Sue Monk Kidd became interested in writing when she was a child. "My desire to become a writer was born," she explained in her biography on her Home Page,
"while listening to my father ply us with tales about mules who went through cafeteria lines and a petulant boy named Chewing Gum Bum." She wrote throughout her childhood, but at the age of sixteen stopped writing completely until long after she graduated from Texas
Christian University with a nursing degree. "The only time I really doubted my career choice," she recalled in her biography, "was when my English professor said to me, and I quote, 'For the love of God, why are you a nursing major? You are a born writer.'" Kidd went on to work as a nurse and later as a nursing instructor.
In her thirties, Kidd nurtured her lifelong interest in spirituality with a serious study of Western religion and theology before turning to psychology and mythology. It was during this period that she returned to writing and published essays that grew out of her spiritual journey.
She described her first book, God's Joyful Surprise, as
"a spiritual memoir which chronicled my early experiences with contemplative Christian spirituality."
She followed that book with When the Heart Waits, which portrays the psychological and spiritual transformation she later experienced. When her spiritual explorations took her into feminist theology in her forties, Kidd captured that experience in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.
"The book found a huge audience of women," she recounted in her biography,
"and their response to it was astonishingly passionate."
Augusta Trobaugh
Olympia Vernon
P.J. Parrish
Denise Nicholas
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Compiled from resources – Novelist, Biography Resource Center, Catalog - available at the Deschutes Public Library. Discussion questions from ReadingGroupGuide.com

1.
What does August mean when she tells Lily that "everybody needs a God who looks like them"?
2.
What does Lily's relationship with the three sisters and the
Daughters of Mary suggest about racial identity?
3.
What is the significance of Lily's relationship with Zach?
4.
What does the novel suggest about the importance of stories?
5.
What is the significance of Our
Lady of Chains?
6.
What does Lily mean when she says that she wants to grow up to be an amnesiac?
The Deschutes Public Library Catalog at
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iPac
Novelist at www.dpls.us
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In 1964 South Carolina, 14-year-old Lily is seeking to escape her abusive father through her fantasies about her deceased mother. She has few mementos of Deborah, but chief among them is a mysterious picture of a black Madonna. She runs away with her servant to Tiburon, SC, and to the Black Madonna Honey company, where middle-aged sisters May, June, and August take the two fugitives in and introduce them to the ways of beekeeping and the sisterhood of Our Lady of Chains. The predictability of the plot is well balanced by the author's descriptions and Lily's increasing struggles with the truth about her mother's past. This is a well-paced and crafted Gothic debut that mixes humor with tragedy. Highly recommended.-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria
Coll., Buffalo, NY
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