Easter Everywhere: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Darcey Steinke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2007

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

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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From Booklist

Steinke, author of several novels, including Jesus Saves (1997), turns out a smoothly written memoir detailing the derailing of a minister's daughter. Her father's professional life begins in a poverty-ridden carnival town where he builds a modest A-frame church from a mail-order kit. Her voluptuous mother, a former beauty queen, is worn down and depressed by "the degraded position" of a poor clergyman's wife, and young Darcey becomes "desperate to minimize [her] mother's sadness." The child sometimes escapes and plays "deacon of the woods" as she baptizes cats, weds her calico blanket for security, and performs funerals for dead animals. A third child's birth pushes her mother temporarily over the edge. When Dad enters secular life "ministering to crazy people" in a state institution, it's another step down. No wonder Darcey stutters. And no wonder she rebels, committing herself "to glamour" and appearing in photo shoots and commercials as her wildness increases. Marriage, motherhood, and divorce follow, and at every conjuncture, the reader finds joy in Steinke's journey. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582345309
• ISBN-13: 978-1582345307
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,402,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars finally, a memoir about religion I can identify with, April 26, 2007

By 

Brooklyn reader "Lily" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easter Everywhere: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I was feeling very down when I picked up this memoir and reading it gave me some respite and new insight into what is often labelled depression--but what this author suggests might actual be spiritual longing. Without being zealous, Steinke wrestles on the page in very spare, moderate prose with her struggle to come to terms with her questions about spirituality, instilled in her as a child by her father, a Lutheran minister, with a need for a different kind of spirituality as an adult. I would love to read more by this writer about her ongoing attempts to find spirituality in her life.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faith and Doubt, May 2, 2007

By 

Rene Marks (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Easter Everywhere: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Easter Everywhere is an unusual memoir---a beautifully-written exploration of the connections between faith and doubt. Especially at a time when zealots and fundamentalists have the loudest public voice on religion, it's a relief to read Steinke as she frankly probes her own belief, not with cliched pieties, but with a fierce search for God, with all the struggles and uneasiness that entails. The writing is so vivid and compelling, this book will move readers (especially perhaps those with spotty church histories, or no religious background at all) to consider their own faith or lack of it. Steinke's story is startling, poignant, and revelatory.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry in motion, July 27, 2007

By 

J. A. Davis "jadecat" (Northern Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Easter Everywhere: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This was a beautifully-written memoir about growing up as a minister's daughter. The author paints a vivid picture of what it was like to move from place to place, live with a mother who suffered from depression, all the while searching for spiritual meaning in her life. It's very honest and frank, yet has a poetic quality to it. Whether you are a devout Christian or struggling with your faith, I think everyone will find something to relate to in this memoir.