Former nun Catherine Coldstream spent 12 years at Akenside, a Carmelite monastery in Northumberland, England. Now, 22 years after leaving, she is sharing her story in a debut memoir, 'Cloistered' (St. Martins), which PW’s starred review says “opens a window into a reclusive culture, resolutely exposing its problems without losing sight of its virtues.” PW talked with Coldstream about her experience, and why she is telling her story now.
It’s been 22 years since you left Akenside. Why are you sharing your story now?
As soon as I left Akenside, I started writing. I had a huge amount I needed to get onto the page. I wanted to tell my side of the story and I needed to give it form and shape and somehow exorcise it. But my first draft was very raw. I wasn't a practiced writer at that stage. I left that draft in a plastic bag in a bottom drawer, and it sat there for 10 years. Then, about 12 years ago, I started working on my writing seriously. I worked on different ways of telling my story, which included a fictionalized novella version and a family memoir. It was only about four years ago that I started writing the version that has become Cloistered.
You’re keenly observant and descriptive—do you believe that skill that was honed during your years of quietude?
Very much so. You've put your finger on something I've never stopped to think about, but it’s absolutely true. Our whole life was so focused. Every moment of the day you were completely conscious of what you were doing. It’s called recollection, and it’s sort of like mindfulness. It means that you are aware all the time. You never rush out of a room or blurt something out. It’s a kind of self-possession that makes you very aware of your inner world. This is a result of the silence of the cloister. That, coupled with the intense regulation that meant you never had to think or act spontaneously, meant you had loads of time to observe quietly. The focus and discipline made you become hypersensitive to things like birdsong and footsteps and people’s facial expressions.
There were a striking number of contradictions in the nuns’ behavior, including gossiping, harsh judgments, and forming cliques. Do you think Akenside bred those issues, or did monastic life itself lead to them?
My community was definitely dysfunctional. There were toxic control issues going on from the top. But not all Carmelite communities are like that. The Carmelite ideal should be harmonious. But when human nature is under pressure with very little freedom or comfort, it has to find some outlet for frustration. Even in the better-run Carmelite monasteries, people are carrying all kinds of baggage. Everyone is fighting their demons. That was the metaphor we used—you fight your demons in a desert, like St. Anthony did when he went out into the desert. He had all these terrible experiences of devils and demons, which are interpreted as facing the dark side of your psyche. Everyone’s got a shadow side. Everyone’s struggling with it, and it’s happening in all monasteries, but people are more or less successful at covering it up or going with this serene exterior. Things probably go wrong in all monasteries, but mine was particularly dysfunctional.
Why did you feel you couldn’t leave Akenside, even though you were deeply unhappy for years?
When you’ve been formed into something, like people who join an army or even a cult, it's very difficult to leave. Your whole identity is bound up with it, and the outside world feels so alien. I was hardly ever outside Akenside. In 10 years, I went to the dentist once, the optician twice, and to a few religious meetings in another Carmelite. Your identity is formed by all those years at such a deep level. You get reprogrammed to that life. You fall in love with it and keep trying to make the best of it, even when there are massive toxic dysfunctions. It’s hard to stay, but it’s also really hard to leave.
Your deep devotion to faith seemed like a perfect match for monastic life, but it ended up clashing with the prioress’s rules. Is it possible for anyone to achieve the combination of devotion and rule-following that makes an ideal nun?
Monastic life is almost designed to break parts of you. There’s this old-fashioned idea of being “broken in” that says parts of your personality need to be completely remodeled. This process can bring positive change, but only after quite a lot of what feels destructive and painful. There are certain robust psyches who can really weather it, but most of the younger generation, my generation born in the sixties and seventies, seemed to suffer from breakdowns. The older ones, your grandmothers and great-grandmothers, people who lived through the wars in the fifties, had a stoic toughness that’s very rare nowadays. I think probably a certain personality type can flourish, but it’s quite rare.
How do you want this memoir to change readers’ perception of monastic life?
I want to leave people with a much more nuanced and realistic picture of what cloistered life is like. I want to move people away from the stereotypical idea of nuns as inhuman or superhumans. Nuns are human beings who are struggling. And I don’t want to demonize monasticism or make people think it’s intrinsically negative. I want to show people the beauty and attraction of cloistered traditions and all the things that made that life so compelling and powerful for me. At the same time, I want to tell my personal story of how things went wrong because of bad leadership, dishonesty, double standards, and power games. I want to tell my story and be heard rather than be silenced.
