of his mouth were, there's an awful lot of Anna in you. There's an awful lot of you in Anna. And I knew what he was talking about. But my response to him was, there's an awful lot of Anna in you. There's an awful lot of you in Anna. And I knew what he was talking about, but my response to him was, there's an awful lot of Anna in an awful lot of women,

and an awful lot of women in Anna. And it's not just me. And I think that longing to have a voice in the world and to know our largeness is so palpable for us. In Anna's prayer that she writes in this incantation bowl, she closes by saying, when I am dust, sing these words over my bones. She was a voice. I think that's my prayer too. And that feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To pay attention. To love.

To be here now. Thank you. Before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation that we had with Elizabeth Lesser about the writing life and the role of women in historical narratives and storytelling. You'll find a link to Elizabeth's episode

in the show notes. Good Life Project is a part of the ACAST Creator Network. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better

together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.