67 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A highly readable look behind the closed doors of a convent, September 14, 2005
This review is from: The Tulip and the Pope: A Nun's Story (Hardcover)
Anyone who ever attended Catholic school will understand why Deborah Larsen was so curious in her youth about convent life. Surely we girls all wondered, at least--we shapeless lumps in knee-highs and pleated skirts--what the nuns who taught us did behind closed doors, how their communal life was organized. That same curiosity is what will draw readers to Ms. Larsen's memoir, The Tulip and the Pope, an account of the nearly five years the author spent as a nun some forty years ago among the BVMs, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
To most of us the lifestyle Larsen and her fellow postulants to the order adopted upon "entering religion" would be anything but appealing: not only was complete obedience to one's superiors in the order required, but postulants had also in effect to renounce their individuality. One could not own anything: even the habit a nun donned with such attention, pinning and snapping it into position with the greatest care, was considered communal property. All mail, incoming and outgoing, was screened and might or might not be delivered at the discretion of one's superiors. Nuns were forbidden to establish "particular friendships" with one another lest anyone among them be left out. Postulants could not bring their own books into the convent and could thus read only the religious publications provided there for them. Nuns were to practice "custody of the eyes," not making eye contact with one another, not looking about willy-nilly at the world around them.
The convent as Larsen describes it is a stark, black-and-white place, a sensory-deprived world in which a young woman might understandably look forward, as Larsen did, to the task of cleaning out the convent's walk-in freezer: a perk of this job was that the person performing it had to wear a particular sweater, one that happened to be green rather than white or black and thus set its wearer apart from her Sisters. Almost as if she were an individual. In this world the responsibility for decision-making was taken from the individual, who lived content in the knowledge that in doing anything by order of her superiors she was doing God's will: "...the day-to-day living of Holy Obedience was pretty simple. Simple in the extreme as a matter of fact: your Sister superior's will for you is expressive of the Will of God. If the superior has you on the duty list for scrubbing toilets, that is God's Will for you. How positively joyful that you are certain that when you are cleaning the toilets, that is God's Will." One could see the appeal of this trouble-free existence, it being a kind of extended childhood, if the price of not having to balance a checkbook and make mortgage payments and pick out one's own clothes were not deemed exorbitant.
What is remarkable about Larsen's thoughtful book is that she does manage to convey to readers what the appeal of the convent was for her. One understands her decision to commit herself to that ascetic lifestyle at nineteen, and one understands equally well her decision some five years later to walk out the convent's front door onto the snowy streets of Dubuque, Iowa, no longer wearing her habit. But while she is implicitly critical of the religious life when explaining the intellectual process by which she came to reject the convent, Larsen is by no means disdainful of it.
Although the outcome of Larsen's memoir is foreordained--the author's bio, after all, makes it clear that she did not remain in the convent--the book offers readers a sort of suspense. We know that the heroine will emerge safe, if you will, at the book's end, but fear nonetheless in the reading that she won't make it, that she'll surrender herself to the Church and live with her eyes perpetually downcast. Fortunately Ms. Larsen did not choose that for herself forty years ago, and she has, among many other things no doubt, a highly readable memoir to show for it.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
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33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great writing saves the day (and the book), December 9, 2005
This review is from: The Tulip and the Pope: A Nun's Story (Hardcover)
Several years ago, I worked with an ex-nun. Naturally, I was fascinated by her former life, but she herself dismissed the mystique. Asked why she left, she shrugged. Her friends had left and they said, "How come you're still here?" Not much more traumatic than changing more secular careers.
And Deborah Larsen's memoir echoes this view. Near the end, Larsen asks a present-day BVM nun who would have been her contemporary, "Why did you stay?"
Prosaically, the nun answers, "It's a good fit for me." She's using the language of career, not vocation, and we shouldn't overlook the significance of that distinction.
Larsen entered one of the most progressive, intelligent religious communities in the US. She remarks on the good taste that now surrounded her. And although she agonized over the decision to leave, she received support from friends and most of the religious community. And when she took off her veil for the last time -- no big deal. Just another evening.
Larsen writes with a detachment that could be considered cold, or perhaps poetic. We get few glimpses of struggle -- interior or exterior -- from the moment she entered to the day she left. Weren't there any conflicts? (Even my ex-colleague remembered a civil war with her novice mistress.) Any moments of intense homesickness, anger or frustration? Larsen doesn't even seek advice till she turns to her confessor as she considers leaving the religious life.
Following the rules of writing, Larsen's book should fail. No conflict. Little suspense. No adventure. But instead the book is selling well and I didn't want to put it down.
Why? Well, each chapter reads like an elegant essay, more like a short op-ed piece than a memoir.
And Larsen's irony, sometimes approaching self-mockery, keeps the story from becoming maudlin. She inserts actual documents - lists of "what to bring to the convent," rules from previous years - that communicate a sense of early-sixties religious life more than any narrative and add further to the sense of irony and detachment.
But the greatest irony comes from the way Larsen keeps contrasting Hulme's Nun's Story with her own. Before entering the convent, Larsen practically memorized the story. Now Sister Luke hovers like a ghost throughout the book and, most likely, through Larsen's life.
And Larsen occasionally stretches the irony into humor. My favorite passage can be found on page 210, The Taste of Straw, where Larsen compares her own departure with Sr. Luke's. "How I wish the Belgian underground were waiting for me!" Almost a laugh-aloud moment.
But more seriously, she captures the ambiguity and angst of a true life transition -- something I, as a career consultant, find worth exploring. Leaving an identity can be especially problematic when you are moving from something, not to a new goal. Larsen vaguely dreamed of marriage and family. On page 206 she writes, rather matter-of-factly, of moving from procrastination and dawdling to the sheer power of dramatic motivation.
This book makes a worthwhile contrast to Peter Manseau's book, Vows, which I have just read and reviewed. Manseau's parents experienced religious life as repressive, because they were an earlier generation. Larsen's story might be closer to what Peter Manseau's life would have been like, had he chosen to remain with the Trappists. Both began with ideals. She had Sister Luke; he had Thomas Merton.
I wish Larsen had shared more of her life between convent departure and her reunion forty years later.
Ultimately author's writing triumphs over potential flaws. And I don't know how to categorize the book: memoir? Coming of age? Religious or ex-religious? It's a triumph of writing that I realized it doesn't matter. I liked the book.
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