Darcey Steinke

New York Times
April 22, 2007

The God Disillusion
By Stephen Metcalf

I love my neighbor as I love myself — which is to say, minimally, if at all, and in between fits of out-and-out loathing. But this is not quite the same thing as Christian charity, and one doesn’t skip into heaven through a loophole. If the spirit should finally move me, and I answer the call to care for my fellow man unconditionally, the biggest challenge will be extending my newfound caritas to the religious zealots, for it is the zealots — more than the child molesters, petro-dictators or certain on-air personalities of the Fox News persuasion — whom I despise above all. 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. In her memoir, “Easter Everywhere,” Steinke has dared to ask, What if my abiding sense of misery isn’t due to abuse or balky neurotransmission, but to the absence of God in my life, to an unfulfilled relationship with my own divinity, as vouchsafed to me by the Creator?

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LA Times
April 15, 2007

Easter Everywhere' by Darcey Steinke
Growing up a minister's daughter, desiring glamour and faith.
By Erika Schickel, Erika Schickel is the author of the memoir "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom."

THE problem with religion is its insistence on denying the physical. For a woman like Darcey Steinke, raised in the church but given to deep communion with the physical world, it becomes a lifelong conflict that leaves her lost and alone.

One of several moments of divinity in her memoir, "Easter Everywhere," comes while she is visiting Graceland. Divorced and living in Mississippi with her toddler daughter, she finds herself in an annex displaying Elvis' memorabilia and comes face to face with his most famous white jumpsuit: "[T]he embroidered red, white, and blue eagle, the cape, the rhinestone superhero belt all held me in their messianic glow…. They radiated glamour, sadness, faith."

The Village Voice (New York)
April 25, 2007

Raw God, Tiny Nun: In a memoir of spiritual quest, Darcey Steinke tries to divine her soul
by Elizabeth Hand

Spiritual memoirs have legs, particularly the work of Christian apologists who had the foresight to sin early and often. Witness St. Augustine's Confessions, in print after 1,600 years, or latter-day volumes by Anne Lamott, C. S. Lewis, and Thomas Merton, among countless others.

Novelist Darcey Steinke enters this arena with the lovely Easter Everywhere, an account of her lifelong religious pilgrimage. Best known as the author of the erotically fraught 1992 novel Suicide Blonde, Steinke helped create a louche literary genre, works featuring self-destructive young women in sexual and emotional free fall. Steinke's subsequent novels, Jesus Saves and Milk, expanded her range, as otherworldly obsessions flirted with less spiritual ones.

Entertainment Weekly
Mar 30, 2007

EASTER EVERYWHERE
by Allyssa Lee

“I was a blonde-haired teenager…attending a church lined with felt banners that said JOY! REJOICE! PEACE!” writes Steinke, daughter of a Lutheran minister. “But I was also a weepy creature ruled by base longings and haunted by rage and melancholy.” She abandoned her dad’s religion for the glamour (and then depression) surrounding her ex-beauty-queen mother. Steinke unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith, yet remains emotionally detached. While Easter may be too remote to win converts, the hope of redemption in the face of brokenness offers a saving grace.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20016455,00.html

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