Cloistered: My Years as a Nun
by Catherine Coldstream. St. Martin’s, 327 pp., $30.00
Like many contemporary memoirs, Cloistered opens in medias res, giving the reader a taste of the narrative intensity that belongs, chronologically, to the book’s climax. The first paragraph plunges us into a cinematic escape scene—a young nun is bolting through the English countryside, fleeing a monastery under the cover of night:
In my mind I am still running. Running toward the road. Running. Running. Running. The darkness is fresh around me, the air slicing across my face in wild, clean shafts. The rush of oxygen is fizzing, moonlit, completely unexpected. I’d forgotten what night tasted like, the great dome of it, just as I’d forgotten what it was—after ten years cloistered—to run cold and wild and wet, beyond enclosure. I’d forgotten what it was to stand under the sky and feel the far stretching of infinity.
Eventually the nun stops, catches her breath, and realizes with amazement that she is safe. She looks back at the monastery, a fortress looming against the sky. “I see it for what I now think it is,” Catherine Coldstream recalls, “a place of danger and of dishonest murmurings.”
The passage raises a number of questions—Who is pursuing her? Are nuns really not allowed outdoors at night? Can oxygen be moonlit?—that have no immediate answers; the curious reader must wait until she has, thus baited, slogged through the chapters of backstory and building action. Needless to say, anyone who’s had even a passing encounter with the “nun content” produced over the past century has a decent idea of what’s coming. This will be a story of religious corruption and tyrannical subjugation. There will be theological psyops, the twisting of Scripture to serve human power structures, furtive sapphic exploits, and women acting as accomplices to the dictates of patriarchy. But the opening fireworks are decoy flares; they are not quite representative of the story contained in these pages.
All religious autobiography hinges on a drama of escape. The convert speaks from a vantage of liberation, having been freed from the shackles of sin, looking back on the years he lived in bondage, a “prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness,” as Thomas Merton puts it in (1948), his celebrated memoir about becoming a Trappist monk. The deconversion narrative relies on the same arc, but in reverse. The apostate wins her freedom by fleeing the prison of institutional religion. Each narrative is, of course, a lie. The believer, even after he has glimpsed eternity, must continue to live in the world with other fallen humans and
