Notes on This Manuscript The following manuscript, printed here for the first time, came to light on the eve of November 4, 2024. While on a self-directed silent retreat at the Riverdale Center in the Hudson Valley, a Franciscan sister…
I began this novel as a short story, during a time of my life when I couldn’t love myself. The characters were raw, the energy childlike and chaotic—the trauma overflowed. Six months later, I would enter sobriety and experience the seismic shifts of recovery.
Recovery has its own language, many suggestions, and few rules. My early recovery was strange, lonely, and lacked an easy redemption. Perhaps the best thing I did for my fiction writing was enter a PhD program in religion. During the pandemic, I studied and practiced Buddhism. I read the female Catholic mystics—especially Saint Teresa of Ávila, Marguerite Porete, and Hadewijch—watched my country decay.
In my Women and Religion course, we begin with love-smitten Buddhist monks meditating on charnel grounds and end on ecstasies. Saint Teresa describes her ecstasies as violent and unpredictable; when they’re over, she is overcome with detachment, disillusioned to find herself once again tethered to the earthly world. I tell my students: I think Saint Teresa is asking: How do you return to the world once you have this kind of life-altering experience?
At some point, this short story became a novel, and a novel about recovery. Inspired by the mystics like Teresa, my novel became both a testimony and an excavation. But I struggled with these opening pages for a long time. My novel’s protagonist, Mary, lives in three different timelines. The trauma of the past timelines still pulled the novel’s focus, while Mary in the present—Mary recovering—was stalled. How do you visualize this disillusionment—not the chronic disillusionment of active addiction, but this shocking of yourself into a hope without a comedown?
I picked up an older manuscript of Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, a treatise on love and the soul that ultimately led to her being burned alive at the stake. The manuscript’s first introduction explained the discovery of the manuscript and questions about its anonymous author. I liked reading about the mystery of the found manuscript, and the steps taken to solve this mystery. I made a mental note to try this frame for a future project.
Someone in workshop told me they admired my “resistance to narrative norms,” a phrase I turned over in my head. What could be found in this resistance, and what could be gained from it?
Eventually, I thought: Why not find out?
Form tells the story; I don’t want form to be the story. Using the found-manuscript frame expanded the novel’s consciousness to the “we” chorus of Dominican sisters and the Millennial Archivist piecing together their stories with care while questioning the mysteries herself. I’d been reading the apocryphal gospels of early Christianity—a blend of secondhand testimonies and hagiographies—and I wanted that layered sense of witness and also playfulness. The workshop member remarked that these women are on the “margins of history.” I like the idea that this insular world—one that’s often overlooked—can be amplified rather than contained.
LAUREN BARBATO’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Common, The Hopkins Review, Blackbird, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cola, and elsewhere. In 2025, she won the Short Fiction Award from American Literary Review, and has received scholarships and recognition from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Lauren has also been in residence at Jentel Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. A PhD candidate in religion at Temple University, Lauren teaches in the gender studies department at the University of Delaware and researches pro-choice Catholic nuns and reproductive politics when not writing fiction.
