It seems my life is meant to prove over and over again—in case I dare forget—that every curse can be a blessing, that the worst thing that happens might ultimately be exactly what you need.
One night six years ago I awoke to a rapist in my bed. “Don’t scream, I have a knife,” he said. My new memoir, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace, begins this fateful night when evil paid me a visit and prayer chased it out.
It’s as though I’d lived three lives, first as a wild teenaged mother dying for an education, then as a scrappy young mother on the streets of the East Village, and later as the bestselling author of Riding in Cars with Boys. By the time the rapist arrived I thought I’d seen it all. Life in my adopted Mexican town was busy with friends, margaritas at sunset, dancing, yoga, fun. But the spiritual practices that had nourished me for years were beginning to lose their luster as the world turned grayer and grayer, and I realized how much I missed God. I was so bereft I’d even begun searching the internet for a monastery to join, which was precisely when the rapist arrived.
So begins the surprising journey of healing and love as I practice as a monk at monasteries, become a lay member of one, and four years after it all began, step back into the world a changed woman, feisty again, but maybe, I hope, a little bit wiser, a tiny bit kinder, and a big blue–sky–worth’s more peaceful. Astonished is my reverently irreverent and hopeful story of learning to love life again.
Reviews
“Reading Donofrio’s memoir, Astonished, is in itself, an astonishing experience. She grapples with her faith in ways and in words that startle, move, mesmerize, wrench, enliven, and thrill the reader. It is a narrative composed of brutal honesty, tenderness, and an aching love for God. I could not put it down.”
— Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees
“As beautiful as it is authentic, Astonished is one of the most compelling, appealing, and
instructive spiritual autobiographies I have read in many a year.”
– Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
“(Beverly Donofrio) reveals how a terrifying brush with a rapist sparked her spirituality and set her on a journey of recovery paved with prayer.”
– O, The Oprah Magazine
“What’s most compelling, besides Donofrio’s simultaneously warm and tough-as-nails voice, is the openness of her heart toward good old-fashioned faith... The fact that she was able to take such ugliness and transform it into the beauty of this book is a stunning accomplishment.”
– The Daily Beast
“An insightful, candidly unfolding, soul-baring journey to grace.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“Anyone who can read Bev Donofrio’s first paragraph and stop should be interdict for life from libraries and bookstores. She is one first-class human being and, to my mind, a down-and-dirty saint. I’m grateful for the privilege of being invited into her radiant soul.”
– William J. O’Malley, S.J., author of The Fifth Week