Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan
The arrival of summer heralds the promise of long days, perhaps kicking back and relaxing, escaping from the humdrum of every day and catching your breath. And, every couple of years, summer also heralds the arrival of a new novel by author J. Courtney Sullivan. Since the summer of 2009, with her debut novel Commencement, which owed a spiritual nod to Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Sullivan has turned out the perfect novel to get lost in. Her novels usually focus on women and their relationships (often with each other) and Sullivan’s Irish-American-Catholic roots provide all the fodder a novelist could want to tell tales of family, love and loss.
Her newest book, Saints For All Occasions, quietly creeps up on you with its profoundly authentic tale of two sisters who left Ireland for the greener pastures of the new world, a journey undertaken by thousands and thousands of young Irish men and women. That the two sisters, who lived a circumscribed life at home, could then cross the ocean unaccompanied to a whole new life is a story that was lived by many young women, including Sullivan’s own great-grandmother who immigrated to Boston alone at 17 years of age.
The story opens with news of the death of 50-year-old Patrick Rafferty in a car crash. His mother’s call to a Vermont abbey, to inform the cloistered Mother Cecilia of the death of Patrick, sets us down the road of what seems like an all too common story of Irish immigration that started in a small Irish village.
Nora is the stalwart older sister, aged before her time as she has taken on the role of the matriarch of the family after the early death of their mother. She has promised to marry local boy Charlie who has gone on ahead to Boston. She and younger sister Theresa head out to 1950s America, Nora reluctantly, unsure if she even wants to marry Charlie, and Theresa with the hope of becoming a teacher. Soon enough the vivacious and carefree Theresa has embraced her new freedoms and she finds herself pregnant by a married man.
As with thousands of young women, she is taken to a home where she is to have the baby who will be put up for adoption. Nora’s sense of propriety and familial loyalty prompts her to take Theresa’s baby as her own, keeping the child in the family and launching a lie that will rupture the sisters forever.
As the Rafferty family prepares for Patrick’s wake and funeral the choices made half a century ago haunt the sisters and challenge them to come to terms with that decision.
While religion always is a feature of the great Irish American story, not too many of them tell that story through the lens of a nun. Theresa, years after the birth of the son she gave up to her sister, ends up as a cloistered nun in an Abbey in Vermont. It’s an interesting choice narratively and one that is revelatory.
Theresa ends up in the Abbey almost by accident and finds the peace and tranquility she has been looking for since giving up her son. She is not the sister that you think would end up in an Abbey as a nun, but that’s what is so compelling. We follow her for 50 years and learn about the life of the abbey and how women come to stay – through the 60s and 70s to the present day. “Each nun was a product of her time” Sullivan writes and we get a window into those choices and how Theresa, now Mother Cecilia, develops over time.
“When you’re raised catholic, as I was, you imagine that nuns are born fully formed and just come out of the womb wearing a tiny habit and that’s that” Sullivan told me. It was after striking up a friendship with a cloistered nun, a family friend Sullivan had never met, that exposed her to all the reasons that women entered the abbey over the years, including an interest in social justice and serving peace.
“The idea that women only enter an abbey because they are running from something I found to be untrue.” Indeed, Theresa does find something in the Abbey that she couldn’t find outside.
Nora, meanwhile, has kept the secret of Patrick’s birth and brought up three more children. They are a family who nurse the usual secrets, insecurities and grievances of any large family. Nora is the rock of the family and of the neighborhood. The organizer of the community, the parties, the wakes, the glue that holds things together, but above all, the keeper of the biggest secret a family could have. For the Rafferty children it is the death of Patrick that starts to unlock those secrets including the revelation that their mother has a sister they knew nothing about.
For her youngest son, Brian, “It didn’t bother him that his mother hadn’t told them about her sister. The family was built on things unsaid. There might be hints, whispers from another room, that fell to silence when he entered. There were stories he simply accepted that he didn’t know the whole of, and others he didn’t even know he didn’t know the whole of. Who wanted to know everything about his own mother?”
It is the original lie that has determined how Nora Rafferty lives her life. The fierce protection of that original sin and the life spun around it is what stifles Nora. For a granddaughter working on a family tree project she is of little help “Nora never spoke about the past…She always acted like an emotion expressed was the most dangerous thing in the world.” And so the complicated, challenging relationships between her children remains just that, as if any effort to really understand them will crack the rigid construction around the life she has built..
In many ways it is Nora who is the cloistered one, shut in by the edifice she has built around herself and her story. Theresa lives a life that seems somehow freer and more fulfilling.
Sullivan’s structure toggles between alternating timelines, one that spans 50 years and another that spans just a few days from the accident to the wake and funeral. It’s not an easy trick to pull off but Sullivan does it with a deftness that you barely even notice.
"I’m always interested in writing about women in the context of their historical moment and sort of the moment that a woman is born determines who she is allowed to become” Sullivan says. The story of Theresa and Nora is the story of so many young women who arrived in America after an epic voyage across the ocean, unprepared for the fact that they now had to author their next chapter themselves. You will be swept up by their lives and have a new respect for all the brave young women who ventured into the void to start a new life abroad.
BEFORE YOU READ:
LENGTH: 335 pages
GENRE: Fiction, Family
THEMES: secrets, sacrifice, family
COMMITMENT: You will want to spend uninterrupted time with this book, order now for your vacation.
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