And I donât know why you write your books.
I write them for lots of reasons, and usually those reasons overlap and bury each other until you canât really pull them apart.Â
But this little novelâs pedigree remained fairly uncluttered as I wrote it. Uncluttered enough, really, that Iâm not sure if itâs a novel. It might technically be a fable or a rumination or an allegory. Maybe thatâs in the eye of the beholder.
On the surface, the book is about a remote ranch in southeastern Colorado, a place where two kinds of miracles take place. The first one is always performed by a member of the Soria family, and itâs always the same variety of miracle: when a pilgrim arrives, the Saint makes their inner darkness visible. Tangible. Concrete. Basically turns them into a walking metaphor â the pilgrims are saddled with a supernatural and physical manifestation of whatever has been troubling them. Some have rain falling on them all the time, some are giants, some have the heads of coyotes. Obviously this makes returning to the real world difficult, so this is where the second miracle comes in, which must be performed by the pilgrim: vanquishing oneâs inner darkness. Theoretically, this should be a snap once they know what the shape of it is, but practically, many of them are still kind of stuck. And they canât ask the saints for advice, because the saints have a taboo â if they help with the second miracle in any way, their own inner darkness will appear, and supposedly it is worse than anyone elseâs. Obviously a saint breaks the rules and a book happens, ta da, rock and roll/ owls/ miracles/ go. That is a true enough version of what this book is actually about.
But the book is also very much about my experience with my OCD and mental health, and my experience as a friend watching friends and family members work with their own mental health. The darkest point of my life was in college, when I was a suicidal teen. I was a disaster in at least forty of the ways a human could be a disaster (some of these are part of other novelsâ pedigrees). Then I found out my disaster had a name: obsessive compulsive disorder.Â
You know what this changed?Â
Iâd received the first miracle, and now I knew the shape of my inner darkness, but it didnât really change anything. I even had theoretical methods on how to cope with my darkness written in front of me, but that also didnât help. Concrete steps written by someone else for someone else didnât seem relevant to me. Even when I did finally try them, they didnât seem to work, so obviously they were bullshit and someone had either labeled me wrong or I had a particularly virulent form of disaster that didnât respond to treatment.Â
The reality, however, was this: It took years of learning myself, seeing other people living with OCD, practicing and learning how the coping techniques felt when I was actually doing them right for me, and learning that success is not always a straight slope up. Moreover, it was learning that it was less about completely killing that inner darkness (a futile battle, OCD never goes away as itâs hardwired into your brain) and more about learning how to live with it and make it a reasonable, manageable part of me. This was my slow and complicated second miracle. Â
That is why I wrote this book.
I also wrote this book because I try to be the sort of friend you can rely on to be a truthful mirror when you arenât sure of your own reflection: a saint, in a tiny and crooked fashion. Itâs difficult, however, in a very specific way, to watch a friend or family member seek your advice and still fall down the rabbit hole despite your best intentions. Did you fail them? Did they fail you? Does feeling the prickle of your own past darkness when youâre helping someone through something similar mean that youâre in danger of sliding back yourself? Who is even qualified for giving advice; is there a point at which youâre evolved enough to take on the role? What is the cost of offering miracles if you are a flawed saint yourself?
This is also why I wrote this book.
I put all of my thoughts about these things into All the Crooked Saints, and I still donât know if it contains answers or only more questions. I do know that unlike my other novels, it takes very little digging or analysis to get to my motive for writing it. I think thatâs ok. I think thatâs the point.
Which is to say that Iâm glad, OP, if my odd little novel could be any part of either of those miracles for you. The last lines of the book are actually in the acknowledgments, and they are this:Â
And thanks to my old Camaro, which hurtled and lurched its failing way into a small Colorado town years ago. I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.
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