Libro de la Vida

This is not the autobiography of a saint writing from the safety of canonization. This is a woman in the midst of transformation, still raw, still terrified, still astonished by what God is doing to her. Teresa of Avila composed this extraordinary memoir at the command of her confessors, and she gave them something far more honest than hagiography. She writes about her childhood daydreams, her family's horrified reaction to her first attempts at fasting, the time she faked levitation to impress a nun, and the mystical experiences that left her body broken for months. The book chronicles her progress from a restless, sometimes frivolous young woman to the founder of a reform movement that shook the Spanish church. But what makes it endure is not its importance to theology. It is the voice: fierce, funny, impatient with her own weakness, and utterly unafraid to describe prayer as a kind of madness that she could not stop even when she wanted to. For anyone who has ever tried to find God in the mess of their own life.