A Change of Habit
Leaving Behind My Husband, Career, and Everything I Owned to Become a Nun
Claudette Powell was working as a live-in nanny in her early 20s when her employer, a lapsed Catholic married to a Jew, suggested that they take the kids to church. Powell, “a twice-lapsed Baptist and Mormon” who hadn’t been to church in years, cautiously agreed. They went to a Christmas Eve service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church of Beverly Hills, where “even the poinsettias were tasteful,” and when Powell saw that the priest was a woman, she “nearly fell right off the pew.” Thus began her transformation into Sister Monica Clare, an Episcopal sister who is best known these days for her TikTok channel @nunsenseforthepeople.
Her transformation, which she chronicles in A Change of Habit, takes two decades and involves a lot of work—including therapy and Al-Anon to process the violence of her turbulent childhood, various jobs including film editing and stand-up comedy, a painful break from her biological father, and a disastrous marriage that she knows from the start is “an exercise in feeble hope.”
Much of the memoir is dedicated to describing Powell’s insecurities and failures. Some of these failures are monumental, like the time when she inadvertently turns a $10 flea market ring from her ambivalent boyfriend into a marriage proposal. Others are more trivial, like the time when she gets invited to a birthday party for Jimmy Fallon (who she’s never met) and there are only a handful of people there so she spends the whole evening being a wallflower, and when she tries to sneak out, Fallon (who she still hasn’t met) accosts her by the front door and embraces her in a giant, theatrical hug while making her the butt of a whispered joke.
