Crisis of faith

The plot that drives Erin White’s memoir—the story of a woman simultaneously falling in love with Catholicism and another woman—isn’t unique. Plenty of LGBT Catholics struggle to reconcile their sexuality with the expectations of what White calls “one of the most harshly and unapologetically homophobic denominations in the world.” What’s unique is the writing. Unlike most memoirists, White is an excellent writer. Her prose is poetic, funny, and deeply honest. She had me at page 14, where she describes reading the Gospels for the first time after a breakup with a boyfriend:

They stunned me. They were nothing like I had imagined. The language had a hard and declarative edge that was as poetic as it was spare. Not a wasted word. After a few nights of reading I could hear Jesus’ voice when he spoke. I liked his obtuse metaphors and his starkly beautiful language. . . . I was besotted. I began to read the great Catholic thinkers, the philosophers and poets and mystics, and in everything I read, Jesus seemed to fly off the page—he was a feeling, he was a voice, he was sweet relief from the loud world and my new loneliness in it. And then one spring night he was in my apartment.

That’s right, Jesus shows up in her apartment. Jesus of the Futon, to be precise. He sits next to her on the edge of her futon, “wearing the softest flannel shirt in the world. His hands were rough and his voice was warm and low, and for the moment he spent with me, he was extraordinarily good company.” After he vanishes, White wonders “if solitude would always feel this warm, this brimming.” A few weeks later, White steps into a Catholic church and falls in love with what she experiences there.