Easter Everywhere: A Memoir - Softcover

Steinke, Darcey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596911387 ISBN 13: 9781596911383

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2008

Synopsis

"I became riveted by Steinke's tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum...[Easter Everywhere is] a delicately wrought little volume...This is a beautiful book." ―New York Times Book Review

In this critically beloved and piercing memoir, Darcey Steinke, a minister's daughter, recounts her lifelong struggle to find religion. Though wide-eyed and accepting as a girl, Steinke left the faith in her teenage years; scene by breathtaking scene, she vividly describes the angst, embarrassment, uncertainty, and joy of her decades of on-and-off piety. Emotional, wise, and beautifully crafted, Easter Everywhere is a rare literary accomplishment, a feat of storytelling and personal insight.

About this title

About the Author:

Darcey Steinke is the author of four novels, two of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel Suicide Blonde has been translated into eight languages, and her novel Milk has been translated into four. Her nonfiction has been featured in Vogue, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, Spin, the Boston Review, and the New York Times Magazine. She currently teaches at both Columbia University and New School University in New York City. She lives with her daughter in Brooklyn.

From Publishers Weekly:

A scrappy kid with a violent stutter, novelist Steinke (Milk; Suicide Blonde) is the oldest child of an aloof Lutheran minister and a clinically depressed former Miss Albany. The household is steeped in the word of God; Steinke grows up brewing her own communion wine, baptizing the neighborhood cats and craving, even at age six, spiritual transcendence. It's a wish that never leaves her, and she's tireless in her pursuit of this elusive state of oneness, first seeking it in a sexually obsessive relationship with a man who turns out to be gay, and then in her doomed marriage. Her writing on these topics is blunt and powerful. When her husband confides that a teenage girl of their acquaintance has been e-mailing him, Steinke doesn't pull her punches. "Michael believed that getting close to young girls and hearing about their love life was so exciting that anyone, even his own wife, would understand the Masonic pull." When it comes to her personal relationship with God—the real meat of the book—Steinke is relatively brief, almost distant: "The idea of church still has a grip on my imagination, but I realize now that what I thought was held only inside those walls—grace and divinity—is actually located directly and authentically inside myself." Steinke is a gifted writer, and this only leaves readers wanting more. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1596911387
• ISBN 13: 9781596911383
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240