by Sarah Arthur
If Madeleine was ever outspoken about injustice, it was about literary censorship—the effects of which she experienced firsthand and which she battled directly through advocating for authors as a member and one-time president of the Author’s Guild. The inveterate storyteller was not particularly happy when censors wrested her own character away and scripted her as they wanted, depicting her as secretly New Age, for instance, a dangerous author trying to deceive Christian children.
It was her own Christian colleagues who helped her occasionally laugh about being mischaracterized and maligned. In the Chrysostom Society’s rollicking serial murder mystery Carnage at Christhaven, Madeleine’s fictionalized persona, Philippa d’Esprit, claims that her arch enemy, Ms. Emma Syss (nemesis, get it?), is somehow on the grounds of the Colorado resort where murders are taking place. Could Ms. Syss be the murderer? Another character, Stevens, isn’t so sure. “It suddenly struck Stevens,” wrote Calvin Miller in his assigned chapter, “that Philippa was the only one who had seen [Ms. Syss], and there was some doubt in his mind that Philippa could be trusted. She had once won an important literary medal in England, it was true, but it was also true that the book was a fantasy novel.” Of all novelists, Stevens muses, “fantasy novelists were the last to be taken seriously.”25 The joke, of course, is that Stevens is based on real-life fantasy author, Stephen Lawhead, another member of the Society and contributor to the book. But underneath is a subtle critique of those writers who play fast and loose with the facts.
Madeleine’s own tendencies, we might say, coming back to haunt her.
• • • •
For as long I’ve known him personally, Philip Yancey has been writing his own memoir. “It feels like fiction although it’s based in fact,” he told me. “I’m trying to make it as true as possible, but of course the techniques of memoir are more the techniques of fiction, things like dialogue and scene. But I’m quite aware that no memoir ever gets it right. We distort by selection; we distort by our point of view. There’s nothing more boring than a moment-by-moment account of what happened in my day, in my life.” What he gleaned from Madeleine, he said, “was that she held firm to her core of beliefs and yet expressed an attitude of grace and inclusivity and a true humility that we’re human beings, we don’t always get it right. We never get it all right.”
Fiction itself can be a distillation of the ways we sometimes get it wrong. Years ago, he says, while taking a course in fiction, he was working on a short story in which he tried not to fall into the usual writerly problems, such as creating two-dimensional characters who speak in clichés. “It was my world, and I was trying to make it true and authentic and compelling,” he told me. “And then I got on the city bus and everyone spoke in clichés. There were no three-dimensional characters: they were all two-dimensional characters. They were stereotypes. That’s the odd part of writing, you create this universe that only you inhabit, but you have to artificially create it in such a way that it sounds real even though clearly it’s not real. And a great writer is able to do that.”
But memoir is, in a sense, real. When I asked him whether he will get permission from existing people who appear in his memoir, he replied, “In some cases yes, and in some cases I would determine them to be unreliable sources. So I just have to make my own judgment. Some of the key characters are trustworthy, in my opinion. I don’t make any promises that ‘I’ll change whatever you say.’ It’s only fair to make it known that they will be exposed, as it were. I’ve found it easier to deal with reactions before something reaches print than afterwards.”
His favorite example comes from the story of Frank McCourt, who wrote Angela’s Ashes—which, Philip said, “is a wonderful memoir, very well constructed.” According to Philip, “a journalist asked Frank’s brother, ‘Did you read Frank’s book before it was published?’ ‘Nope,’ the brother replied. ‘Well, what did you think?’ And the brother said ‘I disagree with a lot of it. I remember it differently.’ So the journalist went to Frank McCourt and said ‘I talked to your brother and he said it didn’t really happen that way.’ And Frank said, ‘Well, he should write his own damn memoir.’ And the brother did.”
When I shared that story to a roomful of Madeleine fans at the 2018 Festival of Faith and Writing, Charlotte and her sister Léna commented, “And that’s the right answer.” It doesn’t matter how powerful an idol you might be, your writerly task, however difficult, is to make room for more voices than just your own.
Author and blogger Sarah Bessey told me that when she read Cynthia Zarin’s New Yorker profile of Madeleine, it had a profound impact on how Sarah writes about her own family. “Back when I first started writing I wrote a lot about my children,” she told me, “especially my older two, who are now fully functioning human beings with their own ideas. They’ve turned into these wonderful amazing people.” But then she read the article, “and I remember having the realization that I was almost imposing a narrative on their life. It deeply changed how I wrote about my children, our community, our family’s story.”
For Sarah, the biggest concern “is exactly what Charlotte said: How do you make yourself real to someone who’s fictionalized or created a narrative for who you are? That idea really haunts me as a mother because I think there’s a lot of ways that parents do that to their children—whether parents are writers or not. How do you make sure you’re actually seeing your children and knowing them and hearing them instead of, ‘Well, here’s how you were when you were two, and so I’ll never let you break out of that mold’?” As Charlotte pointed out to me, when the parent is a writer it’s even more difficult for the parent to allow the narrative to be challenged—because the story, on paper, is now bound up in the parent’s public identity.
Several years ago Sarah wrote a blog post in which she included a conversation she’d had with one of her children about body image. The post went viral. But then, she recalls, “I felt so gross about it. Especially as the comments began pouring in of everybody diagnosing my child and giving me things to say or do. And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute: now people know this about my children.’ I was mortified. I ended up having to delete that.” In fact, Sarah told me, “I deleted a lot of stuff that I’ve written about my kids on my blog because I’ve realized I really misstepped. At some point I’m sure this new generation will begin to Google their parents. There will be moments when we’ll have to say, ‘You know what? I screwed up there. I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have done it. I fixed it later, but I shouldn’t have done that. And I’m sorry.’”
For Sarah, “My children need to know that they’re not copy to me. They need to know that their spiritual questions or moments or lives are not here for anyone else’s consumption.” But she also recognizes that this is hard for a lot of writers, “especially when parenting is a huge aspect of your life—a huge aspect of your own spirituality and awakening and how you understand God, how you’re moving through the world.” As with many women writers, “Faith is deeply connected to mothering for me. And how do I write about the ways motherhood has been transformative, how it’s become this crucible, without turning my children themselves into content?” And yet, Sarah cautions, none of us gets a pass just because we have some kind of unique calling. Not politicians, not pastors, not writers. “I refuse to believe I’m special.”
When Sarah is out traveling and speaking, she continually meets people “who literally feel like they know me. They feel like we would be best friends in real life. They feel like they know my marriage and my children and my family. But you know what? They know the version I wrote. It’s true as far as I’m concerned. Is it the whole truth? Nope. Is it the whole thing? Not at all. They’ll be disappointed in me. I’m disgustingly normal. But there can be no pedestals here.
“The place where I have grief around Madeleine is that there’s still this idea that she didn’t do anything wrong. That other people were too sensitive. That they needed to get over it because it was in
service of the almighty art, of the almighty story, of the almighty thing that was being created. But I don’t think that anything we create trumps the people whom we love and who love us. We don’t get to stomp all over their humanity in service of some mythic humanity. Learning how to hold that tension will be the work of a lifetime.”
In the end, Sarah says, “No matter how much goodness and grace and richness someone like Madeleine has brought to our lives, acting like anyone is infallible—as if you shouldn’t be able to look at their lives and say, ‘I would do that differently,’ or ‘that’s a blind spot or a tragedy’—diminishes the power of their work. You need to let them be a complicated human being.”
• • • •
Madeleine’s purportedly autobiographical events may or may not have happened, but to her, they were things that happen: they faithfully express the human experience; they point to the nature of God. And yet one gets the sense that she was aware, in some deep part of her spirit, that to play fast and loose with the facts at times diminished, rather than honored, those she loved. In one of her many sonnets—a poetic form that Luci Shaw says came to Madeleine effortlessly—Madeleine wrote to her husband Hugh in “To a Long Loved Love: 7”:
Because you’re not what I would have you be
I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
Seeking mirage where desert blooms, I mar
Your you. Aaah, I would like to see
Past all delusion to reality:
Then would I see God’s image in your face,
His hand in yours, and in your eyes his grace.
Because I’m not what I would have me be,
I idolize Two who are not any place,
Not you, not me, and so we never touch.
Reality would burn. I do not like it much.
And yet in you, in me, I find a trace
Of love which struggles to break through
The hidden lovely truth of me, of you.*
Part of our human brokenness is that we never fully know another person, not even our long-loved loves. And neither are we ever fully known. Only God, the one who made us, knows us in full—even better than we know ourselves. This is both a comfort and a struggle. But what I see in Madeleine, in this poetic moment, is the spiritual discipline of humility in the face of divine mystery, yet another Christian practice that we can lean into. We can take to heart this beautiful prayer by the first-century bishop Saint Clement of Rome, which Madeleine quotes in the afterword to Duane W. H. Arnold and Robert Hudson’s book Beyond Belief: What the Martyrs Said to God:
Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant, we pray, that we might be grounded and settled in your truth by the coming of your Holy Spirit into our hearts. What we do not know, reveal to us; what is lacking within us, make complete; that which we do know, confirm in us; and keep us blameless in your service, through Jesus Christ our Lord.26
Grant that we might be grounded and settled in your truth. Not our truth. Not the truth we wish for other people. God’s truth.
In the end, we don’t get to script others, much less ourselves. God is the author, not we humans, of our ongoing story—as the writer of Hebrews says, Jesus is “the author and finisher of our faith” (12:2 KJV). And just as God is the giver of truth via narrative, we can also hope, and pray, that God is the giver of truth via facts. Via events that really happen, to real people; not merely to events as we wish they would happen and to people as we wish them to be.
As much as Madeleine’s family loves their matriarch, Charlotte told me, their choice to speak honestly is a way for them to grant Madeleine “the dignity of being human.” When we make an idol of someone, we elevate them to an impossible plane. But when we treat someone with human dignity, with humility and grace, we allow her the chance to be, once again, an icon. Not an object to adore or shun but, rather, a window—rippled with imperfections, at times distorting our vision, but through which God’s light can shine nonetheless.
At some point, however, the light will fade. Night will fall. Outside the window comes a growing, bewildering dusk. It’s to those moments in Madeleine’s story—and in our own lives—that we now turn.
Chapter Seven
LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
“And we’re not alone, you know, children,” came Mrs Whatsit, the comforter. “All through the universe it’s being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it’s a grand and exciting battle.”
A Wrinkle in Time
A few months shy of her seventy-third birthday in 1991, while being driven to a speaking gig in Escondido, California, Madeleine was chatting in the car with her hostess when a truck ran a red light and broadsided them. As Madeleine recounts in The Rock That Is Higher, while her hostess was obviously injured, Madeleine herself seemed, at first, merely sore. But at the hospital it became clear she had extensive internal damage and would require immediate surgery to remove her spleen. Alone, almost three thousand miles from home, she found herself being wheeled down a hospital corridor, the words of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) echoing in her soul:
I knew that once I went under the anesthetic I might not come out of it, not in this life. I was not afraid. The Jesus Prayer was still with me, a strong rope to which I held like a sailor fallen from a ship. If God was ready for the curtain to come down on this final act of my life’s drama, I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I am grateful for that feeling of readiness, for the lack of fear, for the assurance that whatever happened all would be well.1
“But all shall be well,” wrote the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich; “and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”2 It’s a refrain that Madeleine reiterated, time and time again, in her writing and in her life.3 Many years earlier, when her nine-year-old granddaughter Léna had been hit, as a pedestrian, by a truck in July of 1977, Madeleine was awed by the miracle of people praying, all over the country, for that little girl—not just people like her good friend Luci but total strangers. Yet Madeleine knew that prayers did not guarantee the hoped-for outcome. She wrote in Walking on Water, “The largest part of that act of thanksgiving was gratitude for my children and grandchildren, for the first nine years of Léna’s life, and then to say with Lady Julian of Norwich, ‘But all shall be well’ . . . and then to add, ‘No matter what.’ That was the important part, the ‘no matter what.’”4 Whatever the outcome, Madeleine would cling to the goodness and mercy of God.
Léna survived her accident. Years later, Madeleine survived her own. But Madeleine knew such happy endings were not a foregone conclusion. She was no stranger to loss, to things being not well, as story after story from her early life demonstrates:
As a young teen, for instance, while staying with her parents and maternal grandmother (“Dearma”) at the grandmother’s beloved beach cottage near Jacksonville, Florida, Madeleine somehow intuited, late at night, that Dearma was dying. Madeleine woke her parents, and together they went into Dearma’s room, where indeed, the old woman was barely breathing. They sat with Dearma, keeping vigil, till she breathed her last.
At age seventeen, Madeleine somehow knew that when she said goodbye to her father on a train platform on the way to boarding school, it would be the last time she would see him. His failing lungs succumbed to pneumonia within months. Urgently summoned to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was hospitalized, she prayed on the train, “Please, God, do whatever is best for Father. Please, do whatever is best.”5 She arrived too late. His death left a hole in her heart and in her life that would never be filled.
Then a close friend committed suicide when Madeleine was a young woman—a devastating act that left Madeleine bewildered and frightened, never able to fully recover from feeling blindsided that anyone would choose to not be.
After Madeleine met Hugh in 1944 during the theater production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and the two began dating, Hugh suddenly, unaccountably withdrew. For six months. “I can re
member that Hugh’s turning away hurt agonizingly,” she would write in Two-Part Invention, “and that even in my pain I knew that I would wait for Hugh to come back to me.”6 Then he returned, just as suddenly, as if nothing had happened. She would never name that experience as a kind of betrayal, but when her fictional character Mac similarly abandons Camilla in Madeleine’s 1996 novel A Live Coal in the Sea, it’s not hard to imagine the author working through old, unresolved wounds.
After their marriage, Madeleine and Hugh’s adopted daughter, Maria, came to the family in 1956 at age seven after a series of tragedies involving the early deaths of several of the Franklins’ friends. Maria would write in Mothers and Daughters (coauthored with Madeleine), “My new mother, also shocked by the untimely death of her dear friend, suddenly found herself a mother of three children instead of two. Thus, ours has been a stormy relationship.”7 Even without Madeleine’s unwelcome fictionalization of that experience in Meet the Austins, one can only imagine how such a deep trauma affected them both.
During the summer of 1971, Madeleine’s own mother declined at home with the Franklins, sinking further and further into dementia. In a moment of bewilderment, her mother confessed to feeling afraid; and Madeleine found herself holding and comforting her with the words, “It’s all right, Mother. It’s all right.” Madeleine recounted in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother:
