Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey. In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.
- ISBN10 0385721277
- ISBN13 9780385721271
- Publish Date 22 February 2005 (first published 24 February 2004)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Imprint Anchor
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 336
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385721271