Taking in the eclipse with the English writer, whose new book grapples with her Strict Baptist upbringing.
Sarah Perry in the nearly 1,000-year-old cathedral in her home city of Norwich, England. ,” but — absurdly, in her opinion — had never seen one herself. So, this spring, she crossed the Atlantic from her home in East Anglia
“Enlightenment” is Perry’s most overtly personal novel to date. It follows a friendship whose arc feels like a matter of celestial math: Thomas Hart, a small-town newspaper columnist and amateur astronomer, and Grace Macauley, a willful teenager, first meet at their church when Grace is just a baby. That encounter is narrated simply: “She had not existed, and then she had, summoned out of whatever matter her consciousness had been made, and had stuck her small bare foot in his door.
But for a time, the comment shook Perry’s confidence. She knew what her peers counted as good prose, and that she would never achieve it. When she tried to write hard-boiled realism, it came out Gothic. Essentially, she had been raised on the reading diet of a Victorian child. Her perception of the world, her whole consciousness, came from inside notions of sin and the eternal.
In an early draft of “Enlightenment,” she tried to write about it — that first Sunday morning after leaving the church. She remembers it clear as day: waking up, going to a cafe, ordering a cappuccino, a muesli and a yogurt. Feeding ducks at the park. “I physically felt a heavy weight release from my shoulders. I felt as if I was drifting up.”
Overwhelmed with sadness, she texted a doctor friend for advice, and he told her: “It will pass. And eventually, it will come back.” Oddly, she found that more comforting than if he had tried claiming that sorrow flowed only in one direction. The thought of these loops through time — of abandonment and reconciliation, friends and lovers orbiting one another — became the kernel of “Enlightenment.”
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