In Unconverted, you share with readers the surprising journey that resulted from your unexpected marriage to an Episcopal priest. Why was this an important book for you to write? 

This was an important book for me to write because, beginning around the time I started going to church every Sunday with my children, I was thunderstruck by the feeling that my life had changed enormously, and in a way that I hadn’t fully anticipated before marriage. I realized that falling in love with a particular person, who was on a particular trajectory, set in motion a whole chain of events that brought me into unfamiliar territory: The Church, really, Any Church. I needed to figure out who I really was: how much I could shift around inside myself to accept some degree of religion, even as a bystander; how much my well-being depended upon my staying the secular person I had always been. Sitting in a pew, time after time, watching my husband up front performing his duties, I became fascinated with both the covenant and the daily reality of marriage – what it asks of us, how it enables us to grow and sometimes to merge with another person, how much room it allows for maintaining individuality.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

Since this is a book about our marriage, I had to be careful throughout with any scenes depicting my husband’s actions or words; I needed his buy-in, his memories of these particular scenes, for accuracy. It was important to me that, overall, he comes across as the very decent and loving person that he is.  And I couldn’t make the mistake of assuming I knew what his feelings were in particular moments, either – only what I observed (unless he wanted me to know).  Probably the hardest parts of the book to write were the episodes when I stand apart, in some way, from engaging in the full experience of a church service. Specifically, the section when I remain in the pew at communion time, watching my kids go up for the wine and wafer, feeling a kind of necessary isolation; also Chapter 36 — “At the Consecration,” because that event was so celebratory in nature, with many people looking at me, I knew that my internal anxiety pegged me as someone swimming against the tide. And yet, that feeling was precisely what made the scene worth depicting in a book. It was in my Memoir Incubator class at Grub Street that I got the idea to begin this chapter with a childhood memory of lying in a field, seeing the crows circling; I’m proud of the honesty in this writing.

What is one misconception you believe many people have regarding mixed-faith marriages?

Mixed-faith marriages have become increasingly common over the past 50 years or so, part of the cultural landscape that most of us accept as normal. And yet, people continue to gather data on these unions, trying to discern how much impact this particular kind of difference makes over time, in the life of a couple, especially when it comes to divorce rates. From my perspective, a common misperception that is still prevalent is probably that couples spend a whole lot of time wrangling over matters of faith, trying to come to agreement about their individual beliefs. In the case of my marriage, we had probing conversations on the topic through our courtship, owing to the fact that we each knew we were falling in love and so needed to bring it all out into the open: the fact that he was devoting his life to serving the Church, while I wasn’t even sure what I believed! My willingness to have our children be brought up Episcopalian meant that we didn’t need to disagree about a key element in how they were raised, or what holidays we celebrated, etc. Over time, while we continued to explore our diverging beliefs (many being already in synch) we discovered that the key challenges we faced in maintaining daily harmony had more to do with how we were each “built” – his introversion and need for quiet, my extroversion and need for connection – than any specific doctrines we embraced. How well we managed a long drive to Nova Scotia together, for instance, wasn’t determined by anybody’s faith tradition, or lack thereof.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your experiences? 

As they finish Unconverted, I hope readers will take away a sense of tenderness about what’s involved in living out any long-term commitment between two people, especially one in which a fundamental difference is baked right into the relationship. I also hope that they’ll consider how such a difference can actually enrich a union, rather than threaten it, with each person being able to see and respect and learn from “another way” followed by a beloved without fully adopting that other way. Perhaps many readers will have had some kind of a similar experience – when they’ve felt the need to retain their own true nature, stay loyal to their roots, while also making space for someone else’s next to them – and therefore they will take away encouragement that the effort is worth the challenge. In addition, I hope readers might reflect upon how falling for and staying with another person always takes some degree of courage as well as vulnerability; you are taking a risk, putting yourself on the line, opening yourself up to many potential kinds of changes. So long as you don’t give up a sense of your own integrity, your heart can grow in surprising ways.

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