In her previous memoir, Parched
, King wrote about two decades of “squandering my talents, sleeping around, smoking cigarettes, and swilling Sea Breezes at 8 a.m. in Sullivan's Tap,” saving her conversion to Catholicism for the epilogue. Here she looks at what she considers the more interesting part of her story (“nothing is more boring than degradation”)—her everyday life without alcohol, with God and yet still full of struggle and pain. “Sometimes I think anyone as drawn as I am to suffering would have had to become a Catholic,” she writes. The book starts off as straight memoir: sobriety, frustration, attraction, conversion. In the fifth chapter, however, she shifts to topical essays with a pronounced theological bent. King, familiar to many from her commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered
, maintains her signature self-deprecatory humor throughout, at the same time offering readers plenty to chew on as she reflects on her father's death, her bout with breast cancer, the end of her marriage, the importance of humility and the inevitability of loneliness. Though suffering is a constant theme, King's faith sees beyond the pain: “heaven is not some other world, but shot all through the broken world where we already live.” (Feb. 18)
