Barbara at six

BLUE WINDOWS:
A Christian Science Childhood
Published under the name Barbara Wilson
Picador, 1997
ISBN (hardcover): 0-312-15066-0
ISBN (paper): 0-312-18054-3

Short-listed for the PEN USA Literary Award
for Creative Nonfiction

Winner of a Lambda Literary Award
for Lesbian Memoir

Barbara Wilson grew up in a Christian Science family where she was taught that there was no sickness or evil in God's perfect world. When Wilson was ten, her mother's breast cancer and decision not to seek medical care, precipitated a mental breakdown, and eventually death. In this perceptive and textured memoir of those events and the troubled adolescence that followed when her father remarried, Wilson surveys the complex history of Christian Science, the story of its founder Mary Baker Eddy, and the role of religion and healing.

From The Hartford Courant:
Occasionally, a book so transcends its subject matter that it reads like a work of art. Blue Windows is a stunning memoir.

From The New Yorker:
A memoir of exceptional sensitivity and intelligence.

From The Seattle Times:
Graceful, superbly written…In an age when the memoir has become transcendent, Blue Windows is among the best.

From New York Newsday:
The best sort of childhood memoir: It reaches beyond the troubled family…to illuminate a whole society…Like a pebble tossed into a pond, Blue Windows resonates in ever-widening circles.
—Francine Prose

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
A brave memoir…Wilson movingly explores her childhood.

From The Women's Review of Books:
Painfully searching, honest, and ultimately, inspiring…[This] courageous and moving memoir evokes a world of childhood faith and healing.

From The Seattle Weekly:
Is organized religion, with its blind faith and authoritarian structure, essentially childlike? Can a person raised in a particular faith ever finally separate her conception of the Almighty from her feelings about her parents? Wilson's beautiful memoir both reveals and illuminates these questions, holding them up as the spiritual conundrums of a seeking generation…Extraordinary.

From Booklist:
Wilson's novel If You Had a Family heavily mined her Christian Science background: reared in the faith's ultraorthodoxy by her own super-devout, inflexible mother, the protagonist's mother relies too long on her faith, postpones seeing a doctor, and dies of cancer. In Blue Windows, Wilson removes fiction's facade and tells the gritty truth about her cancer-stricken mother, who attempted suicide, a guilty reaction to her self-perceived failure of faith: she drank Drano and thereby gave her doctors the task of skin-grafting her face back together to repair acid burns on her mouth, lips, tongue, and chin. After her death, Wilson's father married Bettye, who redecorated rooms and tried to redecorate lives; she forced Wilson into a puke-pink room and shut the girl's bookcase away in a closet. With time, Wilson made painful peace with her childhood and her mother's death. Her searing memoir deserves to find a mainstream audience well beyond the loyal following for her lesbian mysteries.

From Kirkus Reviews:
This sensitive, eloquent coming-of-age story articulates the often painful intersections of religion, power, illness, and death. Mystery writer Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, 1993, etc.) departs from fiction here to unveil her Christian Science upbringing in uncompromising, often disturbing detail. The crux of the book is how family and faith fall apart when the author's mother, a devout Christian Scientist, dies of breast cancer at a relatively young age (and after a failed suicide attempt). Given Christian Science's teaching that illness and death are merely errors of the mind that must be corrected, the family was forbidden to mourn this loss. Such denial meant that grief and anger were channeled into other, often horrifying, modes of expression: her father's remarriage to a sadistic woman and the author's own floundering, which made her receptive to her new stepbrother's sexual advances. In this sense, the book is an unforgettable testimony to the destructive powers of some religious beliefs. But paradoxically, it is also a nuanced acknowledgment of the ways in which sectarian religion orders the chaos of the world, providing new opportunities for its followers. Wilson concedes, for instance, that Christian Science healing continues to provide an important outlet for women, who comprise almost 90 percent of healers. She can also see that Christian Science helped her to define her own strength as a woman—her identity forged not just through surviving her mother's death but through more mundane statements of faith, such as her refusal to accept a school polio vaccine in the 1950s. Historically informed and refreshingly candid—though a bit too long—this offers not just an individual memoir of an increasingly obscure religious movement, but also a more general exploration of the crises of faith and health in the 20th century. (Of particular interest is Wilson's parallel of contemporary guru Deepak Chopra with Mary Baker Eddy.)