The Tulip and the Pope
A Nun's Story
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The story of novelist and poet Deborah Larsen's young womanhood, The Tulip and the Pope is both an exquisitely crafted spiritual memoir and a beautifully nuanced view of life in the convent.In midsummer of 1960, nineteen-year-old Deborah shares a cab to a convent. She and the teenage girls with her, passionate to become nuns, heedless of all they are leaving behind, smoke their last cigarettes before entering their new lives. In the same artful prose that distinguished her novel The White, Larsen's memoir lets us into the hushed life of the convent. She captures the exquisite peace she found there, as well as the extreme constriction of the rules and her gradual awareness of all that she is missing. Eventually the physical world—the lush tulip she remembers seeing as a girl, the snow she tunneled in, and even the mystery of sex—begins to seem to her an alternative theater for a deep understanding and love of God.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In July of 1960, 19-year-old Larsen (then Deborah Maertz) smoked a final cigarette before walking through the doors of Mount Carmel convent in Dubuque, Iowa. Inspired by Sister Luke in the 1956 novel The Nun's Story, she was determined to be a perfect nun, though she somehow overlooked Sister Luke's little problem with the vow of obedience. Along with theology and scripture, she studied posture and movement, hygiene and manners, French and "custody of the eyes" (how to avoid being distracted by one's surroundings). She practiced silence, performed menial tasks and prayed daily, always following her order's rule while increasingly hungering for sensory experiences: "The fabrics I were black and white serge, wool, cotton. There was no crushed velvet, no fleece, no angora, and no slubbed silk." In 1965, after a year of college in Chicago and many visits with her confessor, she decided not to make her final vows. One among thousands of American nuns to leave religious life during the tumultuous 1960s, Larsen is now a writing teacher, poet (Stitching Porcelain) and novelist (The White). Affectionate rather than bitter, her memoir is a richly detailed reminiscence of convent life and a sensitive evocation of a young Catholic woman's coming-of-age.
