Michaela Kolowski

And she also says, whether we believe her or not, that she wrote from a novelist's perspective, not a religious one.

I suppose I did.

I did to some extent.

I mean, I should say as well that it's my take on the book from a reader's perspective also is that I'm not versed in Christian doctrine in this way because I wasn't raised with it.

So I did come to the book, I think...

You know, obviously I know and am familiar with the story of Jesus and his importance and the importance of what he signifies religiously and dogmatically and spiritually still.

But I didn't have that problem where I felt like there was one history that was being challenged.

I mean, to some extent, and I think Sue Monk Kidd writes about this a bit in her author notes at the end of the book,

nowhere in the New Testament does it say that Jesus didn't have a wife.

It's just silent on whether he had a wife.

And so she just wanted to play around with that idea.

I think I do agree with you, though, to some extent, Kate.

I think that she, Anna is a very interesting character, but almost her own story in the second or the last quarter of the book is really Anna's story almost on her own.

It doesn't quite...

to sustain the narrative enough, as much as it did, say, in the first quarter, where she's discovering that she's going to be married off to a man so much older than her who's nasty, where she's discovering that she's really, even though her father's allowed her to read and write and think, she's really chattel.

You know, those aspects of the novel were very powerful and I found them very moving.

And I felt like by the end of the story, we'd sort of gone back to trying to

in effect retell some of the Jesus story without Jesus present.

So it didn't give us any of the, yeah, yeah, any perspectives or insights that might have been interesting or powerful to read.

But I also wondered from the perspective of someone, you know, a novelist who's also somebody who is a Christian, how difficult it would be to write that kind of novel.