Easter Everywhere is described by the author, Darcey Steinke (whom I met this past week when she came to a Non-Fiction Writing course to discuss this specific piece) as her spiritual memoir;  A reflective piece of literature that describes her own personal quest to find God and to answer the age old questions surrounding spirituality. 

            Steinke is the daughter of a minister and grew up playing in her father’s rectories and the backwoods behind the church—performing her own baptisms, weddings and funerals on frogs, cats and dogs.  Her mother, a former Miss Albany, grows increasingly depressed by the life of a minister’s wife and Steinke watches her parent’s relationship as it grows strained and distant.  Her father’s own uncertainties surrounding his faith lead the family on a whirl-wind of moves from New York to Kentucky and numerous places in between. 

            Easter Everywhere is unlike the traditional memoir in that it spans most of Steinke’s lifetime; from a young child to her adult life, rather than a small extracted piece of time in her life.  Her memoir obviously does not focus on every aspect of her life during those years—in fact she never mentions her writing career during the memoir (even though during the time period she had written and published three novels all of which went on to become New York Times Notable Books of the Year), but instead she focuses on the events in her life that had a spiritual impact and explores them deeper as she searches in retrospect for the answers to her childhood question: “Why does God let bad stuff happen?”

            As a reader, this memoir makes one take note of their own life and experiences surrounding religion and how it manifests itself in ones own life.  This memoir allows the reader to be comfortable exploring these notions, because the tone the author takes reflects her own uncertainties, doubts and hesitance towards the spiritual life. 

            Easter Everywhere is a pleasure to read.  Darcey Steinke has done an excellent job of opening up herself and her life to her audience and she brings the reader into this world that she is looking at through the window of time with poetic detail and expressive language.  She lets her character be vulnerable to the scrutiny of the reader and seemingly hides no secrets from the reader.  A memoir well worth the read!