Karen Armstrong is best known, at least in the United States, for her popular works on the history of religion (A History of God, The Great Transformation, etc.). This memoir covers her life following her reentry into the world after seven years as a young nun in a convent.Armstrong really is a suffering soul. Her efforts to fit herself into the totalitarian regime of the convent eventually led to a breakdown. Her subsequent years of study for an academic career also came to nothing when her doctorate was unjustly denied. Part of her distress in life turned out to be caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition mistaken for attention-seeking by her callous religious superiors, and misdiagnosed as the product of a flawed childhood by psychiatrists who ought to have known better.
A crucial discovery comes halfway through the book: “I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out toward the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself” (p. 143), she decides. This truth-telling was a lengthy process, and it would be many years before she learned to articulate her own perspective as opposed to repeating the view of others. But she does manage it, and in contrast to the repeated setbacks of her earlier life, success in television and writing then follows almost effortlessly. “The great myths show,” she later concludes, “that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray.”
I found this book to be a real page-turner, even when Armstrong was describing the minutiae of life-events, and her gradual self-discovery and self-acceptance make for a heart-warming read.
Karen Armstrong. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. New York: Anchor (Random House), 2005. Paperback. 336 pages. ISBN 9780385721271. $14.95.
