Darcey Steinke - Easter Everywhere: A Memoir

Praise forEaster 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 pairtogether 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, EasterEverywhere... 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 quieteven 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'.54dc22

[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

A LL 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.