Author Julie Mars: Seeking Her Sister, Self, and the Spirit in A Month of Sundays

Julie Mars

It is not uncommon for someone to respond to the death of a loved one by attempting to better understand that person's life, or trying to find "God," or trying to find out more about one's self. In Julie Mars' A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister (Greycore Press, available in mid-April), the author manages to do all three when, following the death of her beloved older sister from cancer, she embarks on a pilgrimage of going to church every Sunday for 31 weeks.

Mars' poignant memoir -- which takes her from traditional churches to "houses of worship on the farthest fringe of mainstream life" -- is at times heartbreaking and at times uplifting as she seeks to understand the life and death of her sister Shirley, and her sister's return to a faith that Mars had long since disavowed.

BTW recently interviewed Mars via e-mail.

BTW: Considering your experience at your sister's funeral and your feelings about religion, what do you think spurred you to go to 31 churches as a way to come to grips with Shirley's death?

Julie Mars (JM): In the last few months of my sister's life, she returned to the Catholic Church. I found this to be very disturbing because, essentially, as soon as she began her move back toward Catholicism she became terrified of going to hell.

It was very mysterious to me that Shirley could find obvious comfort in a religion that simultaneously offered (to her) the very real prospect of "eternal damnation." I wondered what could possibly be wonderful enough on the plus side of her religion to balance out such a horrible and grim possibility.

I also felt drained of faith (in anything) over the months I took care of her. I needed some relief from that emptiness and I felt compelled to try a few churches to see if I could discover what my sister had found when the stakes were so high for her. Each week, each church -- from the most mainstream to those on the farthest fringe -- inspired me to try one more. Then one more. Before I knew it, I had a Month of Sundays.

BTW: The subtitle of the book is "Searching for the Spirit and My Sister," yet ultimately, as you write about your journeys to each church and your memories of your sister Shirley, in the end the journey was more a search for your "self." Did this surprise you?

JM: Absolutely. I thought the book was strictly about Shirley. When friends who read it told me that it wasn't -- that it was about me as much as it was about Shirley -- I was shocked. But I think this is one of the benefits of writing: You find out what you've been thinking about. You have the evidence of your experience in the form of a manuscript that you wrote. It took me about three drafts before I saw, and then accepted, that my quest was not what I thought it was in the beginning. It seems ironic to me that I started off in a quest to understand Shirley, and, in the end, she helped me understand myself.

BTW: At one point, when you wanted to skip a Sunday for the first time, you compared your decision to go to church to a gambler hoping to hit the jackpot. Some might consider comparing church-going to gambling as odd -- could you explain the analogy?

JM: Every week I'd get myself dressed up and head out to another church, hoping that this might be the one where I'd fit in, buy the doctrine, convert, and live happily ever after. To me, that was the jackpot. Driving to the church, I'd be thinking, This time I'll get lucky. Sometimes, when I left the churches, my spiritual pockets were empty; sometimes I broke even or came out ahead. No matter what happened, I just kept going. It was a compulsion.

BTW: Your first book was a literary suspense novel. This one's quite a change of pace. How was the actual act of writing this book different from writing a work of fiction? Did you expect your pilgrimage to end up as a book when you first began?

JM: I'll answer your last question first: No, I didn't expect it to become a book. At first, I was just trying to manage my grief. I would go to church, and then afterward I'd sit in my car and write about it. During the week, I'd write more reflectively about my feelings, memories, confusion, etc. I think I was about 10 weeks into the process before I realized I had a book-in-progress.

As for the difference between writing a memoir and a novel, it was immense. I am a very plot-driven fiction writer, and I had to accept that there was no plot in this book. I also rely in fiction on linear time, and I had to abandon that concept for A Month of Sundays. It was much more random. I had the forward march of the Sundays to count on, but in the "midweek meditations," I was back and forth across all barriers: time, rationality, orderliness.

In terms of writing, if not life, this was virgin territory for me. But the biggest challenge (and scariest problem) for me was cutting and editing. Cutting this text felt different than editing fiction -- more bloody and far more painful, but, in the end, I had to pick up my pen and go at it. After a while, I realized I was equating editing with lying, with making the story prettier or more hopeful than it really was, disrespecting the project I had assigned myself. Once I faced this, I knew none of it was true. It got easier then, and I learned a lot about crafting a story and making art. I learned that, even in memoir, the writer must choose, is always choosing, to shape reality, and, if done correctly, what is actually presented in the end is a better, deeper, and more honest version than what she started with. My book is true. Writing it, which includes editing, as every writer knows, deepened my relationship with both my more artistic self and my audience.

BTW: Since you completed your visit to 31 churches, do you feel any more spiritual or religious?

JM: I think that pilgrimage restored my spiritual equilibrium rather than created it. I came away from the whole adventure knowing more about where I stood in relation to belief and doubt, life and death, and love and loss. In other words, I got much more out of it, in terms of spirituality, than I ever could have expected. It just wasn't necessarily what I expected! -- Interview by David Grogan