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The Tulip and the Pope: A Nun's Story
Deborah Larsen
With The Tulip and the Pope, Larsen delivers a swift and moving exploration of Christian experience and young womanhood in a more innocent time, and a message of devotion that extends far beyond the high walls of the convent.
Knopf
September 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 037541360X
Hardcover
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Contemporary | Non-Fiction Memoir
In the heat of midsummer, in 1960, nineteen-year-old
Deborah and several other young women share a cab to a
convent on the Iowa bluffs of the Mississippi River. The
girls, passionate to become nuns, heedless of all they are
leaving behind, smoke their last cigarettes along the way
and enter their life as postulants. In the same precise and
beautifully crafted prose that distinguished her successful
novel The White (“a brutal and beautiful novel”–The New
York Times), Larsen’s memoir lets us into the hushed life
inside the convent. We learn about such practices
as “custody of the eyes,” the proper devotion to the rule
of one’s superiors, and the importance of
avoiding “particular friendships.” Her intimate episodic
account captures the exquisite sense of peace–even of
Presence–that dwelt among the women, as well as the
strangeness of living under such strict rules. Gradually,
she admits to a growing awareness that there is much life
and beauty outside the motherhouse, which she is missing.
The physical world–the lush experience of the tulip she
stared at in the garden as a girl, the snow she tunneled
in, and even the mystery of sex–begins to seem to her a
significant alternative theater for a deep understanding
and love of God.
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