Author: HEATHER KING
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 3, 2025
This week my Angelus News column features several iconic California novels:
“West was an eccentric and a huge boozer. He died at 37 when, en route back to LA from a trip to Mexicali, he ran a stop sign near the Salton Sea and caused an accident which killed him and his young wife.
He achieved posthumous semi-cult fame and “The Day of the Locust” was later made into a movie.
That’s a story with California written all over it.”
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NEWSLETTER APRIL 25, 2025
Blessed Friday in the Octave of Easter!
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a Jewish author from Austria who, having emigrated to London, was in his day one of the most popular and translated writers in Europe.
His 1939 novel, “Beware of Pity,” tells the story of a twisted psychological “romance” grounded in a deeply disordered concept of compassion. It’s been called frightening, gripping, intoxicating, and Zweig’s single greatest work.
Anyone who has ever been the victim — from either end — of unrequited love will squirm, it must be said deliciously (if with horror), throughout.
An aristocratic invalid in a wheelchair, a dashing but callow cavalry officer, a doting but judgment-beclouded father, a faux-martyr doctor: there’s an over-the-top 1946 movie starring Lilli Palmer, too.
Read all about it in my Angelus News column this week.
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: BLESSED TRIDUUM 2025
Greetings, all.
This week’s Angelus News column is a reflection about sitting with Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane.
It begins with a quote from Albert Camus: “When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane.”
—from “The Myth of Sisyphus”
After Easter, I hope to start working up a new Writing Workshop format and setting some dates.
Wishing you all a rich, blessed, profound Triduum.
Meanwhile, I urge you to subscribe–which you can do FOR FREE if you wish–to my new Substack, which is essentially the blog you’re used to reading here.
As always, a thousand thanks for any and all support.
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER APRIL 11, 2025
Greetings. I hope everyone had a good week.
This week’s Angelus News column features Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, patroness of ‘people without categories’ and a fantastic (and eccentric) French laywoman who lived among and cared for the poor. She also wrote many books, most notably The Joy of Believing.
Other exciting happenings: the people next door have decided to build an “ADU” (I call them ICUs–what’s wrong with the lovely phrase guest house?) Whatever you want to call it, the construction will take place about fifty feet from my office. I have already befriended the workers and learned the estimated completion time is three months which really doesn’t sound that bad. Plus, having attained a new level of maturity during Lent, I am not allowing the prospect of noise from 6:30 am to 3 each day to rattle me one bit!
From Father Donald Haggerty’s new book, The Hour of Testing: “As a consecrated woman wrote to my once, her suffering had become for her ‘almost like a precious royal garment that is given to me to wear–and it’s an honor to do so–but which actually does not belong to me.’”
In that case–happy to lend it out!
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COME OVER TO MY NEW SUBSTACK, AND WELCOME!
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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER APRIL 5, 2025
This week’s Angelus News column is about the C.S. Lewis essay, “The Abolition of Man.”
If you’ve been following along, you know I have launched a new Substack: DESIRE LINES: BOOKS I LOVE.
Here’s a complimentary post, free to all, called Bring Back Betty MacDonald!
From hereon in, most posts will be available to paid subscribers only.
I’m very excited about sharing my love of books, and hope you’ll come along for the ride!
GOD AND MAMMON
“You remember some of the “harsh” sayings of our Lord: Let the dead bury their dead, Unless a man hate his father and his mother, Sell all thou hast: what are they telling you if not the same thing: you cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot be at the same time a Christian and a self-complacent egoist, you cannot claim to follow Christ if you give only half of yourself to Christ. There is no way to life except through death and re-birth: that re-birth in the Spirit means a full surrender of will, through love, to the will of the Spirit.”
–Gerald Vann, OP, The Pain of Christ
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INTRODUCING MY NEW SUBSTACK–BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS!
DESIRE LINES: BOOKS I LOVE. Memoir, eccentric travel, family dysfunction, pilgrimage, prayer, biography, the vocation of art, sinners, saints. I write myself.
HERE’S MY WELCOME PAGE.
READ MY OPENING POST HERE!
If you love books, you’re going to love this Substack. Many of you have followed me for years–subscribing would be a beautiful way to support my efforts. THANK YOU!!
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WHY WRITE A MEMOIR?
“Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.”
–C.S.Lewis
Steeped as I am in books, story, and memoir, I’m sometimes taken aback to come upon people who don’t much know what a memoir even is.
When they find out, they narrow their eyes and ask with a barely-disguised sneer so you just know they’re thinking: “Has your life really been that interesting?”
What’s so great about you that we need to know about it?
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AGATA IZABELA BREWER’S “THE HUNGER BOOK: A MEMOIR FROM COMMUNIIST POLAND”
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Lent is upon us. Pray, fast, and give alms, saith the Lord.
Apropos of fasting, I recently read a food-based memoir that is about very much more than food.
Agata lzabela Brewer, author of “The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland” (Mad Creek Books, $24.95), grew up in Lviv during the 1980s with a terrifying, unstable, alcoholic mother and a little brother whom she adored and protected.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD DECLARED UNTO MARY…
BLESSED SOLEMNITY!
Turns out it’s also the 100th anniversary of O’Connor’s birth….Happy Birthday, Flannery…
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UP WITH THE FRINGES OF SLEEP
“Several scientists have told me that the fringes of sleep set the problem-sodden mind free to make uninhibited, bizarre, even random connections taht may throw up an unexpected answer. One said that the technical trick that led to one of his most admired discoveries–it was about the fundamental, molecular nature of genetic mutations–had sprung to mind while he was lying insomniac at three in the morning. Another said he was startled from a deep sleep one night by the fully worked-out answer to a puzzle that had blocked him for weeks–except that at breakfast he was no longer able to remember any detail except the jubilant certainty. So the next night he went to sleep with paper and pencil on the bedside table; and when, once again, he awoke with the answer he was able to seize it.
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ME–SELFISH!?
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Recently someone with whom I’m walking the path of recovery chided me for being selfish. She thought I should offer myself for a certain kind of service that, at this point in my life, work, and Benedictine oblateship, I feel is beyond me.
“This isn’t just about you and your self-transformation,” she said. “It’s about passing what we have on to others.”
My first reaction was an inward, “Excuse me? My whole LIFE is a service!” The prayer, the books, the talks, the columns, the 15 years of blog posts, the endless correspondence, the travel, the countless “favors,” the hours spent in recovery circles, both giving and receiving. In fact, in the recent past, I’d faithfully shown up in service to her for an hour each week for more than a period of two years!
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE
“Listen to him,” says the Father at Christ’s Transfiguration, mirroring Mary’s injunction to the wedding guests at Cana.
Boy, do I like to do the opposite, endlessly nattering on, sharing my projects and plans, presenting my well-reasoned Pharisaical defenses of the faith to Christ–Christ!
This morning I was reflecting that Jesus suffered on the cross, and continues to suffer, so that the gate may remain open a crack–the narrow gate that few will enter because I, for one, so mightily resist dying to myself, taking the last place, surrendering completely…
Anyway, here’s a video I worked up yesterday in a burst of enthusiasm…
Flannery O’Connor’s stories, like the parables of Christ, open up many more questions than tney answer.
This is a reflection on one of my all-time favorites: “Good Country People.”