Easter Everywhere: A Memoir

by Darcey Steinke

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596919136
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	280 KB

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.
Darcey Steinke is the author of three previous novels, two of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel Suicide Blonde has been translated into eight languages.

Editorial Reviews

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

Stephen Metcalf

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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Publishers Weekly

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

Library Journal

In poignant prose, the daughter of a minister and a depressed former beauty queen details her religious disillusionment.” —People

“Lovely...compelling...[Thomas] Merton writes of the 'real and constant danger of carelessness and indifference . . . the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls.' Darcey Steinke has captured that struggle in painful but luminous detail. She's earned her measure of grace. And, like Merton before her, she possesses the skill and generosity of spirit to share it with readers.” —Village Voice

“She drew this atheist reader deep into her devotional tale, seducing with prose that is rich and filling, with images that are startling and deep.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Is it any wonder that from the Redeemer to Augustine, from Pascal to W.H. Auden, it has been the doubters, more than the believers, who have kept up religion's good name? A skeptic in this tradition, 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....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

“[Steinke] serves sin and sainthood in equal portions, a dichotomy she continues to explore in her frank, beautiful new memoir, Easter Everywhere...Steinke tells her family saga with journalistic savvy, reporting on events rather than using them to force a point. There's no moralizing or gluey sentimentality...But even at its most measured, Easter Everywhere is full of surprises, especially as it maps out its author's return to spirituality: She finds sacredness not just in churches but in "libraries, garbage dumps, the cruising area of public parks." This book is an excellent account of a writer going head-to-head with the divine and finding some inner quiet—even in the darkest corners of her imagination.” —Time Out New York

“Darcey Steinke certainly knows her way around characters and plot...it's a joy to see her inner life finally exposed.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Steinke unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A smoothly written memoir detailing the derailing of a minister's daughter….at every conjuncture, the reader finds joy in Steinke's journey.” —Booklist

“Her writing...is blunt and powerful...Steinke is a gifted writer, and this...leaves readers wanting more.” —Publisher's Weekly

“You probably wouldn't envy Darcey Steinke her childhood...But her resolve to keep her adult mind as bubbling with question marks and wonderment as it did in her days spent coloring outside the lines could sting even the world-weary with fresh longing...She writes so easily and poetically of her childhood that the cheekiest sarcasm sails past like a smooth curveball...Steinke and her spritely daughter, Abbie, are an inspiring pair—together hungrily posing life's most sober questions and willfully facing skyward.” —Elle

“I adore this book. Darcey Steinke beautifully leads us through her lifetime of spiritual seeking, from a childhood spent in the basement of her father's church, through a young adulthood of rebellion, into a mature and profound personal reckoning with the divine. She writes intelligently, honestly, movingly about a subject which is not always easy to address. It's an inspiration.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

From the Publisher