When I was unable to sleep, the peculiar anxieties of a seven- or eight- or nine-year old keeping me awake, I would imagine myself into a different life, a more predictable story. Would I be Cinderella, rescued from my drudgery and the persecutions of my older sister by a strong prince? Or perhaps I could be Amy Carmichael, rising above the disappointments of my mundane existence to find meaning in serving others. It was probably a fifty-fifty chance which one I would choose. I knew that I could never actually become Cinderella. That was just a fairytale. But Amy was real. Becoming Amy was possible.
Throughout my childhood I read dozens of bestselling Christian biographies filled with adventure and suspense and miraculous rescues and improbable answers to audacious prayers. Disney movies and Nancy Drew novels included similar characteristics (except for the prayers, perhaps), but they did not come close to capturing my imagination the way the lives of Gladys Aylward, Corrie ten Boom, and Amy Carmichael did.
What I didn’t know — couldn’t have known — at the time, was that just like the other fairytales of my childhood, these stories were designed to captivate me.
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It’s no coincidence that biographies of Christian heroes of faith emerged as a distinct and compelling genre in the latter half of the twentieth century.
A Chance to Die. The Cross and the Switchblade. Through Gates of Splendor. The Hiding Place. Trailblazer Books.
If you’re thirty or older, you can probably picture the covers of these bestselling books. They took an autobiographical approach and were filled with quotations from diaries and letters. They incorporated a significant focus on the subject’s personal piety with little to no mention of spiritual doubts or moral failings.
Book after book, whether written for adults or younger readers, followed a pattern. The stories that had so captivated me as a child continued to grip me as a young adult, their yarn unspooled across my consciousness like a film reel.
The stories often begin with an awkward adolescent who doesn’t quite fit in with their peers. Their deepest desires for belonging and significance seem to go unmet. But then something happens that changes everything. The blinders are removed and they realize they were created for something more than the comfortable existence they used to covet.
As they mature into their gifts and calling, they face both internal and external obstacles that seem insurmountable. Skepticism, or even ridicule, from family and friends, self-doubt, and selfishness. Injustice, misunderstanding, supernatural embodiments of evil. All this they overcome, ultimately succeeding in transforming themselves and the lives of those they have been called to serve.
Finally they are recognized and perhaps even rewarded for the ways they have blessed the world, and they can live out their final days with peace and purpose.
But that’s also the plot of Spiderman.
Do you see it? So many of these biographies in which I was immersed as a child follow the same narrative structure as classic fairytales and superhero stories. It’s called a three-act narrative structure (you may also hear it called “the hero’s journey”). It originated in the dramas and mythologies of ancient Greece and has come to define modern Western literature, theater, and film.
My childhood was woven around these stories of significance and sacrifice. I wore them like the floral Laura Ashley dresses with shoulder pads and ’80s puffed sleeves that my mom saved for us to dress up in. I only dreamed that my fledgling faith could one day grow to fill them. But for me, these stories were not just inspirational, they were an escape. When the pressures and traumas of my childhood threatened to overwhelm me, I could imagine myself into an impressive life about which books would one day be written.
And then, decades later, I found myself funneling cheddar turtles into a silicone snack cup for my toddler with one hand while balancing a nursing baby against my bare chest with the other. The adventures and miraculous rescues and audacious prayers I had imagined lay abandoned, like those dresses after a long afternoon of playing “Little House on the Prairie” in our backyard. The comforting stories of my childhood no longer fit, so I picked up something else.
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The first time I read Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead I barely made it through. The epistolary form frustrated me as I tried to follow the plot, not realizing that the story arc wasn’t actually the point. I was looking for a hero’s journey and couldn’t find one. Later, I picked up Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry and with just a little more plot to hang my hat on I was enchanted by the slow descriptions of ordinary Port William life. Berry modeled this fictional community on his childhood home, using an “imagined place … to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it.”[1]
When I returned to Gilead, I saw that Robinson was focused on the same beautifully mundane rhythms of faithful living. Early in the book, the narrator describes his wife and son blowing bubbles at their cat, Soapy. “Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.”[2] Here, finally, were stories I could relate to, a cozy cardigan I could wrap around myself at the end of a long day of emails and Zoom meetings and changing diapers and sweeping floors.
In the early years of marriage and parenting, I found comfort in these slow-paced stories that mirrored my own days. But in today’s fast-paced world, haunted by the sensation that everything is burning down around our ears, these pages can be woven into a parachute out of our smoking sky just as easily as the sensational biographies of my childhood. Where once I craved a more exciting and meaningful existence, now I craved a quieter and more purposeful one, a return to simpler days. Nostalgia can be an escape as much as inspiration can.
So, where was I to land? Should I return my works of fiction to the shelf, whether based in historical fact or not? Should I stick to theological treatises and biblical commentaries? I saw scripture using story to instruct, so I was sure there was plenty to be learned from the lives of these saints, both real and imagined. The stories of miraculous escapes and audacious prayers could open my eyes to see the surprising hand of God in the midst of my ordinary days. The stories of quiet faithfulness could renew my resolve and my patience as I faced another week of budgeting and meal planning, of email responses and project management.
The question for us all is whether the stories we read to take us by the hand and lead us deeper into the soil in which God has planted us, or toward a garden where we were not meant to grow? I’ll continue to visit Dohnavur Fellowship; the Waorani of rural Ecuador; Port William, Kentucky; and Gilead, Iowa. But when I nestle my bookmark back between their pages, I’m determined to look up and greet my little duplex in Palm Desert, California, with my whole self, heart, mind, soul, and strength.
Tabitha McDuffee is a writer and editor living in Southern California. She curates faithful Christian writing at BeautifulDiscipleship.com.
[1] Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place.
[2] Gilead, page 9.
