Easter Everywhere: A Memoir

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Easter Everywhere: A Memoir (eBook) Pub. Date: 12/1/2008 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
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Easter Everywhere: A Memoir Pub. Date: 3/18/2008 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
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Easter Everywhere: A Memoir Pub. Date: 4/28/2007 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Overview

The daughter of a minister and a former beauty queen, Darcey Steinke recalls accompanying her father on sick calls, stopping by the scene of accidents, and holding her own pretend wedding and funeral services. Her father's first church was built from a "church kit" and most of the parishioners worked at the local carnival. As a child, religion soaked all her activities. In Easter Everywhere, Steinke tracks her complex and changing ideas about God and how these ideas were impacted by her mother's nervous breakdown and her father's struggle with his parish before Steinke turned her back on religion, filling the void with club hopping and romantic obsessions. The second half of the memoir details how Steinke, after marriage, becoming a mother and then getting divorced, was able to finally accept her essential ignorance and begin, with the help of a remarkable Episcopal nun, Sister Leslie, the slow process toward a living faith. Easter Everywhere is a rare literary accomplishment, a beautifully crafted, riveting personal story with a huge emotional impact.

Editorial Reviews

Stephen Metcalf

Darcey Steinke is also, in her own way, a skeptic about the virtues of the contemporary memoir, now a mostly secular genre in which every human unhappiness is trendily medicalized or assigned its origin in a topical childhood trauma. In her memoir, Easter Everywhere, Steinke has dared to ask, What if my abiding sense of misery isn't due to abuse or balky neurotransmission, but to the absence of God in my life, to an unfulfilled relationship with my own divinity, as vouchsafed to me by the Creator?

This may seem a peculiar starting point for a Brooklyn it-girl novelist best known for books with titles like Suicide Blonde, but my preconceptions evaporated by about Page 3, when I became riveted by Steinke's tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum.
—The New York Times

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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Library Journal

Steinke (Suicide Blonde), best known as a fiction author, now turns to memoir. Much of her story is made up of the usual trappings of contemporary biography: an awkward childhood, teenage rebellion, marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Yet Steinke's account is filled with the quirks of her own experience, which she recounts with startling honesty. Her father was a minister whose congregants ranged from carnival workers to mental patients, and the family moved frequently; she morphed from a stuttering child outcast into a teenage fashion model acceptable to her unhappy, ex-beauty queen mother. What really sets this book apart, however, is the underlying theme of Steinke's religious experience. She never falls into the easy trap of embracing the Right or Left of our current cultural wars. Instead, she remains solidly focused on her own idiosyncratic spiritual journey, from her identity as a child raised in the church who fell away as a teenager to the fits and starts of her return to religion as an adult, broken, longing, and hopeful. Recommended for public libraries.
—Alison M. Lewis

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781596911383
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication date: 3/18/2008
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 5.73 (w) x 7.87 (h) x 0.73 (d)

Meet 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. Her short fiction has appeared in the Literary Review, Story Magazine, Bomb, and her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, Spin, and the New York Times Magazine. She currently teaches at New School University in New York City and lives with her daughter in Brooklyn.

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Anonymous

Posted November 26, 2007

A reviewer

Written like you are reading a diary. Her recollection of detail is astounding. Reading her book is like making different choices in life than I actually did and seeing what would have happened. Her ability to put difficult to articulate sensations, observations, etc. into words is among the best of any author I know. I want to give this book to everyone I know.
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