Overview
Now a?USA TODAY?and?Publishers Weekly?bestseller!
?Patti Callahan seems to have found the story she was born to tell in this tale of unlikely friendship turned true love between Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis, that tests the bounds of faith and radically alters both of their lives. Their connection comes to life in Callahan?s expert hands, revealing a connection so persuasive and affecting, we wonder if there?s another like it in history. Luminous and penetrating.???Paula McLain,?New York Times?bestselling author of?The Paris Wife
In a most improbable friendship, she found love. In a world where women were silenced, she found her voice.
From?New York Times?bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called ?my whole world.? When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis?known as Jack?she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn?t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn?t destroy.
In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren?t meant to have a voice?and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn?t know they had.
At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer?s life,?Becoming Mrs. Lewis?is above all a love story?a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.
?Patti Callahan Henry breathes wondrous fresh life into one of the greatest literary love stories of all time . . . The result is a deeply moving story about love and loss that is transformative and magical.???Pam Jenoff,?New York Times?bestselling author of?The Orphan?s Tale
?I was swept along, filled with hope, and entirely beguiled, not only by the life lived behind the veil of C. S. Lewis?s books but also by the woman who won his heart. A literary treasure from first page to last.???Lisa Wingate,?New York Times?bestselling author of?Before We Were Yours
?Profoundly evocative, revealing an intimate view of a woman whose love and story had never been fully told . . . until now . . .?Becoming Mrs. Lewis?is a tour de force and the must-read of the season!???Mary Alice Monroe,?New York Times?bestselling author of?Beach House Reunion
?Patti Callahan somehow inhabits Davidman, taking her readers inside the writer?s hungry mind and heart.? We keenly feel Davidman?s struggle to become her own person at a time (the 1950s) when women had few options . . . An astonishing work of biographical fiction.???Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of?Mrs. Poe
?Patti Callahan breathes life into this fascinating woman whose hunger for knowledge leads her to buck tradition at every turn.???Diane Chamberlain,?New York Times?bestselling author of?The Dream Daughter
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780785218081 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2018 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 438 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Patti Callahan (who also writes as Patti Callahan Henry) is a?New York Times?bestselling author. Patti was a finalist in the Townsend Prize for Fiction, has been an Indie Next Pick, twice an OKRA pick, and a multiple nominee for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Novel of the Year. Her work has also been included in short story collections, anthologies, magazines, and blogs. Patti attended Auburn University for her undergraduate work and Georgia State University for her graduate degree. Once a Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist, she now writes full time. The mother of three children, she lives in both Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Bluffton, South Carolina, with her husband. Visit her online at patticallahanhenry.com; Instagram: pattichenry; Facebook: AuthorPattiCallahanHenry; Twitter: @pcalhenry
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Begin again, must I begin again Who have begun so many loves in fire
?Sonnet I ,? Joy Davidman
1946 Ossining, New York
There are countless ways to fall in love, and I?d begun my ash-destined affairs in myriad manners. This time, it was marriage.
The world, it changes in an instant. I?ve seen it over and over, the way in which people forge through the days believing they have it all figured out, protected inside a safe life. Yet there is no figuring life out, or not in any way that protects us from the tragedies of the heart. I should have known this by now; I should have been prepared.
?Joy.? Bill?s voice through the telephone line came in a voice so shaky I thought he might have been in a car wreck or worse. ?I?m coming undone again and I don?t know what to do. I don?t know where to go.?
?Bill.? I hugged the black plastic phone against my ear and shoulder, the thick cord dangling, as I bounced our baby son, Douglas, against my chest. ?Take a deep breath. You?re fine. It?s just the old fear. You?re not in the war. You?re safe.?
?I?m?not?fine, Joy. I can?t take it anymore.? Panic broke his voice into fragments, but I understood. I could talk him off this ledge as I had other nights. He might get drunk as hell before it was all over, but I could calm him.
?Come home, Poogle. Come on home.? I used the nickname we had for each other and our children, like a birdcall.
?I?m not coming home, Joy. I?m not sure I ever will.?
?Bill!? I thought he might have hung up, but then I heard his labored breathing, in and out as if someone were squeezing the life out of him. And then the long, shrill, disconnected buzz vibrated like a tuning fork in my ear and down to my heart, where my own fear sat coiled and ready to strike.
?No!? I shouted into the empty line.
I knew Bill?s office number by heart and I called him back again and again, but it rang endlessly while I mumbled a mantra: ?Answer answer answer.? As if I had any control from where I stood in our kitchen, my back pressed against the lime-green linoleum counter. Finally I gave up. There was nothing left for me to do. I couldn?t leave our babies and go look for him. He?d taken the car and I didn?t have help. I had no idea where he might be other than a bar, and in New York City there were hundreds.
Isolated, I had only myself to blame. I was the one who?d pushed for a move from the city to this banished and awful place far from my literary friends and publishing contacts. I?d begun to believe that I?d never been a poet, or a novelist, a friend or lover, never existed as anything other than wife and mother. Moving here had been my meager attempt to whisk Bill away from an affair with a blonde in Manhattan. Desperation fuels one to believe idiocy is insight.
Was he with another woman and merely feigning a breakdown? This didn?t seem too farfetched, and yet even his lunacy had its limits.
Or maybe it didn?t.
Our house in the Hudson Valley at the far edge of the suburb of Ossining, New York, was a small wooden abode we called Maple Lodge. It had a sloping roof and creaked with every movement our little family made: Bill; Davy, a toddler who was much like a runaway atom bomb; and Douglas, a baby. It often felt as if the foundation itself was coming undone with our restlessness. I was thirty-one years old, surrounded by books, two cats, and two sons, and I felt as ancient as the house itself.
I missed my friends, the hustle and bustle of the city, the publishing parties and literary gossip. I missed my neighbors. I missed myself.
