Books and Beautiful Truths

Memoir Recommendations-Part 3

Hi friends,

I’m back with new memoir recommendations, however, as we wrap up the series in the next few posts, we will be merging lanes and focusing on titles more hybrid in nature.

More on that to come, but for now let me introduce today’s author.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ve likely heard me reference or recommend a book from a member of the Clarkson family. Coming to motherhood in my early 30’s with nary a clue of how to parent, and especially as a Christian who wasn’t raised in the faith, I was handed several books that, in my opinion, steered me in the wrong direction.

I wrestled with the parenting philosophies presented as they came across as formulaic, legalistic, or even harsh.

Something seemed amiss to me.

Finally, I came across The Mission of Motherhood by Sally Clarkson, and a cool and refreshing breeze blew into my parenting paradigm. Thank God. Here was wise, gentle, and biblical parenthood I could get behind.

I read every title Sally and Clay Clarkson put out through the years, and in time, much to my delight and benefit, their four adult children started writing, too. The intentional cultivation of their family, along with the grace of God, produced a rich harvest of words in their offspring. You can find the treasure trove of their various titles here.

For today’s post though, I would like to specifically highlight Sarah Clarkson. Sarah has penned several books and is the author of the Substack newsletter, From the Vicarage. Additionally, she hosts a Patreon. If you are new to Sarah as an author, I humbly suggest finding your way to her work. Her writing is, quite simply, gorgeous.

I’m sure my words can’t do her justice, but nonetheless, let me point you to two of my favorite titles: This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness and Book Girl. The former is primarily a memoir and I will spend the majority of our time on it. The latter is more of a hybrid, but Book Girl is so lovely I would be remiss not to mention it.

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This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness ~ Sarah Clarkson

“Thus, in that marvelous and terrifying summer of my little girlhood, I was introduced to the rival stories of the world.

Beautiful or broken? Despair or hope? Evil or love?

I’ve been trying to answer those questions ever since. I’ve been trying to decide which story is true. And I think this is the fight to which each of us is called every day of our lives.”

Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth

In my introductory post to memoirs, I talked about writing bravely, and how a memoirist is perhaps the bravest of all writers. Sarah Clarkson proves this point in This Beautiful Truth, her story of wrestling with the goodness of God amid an ongoing battle with mental illness.

This book is a heartrending, yet hopeful tale shared with utmost honesty. Sarah directs our gaze to the battle we each face in the opening quote and leads us to God’s goodness, not by the removal of her trial but by his beauty breaking into it.

With remarkable transparency, in the early chapters of Sarah’s book, she speaks about the onset and consequent fallout of OCD, which in her case manifests intrusive and pervading thoughts of a most disturbing nature. Raised in a Christian home and coming to Christ as a child, when the illness takes grasp as a teen, she wrestles with her knowledge of the Lord as being kind and good.

In a particularly powerful chapter, she calls on images of Jacob’s wrestling match with God when she stomps out to the mountains of her youth and has her own match with the Almighty:

“God, I breathed. God, I hissed. God, I wept…I sat there and sobbed, and if I prayed, it was one long shout of rage and bewilderment, so bitter I wondered if I’d ever hear from God again. But amidst my outrage, God came.”

Her subsequent words talk about God “keeping vigil with me in the shadows” and they brought me to tears. I’ve been in this place of rage and bewilderment, and I’ve been in the shadows where God met me. Her words rang true.

I venture most of us have had moments of fist shaking at God, or at least the temptation. Perhaps we shrink from such honesty with the Lord. But Sarah’s discovery of him in the dark night of her soul is an important response to trite and unnuanced counsel from well-meaning believers, which I’ve also experienced.

When Sarah attends Oxford and meets a man who stirs the dreams of her heart and imagination, she grapples with her sense of worth in light of mental illness:

“By the time I reached my thirtieth birthday, an almost unbearable tension had grown within me. For even as I clung with one hand to these dreams that made sense and order of my lonely days, I bore that inchoate sense of my faultiness in the other hand, that unspoken conviction that love could not come to me as I was.”

And yet, the beauty of God meets Sarah again, this time through the reciprocated love from the man of her affections:

“But it was a love unlike any I could have expected or dreamt, one that shattered, with a bright, sweet joy, all my expectations of what it means for God to work in our broken and tangled lives, not after or in spite of our suffering but in the very middle of its tangle and need, to make in the dark muddle of our dysfunction a beauty we could never have dreamed to begin with.”

There is so much more I could say about this story, but ultimately, my hope is that you will read it yourself. And to that end, let me conclude with this: I feel this is an important book.

It’s important because the illnesses, hardships, and trials of the shadowlands are always with us. They ebb and flow, of course. Some may disappear, but new ones surely await. And some, like Sarah’s story conveys, are a continual and constant reminder that we have not yet reached glory.

And yet, God.

We hold fast, or more aptly are held fast, because he draws us into the knowledge of his goodness. Though he is sufficient, sometimes we struggle to know it, and This Beautiful Truth shows us it is right and good to grapple in forthright honesty.

Because always, always, beauty will meet us there in the dark.

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Book Girl ~ Sarah Clarkson

“The reading life is like one of those potent graces bestowed by fairy godmothers on princesses in old fairy tales, the sort to help a young heroine grow in all good things, to love life in its fullness and beauty, but also to make her strong in resisting the forces of evil stepmothers or wicked fairies already gathered round her cradle.”

Sarah Clarkson, Book Girl

As the quote suggests and the cover to Book Girl states, this title is “A Journey through the Treasures & Transforming Power of a Reading Life.”

There are two aspects to this book. On the one hand, it is a series of curated book lists with a plethora of recommendations not just from Sarah, but from other kindred reading spirits in her sphere.

On the other hand, it is memoir and essay expounding the virtues of the reading life as a whole, but also of the particular influence of specific titles.

In the introduction, Sarah explains her heart behind the book and lays out her three primary desires for its readers:

I want your heart to be stocked with beauty.

I want you to be strong for the battle.

I want you to know you’re not alone.

“I’d argue that you should read this book because it celebrates not just the gifts of the reading life but also the rich life of the reading woman, her particular experience and journey, and the wise and joyous fellowship that grows between women who undertake that reading adventure together.”

Indeed.

I’ve found such wise and joy-filled companionship with my own book girls, and I’ve found a sisterhood with women I’ve never met through their words on pages.

Sarah is right. The reading life brings beauty, strength, and fellowship to our midst.

I’ve owned Book Girl for several years and while I haven’t found my way to every recommendation, I’ve used it as a continual reference and guide to my reading life. Those just embarking on the reading journey will find advice for a path forward, but even avid readers are sure to discover new titles. All will enjoy Sarah’s personal reflections and find encouragement toward a literary lifestyle.

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And thus concludes another week of recommendations, friends.

Thank you to those who have reached out to me personally and shared how you’ve picked up a book at my recommendation. It delights me to no end to hear these stories.

I think Sarah Clarkson would approve!

Until next week,

Tiffany