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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness cover

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Karen Armstrong

0

awards won

3

score

#3447 of 3,809 books · #1143 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest (2004).

The Spiral Staircase won the National Bestseller award and was a The New York Times bestseller. In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.

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Publisher
Anchor
ISBN-13
9780307429391
Topics
Religious life and faith crisisConvent life and epilepsyComparative theology

Other awarded books from Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

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