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Easter Everywhere: A Memoir
Easter Everywhere: A Memoir
Easter Everywhere: A Memoir
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Easter Everywhere: A Memoir

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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In this critically beloved and piercing memoir, Darcey Steinke, a minister's daughter, recounts her lifelong struggle to find religion. Though wide-eyed and accepting as a girl, Steinke left the faith in her teenage years; scene by breathtaking scene, she vividly describes the angst, embarrassment, uncertainty, and joy of her decades of on-and-off piety. Emotional, wise, and beautifully crafted, Easter Everywhere is a rare literary accomplishment, a feat of storytelling and personal insight.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 1, 2008
ISBN9781596919136
Easter Everywhere: A Memoir
Author

Darcey Steinke

Darcey Steinke is the author of three previous novels, two of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her novel Suicide Blonde has been translated into eight languages.

Read more from Darcey Steinke

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Rating: 3.224137903448276 out of 5 stars
3/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    4 stars for writing, 2 for content.

    This memoir was a quick, interesting read and was well written. The author is a writer, and she does write well.She writes with honesty and lucidity which I do appreciate. She's written other books, novels, which I will not be reading.

    I liked the beginning part of her memoir here more than the second half.

    One of the reasons I read memoirs is because I want to be inspired. I want to get a glimpse of people's courage. Of strength to overcome trials in life. I didn't find those things here.

    Part of what makes me give only two stars for content is that I found Steinke somewhat dislikable. She is a little too goth for me, for one thing. I found it hard to relate to her crazy relationships and her judgement when it comes to friends and partners. She reminds me of an old childhood exfriend who was moody, phony and unreliable.

    I wasn't sure whether to be encouraged at the end. She seems to find her faith again but it is unclear where she stands.


  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Easter Everywhere is a memoir of writer Darcey Steinke's life as a minster's daughter, and how her faith changed and affected her life.We start out by reading of a young Steinke who held weddings, funerals and church services for dead animals and neighborhood children, attempting to get closer to God and copy her minister father. Later, as a young adult, she turns to a world of beauty, boyfriends and attempting to fit in. We see her overcome her stutter, go to college, have an abortion,get married, and witness the birth of her daughter. We do hear about her work as a writer, although the book doesn't go into heavy detail about that.As a fan of her work, I was thrilled to see similarities in her life that s he wrote about in her earlier books. There is a point where she lives in her father's rectory-very similar to Ginger in Jesus Saves. She mentions living out in San Francisco, just as the heroine in Suicide Blonde does, and we also hear about her waitressing in North Carolina just as the main character in Up Through the Water does.The ending concludes with her rediscovering her faith with the help of a nun, who is far from the typical religious figure Darcey encountered growing up as a young girl.I highly recommend this book to fans of the author, and for anyone interested in or undergoing a change in their religious beliefs.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    So many writers who write midlife memoirs these days, like Kathryn Harrison and Jeanette Walls, have dark, twisted family secrets to spill, and I'll admit that the element of emotional voyeurism is part of what makes reading memoirs fun. Still, it's a nice change to see a memoir that doesn't contain any plot elements that would interest the Lifetime network. Steinke's writing has a clean, fresh-air quality about it, particularly when she's describing her childhood. She's also led an interesting life; she's one of those people who seem to end up in the middle of interesting and unusual cultural moments – in this case the late-sixties Jesus movement and the late eighties New York "club kid" scene. People who've read a few of these memoirs might recognize her father, a bit of a dreamer who's seemingly unable to square his ideals with the realities of family life, from similar books, though Steinke works hard to make him a sympathetic character. The book's ending is a little diffuse than the last chapters of other coming-through-the-fire memoirs, but I'm pretty sure that Steinke considers her spiritual journey to be far from over, and real life can't always be plotted as neatly as most novels, anyway.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Easter Everywhere by Darcy Steinke - a memoir. Darcy's mother is at times suicidal as she contemplates how insecure her life is and Darcy's father flits from job to church and back with a strong conviction but more ideals than focus. My father is a preacher and flawed as any other human but we were lucky (?) that he and my mother considered our whole family as important a calling from God as any other mission. Darcy seems to realize the dysfunction relatively early but seeing it and dragging yourself to health are two different things.

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Easter Everywhere - Darcey Steinke

Praise for Easter Every where

I adore this book. Darcey Steinke beautifully leads us through her lifetime of spiritual seeking, from a childhood spent in the basement of her fathers church, through a young adulthood of rebellion, into a mature and profound personal reckoning with the divine. She writes intelligently, honestly, movingly about a subject which is not always easy to address. It's an inspiration.

—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

In poignant prose, the daughter of a minister and a depressed former beauty queen details her religious disillusionment.

People

"Is it any wonder that from the Redeemer to Augustine, from Pascal to W. H. Auden, it has been the doubters, more than the believers, who have kept up religion's good name? A skeptic in this tradition, Darcey Steinke is also, in her own way, a skeptic about the virtues of the contemporary memoir, now a mostly secular genre in which every human unhappiness is trendily medicalized or assigned its origin in a topical childhood trauma... I became riveted by Steinke's tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum . . . [Easter Everywhere is] a delicately wrought little volume . . . This is a beautiful book."

New York Times Book Review

You probably wouldn't envy Darcey Steinke her childhood . . . But her resolve to keep her adult mind as bubbling with question marks and wonderment as it did in her days spent coloring outside the lines could sting even the world-weary with fresh longing . . . She writes so easily and poetically of her childhood that the cheekiest sarcasm sails past like a smooth curveball . . . Steinke and her spritely daughter, Abbie, are an inspiring pair—together hungrily posing life's most sober questions and willfully facing skyward.

Elle

Darcey Steinke certainly knows her way around characters and plot . . . it's a joy to see her inner life finally exposed.

San Francisco Chronicle

Steinke unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith.

Entertainment Weekly

"[Steinke] serves sin and sainthood in equal portions, a dichotomy she continues to explore in her frank, beautiful new memoir, Easter Everywhere . . . Steinke tells her family saga with journalistic savvy, reporting on events rather than using them to force a point. There'sno moralizing or gluey sentimentality . . . But even at its most measured, Easter Everywhere is full of surprises, especially as it maps out its author's return to spirituality: She finds sacredness not just in churches but in libraries, garbage dumps, the cruising area of public parks.' This book is an excellent account of a writer going head-to-head with the divine and finding some inner quiet—even in the darkest corners of her imagination."

Time Out New York

Lovely . . . compelling . . . [Thomas] Merton writes of the 'real and constant danger of carelessness and indifference . . . the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls.' Darcey Steinke has captured that struggle in painful but luminous detail. She's earned her measure of grace. And, like Merton before her, she possesses the skill and generosity of spirit to share it with readers.

Village Voice

A smoothly written memoir detailing the derailing of a minister's daughter... at every conjuncture, the reader finds joy in Steinke's journey.

Booklist

Her writing . . . is blunt and powerful . . . Steinke is a gifted writer, and this . . . leaves readers wanting more.

Publishers Weekly

Steinke, a writer of the sensual and the melodramatic, is at her best with emotional crescendos and costume rental shops.

Rain Taxi Review of Books

EASTER EVERYWHERE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Milk

Suicide Blonde

Up Through the Water

Jesus Saves

Edited with Rick Moody

Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited

EASTER

EVERYWHERE

a memoir

DARCEY STEINKE

BLOOMSBURY

This is a memoir, a work of memory,

created as truthfully as my own recollections allow.

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Copyright © 2007 by Darcey Steinke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.

The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Steinke, Darcey.

Easter everywhere : a memoir / Darcey Steinke.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-913-6

1. Steinke, Darcey. 2. Christian biography. I. Title.

BR1725.S735A3

2007 813'.54—dc22

[B] 2006031637

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007

This paperback edition published in 2008

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Westchester Book Group

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

For my mother and my daughter

CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART TWO

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART THREE

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

READING GROUP GUIDE

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

ALL OF PEACE LUTHERAN'S members were connected to Sylvan Beach's tourist trade. Those who didn't work at the carnival waitressed at the restaurants or worked at the gift shops that catered to the upstate New York factory workers who came to wade along Lake Oneidas muddy shoreline. In July and August, when whole families were busy frying onions at the sausage-sandwich stand or operating the Ferris wheel, my father was lucky to get a dozen people in the cottage that served as a makeshift chapel. But in winter, when snow rose to waist level and the pipes froze and the carnival shut down, and only the Sea Shell restaurant, a few bars, and the bowling alley remained open, church membership swelled to seventy and every folding chair was filled.

During those cold months laundry hung outside stiffened and the fire department came often to our house to fill up the bathtub with drinking water. In spring, mayflies clung to the side of the rectory, their black bodies so thick against the ground that for a few days the earth appeared in swarming turmoil. My father, with his blond hair, black suit, and clerical collar, seemed everywhere at once, teaching religion classes at the local elementary school, visiting the hospital and the nursing home. He often had coffee with parishioners at the Sea Shell and he bowled in the men's league. Frustrated with the shabby cottage, he persuaded a member to donate land for a real church. The congregation was too poor to bankroll a building, so he went to the synod office in New York City. The loan officer in charge of God's Bank was a tall man with a thin mustache. He congratulated my father on getting the site for free and agreed immediately to a $25,000 loan as long as my father was willing to raise the same amount from local churches.

My dad had seen a magazine advertisement for a Complete Church Packet for $17,000. He contacted Evangelical Associates Inc., and a young salesman showed up within the week in a red Triumph. He let my father drive the sports car while they discussed details for the modest A-frame. The kit included, among other things, blueprints, lumber, bricks, outlets, nails, a sink, a toilet, light fixtures, pews, a red carpet, and an altar cross. It arrived by rail in the nearby town of Oneonta. My father and other church members loaded a semitruck and brought the materials to the site.

The crew consisted of ten congregants as well as all the drunks in town; every morning my dad gathered men from the local bars. The old carpenter in charge could not understand that the building would have no framing. It had laminated beams attached to three-inch-thick tongue-and-groove boards. By January the arches were up, but then a blizzard dumped four feet of snow and everyone stopped working.

Except for Donald. Donald was a heavyset, quiet man who worked nights as an aide at the big home for the retarded in Utica. Whenever my father drove by the building, Donald would be out in 10-degree weather hammering on the roof. Within a month the building was enclosed and the crew came back to finish the inside. The roof was shingled, the steeple attached. My father calls that time Days of Heaven. He and Donald hauled the old bell off the cottage and attached it to the roof of the new church.

The first baptism in the new church was for four children, same mother, all with different fathers. They were fully grown so my father sprinkled water onto their foreheads. On Sunday mornings church members sang hymns and took communion. On Sunday afternoons my father took me to the carnival. I'd be fascinated to see those same parishioners changed out of their Sunday best, running the Western Shooting Gallery, the Crazy Dazy, and the Roll-O-Planes.

In winter, when the carnival was closed, they went on unemployment. The poorest families came to church irregularly, only when they had a car and money for gas. They came in loose-fitting, faded clothes. Some worked at the carnival freak show: the one-legged man with a gray beard that hung to his belt buckle and the fat lady with two children, one white and the other black. My father walked directly up to welcome these families, encouraging them to sit close to the altar. The Johnsons came most regularly. Mr. Johnson was a tall man with thinning hair and a yellowish face. His wife, who kept her coat wrapped tightly around her, only had a few teeth. They had four children, all boys. The baby had a peanut-shaped head and vacant brown eyes.

All congregations have their secret sorrows and Sylvan Beach was no exception. One was the story of an Asian woman who came regularly to church and sat in the back pew with her children. Even on the bitterest days of winter, I saw her walking along the long road to the supermarket. She owned a car, so her behavior seemed excessive and mysterious until my father learned how, three years earlier, her husband had been shot as he opened his car door. A disturbed man, a stranger, had blamed him for being denied military service in World War II. Equally intriguing was the saga of a young couple new to town. The wife was pregnant, and as her belly expanded her husband grew exotic; he wore a costume-jewelry medallion around his neck, and eyeliner and mascara around his bloodshot eyes. The week before she gave birth, she found him hanging from the light fixture in the kitchen. He wore a bra as well as a full face of makeup.

My mother was taller than my dad and voluptuous, with substantial breasts and generous hips. I loved her bare arms, the hollow of her armpits. Her face was gently freckled and her collarbone distinct and regal. When she was anxious her body trembled and her eyes darted about, unable to settle on anything solid. She was anxious a lot. Our personal phone line was also the church's, and it rang constantly with people wanting to speak to the pastor. During the day my father drove all over the county, visiting shut-ins and those sick in the hospital. Nights he had trustee or ladies' guild meetings. Saturdays he drove to Rochester to visit the home for wayward girls. My mother had packed away her pink cashmere sweater set and the jade linen evening gown, her beauty queen clothes from a few years before when she'd been Miss Albany. She preserved them in plastic in the bottom of her dresser. During her reign she'd lunched with Governor Rockefeller and had her photograph in national newspapers. The only thing she still wore from her reign was her white wool coat. The coat had an empire waist, bell sleeves, and mother-of-pearl buttons and was cut perfectly to the contours of her body. The lining was of the palest pink silk.

After my brother David was born she rarely made it out of the house and she often felt homesick. It was worst at fourthirty a.m., the time when back home in Albany she'd sit with my grandfather while he ate breakfast before he went out on his route delivering Freihofer's coffee cakes and corn muffins. Prior to their marriage, my father had promised he'd always have a hundred dollars in his pocket but now, near the end of the month, all we could afford to eat was oatmeal. Being young and unacquainted with her own temperament, my mother didn't realize how unhappy she was. She didn't understand her attraction to the knives in the drying rack, their black handles and serrated edges.

Snow banked blue on the car window as I sat in my winter jacket with the fur-edged hood, my hand on the frozen turkey beside me. My mother sat in the front seat next to my father with David on her lap. She had on red lipstick, lilac perfume, and her pale beauty queen coat. I spread my palm flat against the plastic cover that enveloped the frozen turkey. This was the first time I'd been allowed to accompany my father on a visit to bring food to poor parishioners and I knew, even at three, that it was a great honor.

Snow assaulted the windshield wipers and left a layer of talc on the glass. The station wagon moved slowly down the road, banked by evergreens, toward the Johnsons'. My father was intent on the long cone of yellow light that shone out on the glittery branches in front of us. The baby fussed and my mother settled a bottle in his mouth. The car grew quiet except for the sound of his sucking and the icy flakes hitting the metal hood with a tink tink tink.

The windows of the Johnson house hovered disembodied in the darkness. Their walk was a corridor of white as I followed my father up to the door. My mother held David and a small bag of canned goods: cranberry sauce, creamed corn, green beans. Even before my father knocked I heard a scurrying inside the house.

Robert, my father said as the door flew open, we brought you a turkey.

Dot! Mr. Johnson called loudly, though his wife was nearby. The little boys gathered around us, clutching slices of bread spread with jam, their jaws working diligently. The room was warm and smelled like pee and refrigerator leftovers. A bare bulb illuminated foam spilling from splits in the couch's upholstery. Nestled in a pile of dirty blankets was the sleeping baby.

My father put the turkey on the table near the woodstove and said something about the storm. Dot took cans out of the bag, staring at the labels, and set each on the table. She had the body of a teenage boy but her face was deeply lined, her features pressed into the center of her face.

Your coat, she said, reaching out toward my mother. I admire it. She touched the white sleeve just where the material turned over and attached to the pink lining. My mother stared down at Dot's hand, chapped red with dirty fingernails. She smiled tightly and her chin bunched. She passed David to my dad, undid the buttons, and offered her coat, the wool material draped over both her hands, to Dot.

Dot shook her head vehemently.

Take it, my mother said. I'm going to give it away anyway. Dot continued to shake her head, though more slowly, and my mother pushed the coat forward, aggressively knocking the woman's arm.

Try it on, my mother urged. It will look good on you. She slipped the coat over her long sweater and shapeless skirt. It hung on her shoulders and the cuffs fell to her knuckles.

Are you sure? Dot asked.

My mother nodded.

I thank ye, she said.

My mother took my brother back from my father and moved toward the front door.

Merry Christmas! my father said to the little boys, their breath turning white in the open doorway.

On the ride back he blasted the heat and told my mother he loved her. The snow stopped and I located a star through the top part of the window. Whenever a car approached us on the highway I could see my mother's reflection in the rearview mirror.

My father had told me that God resided in everything. Birds. Stars. Snow. And most particularly, I saw now, in the features of my mother's face.

CHAPTER 2

WHEN MY MOTHER WAS nine, she began attending a Lutheran church around the corner from her family's apartment in Albany. Her parents had no interest in religion, so my mother, a quiet girl upset by her father's drinking and the arguments that ensued whenever he came home late from the pub, walked to St. Paul's and settled into a pew by herself. It was there that she would eventually meet my father, who as a minister's son held a position of honor in the congregation's insular culture.

Her own father was more interested in fishing than in God, but in earlier generations religion had consumed his family. William

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