Easter Everywhere

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. Praise for Easter Everywhere: "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.. 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