A century before publishers started marketing novels as “essential sad girl literature” and newspapers ran headlines about the “cult of the literary sad woman”, Mary MacLane confessed all, at the age of nineteen, and became the enfant terrible of American letters, seemingly overnight. “This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything—to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. . . . These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.”
Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.
After surveying the past 2000 years, he writes, “there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex. There are multiple Christian theologies of sex, many of which have over two millennia been downright contradictions of each other.” When religious authorities attempt to ground their directives in tradition—be it admonishing couples to have more kids or prohibiting abortion—they rarely understand the history they cite.