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The Dearly Beloved

A Novel

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About The Book

“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” —Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!)

This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become copastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s.

Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart.

Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not?

James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life.

In The Dearly Beloved, Cara wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love,” (Entertainment Weekly, A-) as we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.

Excerpt

Chapter One ONE
On both his mother’s and his father’s side, Charles Barrett was descended from old Boston families. His father was the head of the Classics Department at Harvard, where he taught seminars on the Romans and Greeks.

“Societies fail,” his father told the freshmen year after year, “when men are rewarded for seeking pleasure instead of responsibility.” His tweed jackets rasped as he cracked notes on the blackboard; his comments on papers, written in gaunt handwriting in deep blue ink, were direct and critical. At the dinner table, just before pushing back his chair to retire to his study, he often said, “Obligations are the fuel of life, Charles. Reputation is their reward.”

Their shingled, sharp-roofed Victorian house was painted grey with brown shutters. Inside it was stern, angular, and choked with books, each chosen deliberately: a collection of translation, biography, and historical analysis his father would one day bequeath to the library—a legacy of edification. Charles’s mother hid her romance magazines behind a bucket under the kitchen sink, and Charles fell on the comic books other boys brought to faculty parties, gorging himself as quickly and stealthily as his contemporaries emptied the cocktail glasses the grown-ups left behind. He never took a comic home, because his father did not believe in leisure or in letting one’s mind run free, without purpose. If he had seen Charles with so much as a paperback, he would have assigned Charles an essay to write or a problem to solve.

Thankfully, each June, Charles and his mother packed the station wagon with canvas totes full of shorts and white sneakers and escaped to her parents’ square, damp summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, which was full of rag rugs, needlepoint pillows, and dogs. Her tanned parents were waiting when she and Charles stepped out of the car onto the crushed-shell driveway. His grandmother hugged him tightly; his grandfather clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Stack of funnies on the table,” words that caused Charles to race into the dining room, dropping his bags hastily in the front hall.

Charles felt his full self in that house, bigger than himself—free and happy. His mother’s sisters laughed often, walked barefoot on the lawn, meandered into town for ice cream with their arms linked together. Her brothers joked with Charles around the barbecue; he and his cousins built model airplanes, flew kites, and captained remote-controlled submarines in the salt-water lake behind the shed. Summers were when Charles learned how to sail, play tennis, fix old shutters, season butter for lobster, and introduce a new person to a crowd. Summers allowed him, though he was an only child, to feel part of a brood, a clan that sailed through the world together, as stately and festive as an ocean liner.

His father visited for a week each August, sat on the beach in khaki pants and blue button-down shirts, never took off his shoes. He was not like his wife’s family, and he did not like his wife’s family. Despite this, Charles’s aunts, uncles, and grandparents respected his father. It was hard not to. He had set forth a paradigm for himself and followed it to the letter. He was well educated, eloquent, gainfully employed, and saved from arrogance by the fact that his accomplishments were verifiable and significant. For all their diversions, Charles’s mother’s family esteemed intelligence and academic debate. Still, they took turns sitting next to his father at dinner, so that no one had to talk to him two nights in a row.

Charles had always known he would go to college, just as he had always known that to go anywhere but Harvard would cause his father to grumble and sigh. He wasn’t unduly bothered by the expectation—he loved Harvard. He loved its tree-filled commons, its stone courtyards, its brick facades, and the snippets of conversations that fell out of its open windows. He could picture himself there, walking to class in a blue blazer, books tucked beneath his arm. He could imagine the smoky smell of autumn slipping into classrooms as his professors entered, hear the gentle pop of new texts opening, see clean notebook pages white and blue beneath his pen.

Because, even though he sometimes wished he could spend his whole life playing baseball, standing in the outfield, tossing lazy balls at the deep green end of summer, when the air stayed warm well after dark, he knew he was very much like his father. Though he loved to feel his cleats kick up dirt, smell the chalk of the baselines, catch a ball in his mitt and throw it back, his body lengthening as the seam slid off his fingertips, he also loved books and everything in them: Latin, physics, algebraic equations and algorithms, the end-stop lines of geometric and philosophical proofs. Though he often longed to lean out over the side of a little boat, bracing his feet on the mast while the wind hurled him forward, pulling the line close to his hip, he also wanted to write papers, debate ideas, use his mind to read closely and accurately, formulate answers to every hidden question.

He enrolled at Harvard and majored in medieval history.

It was there, in late May 1954, that Charles sat in the library reading a book about Catherine of Aragon. He loved the library, its mahogany shelves that climbed to the ceiling, its bounty of lush pages majestically restrained. He loved it especially on days like this, when it was empty, steeped in quiet, electric with promise, as if the books were breathing, alive as big dogs sleeping at the foot of his bed. He reveled in that particular stillness, in which he felt as if he could, at any minute, turn a page and recognize everything there was in the world to know.

His junior year was drawing to a close; as soon as exams were finished, he would set off for another summer on the Vineyard. He was looking forward to vacation. He was ready to be without coat and tie, to sleep late, walk on the beach, and read whatever paperback novels happened to be on hand. It occurred to him that he should take his cousins’ children some comic books, carry on his grandfather’s tradition, but he realized, with a pang of disappointment, that he did not know where one bought comic books—his had always been hand-me-downs. He marked his page and crossed the long marble room to ask the librarian, Eileen, keeper of the key to the rare manuscripts collection, whether she knew where to buy some.

“Comic books?” she asked, eyebrows raised. “I don’t think so.” She pushed her chair back and craned her neck to ask the woman in the office behind her. “Marilyn, do you have any idea where to buy comics?” The woman in the office must have shaken her head because Eileen turned to Charles and said, “Apologies.”

Charles moved off to the side of the desk, abashed at having bothered a librarian with such a trivial question. But before he went far, he turned back to ask Eileen if she had a phone book. A girl had moved to the front of the tall desk. Eileen was stamping her books, and as she slid the last circulation card into its cardboard holder, she asked the girl, “You don’t know where to find comic books in this town, do you?”

The girl looked up, thought for a moment, then said one word: “No.”

It was not the flat clap of a mother’s angry no; it was not the timid no of someone who wanted to always, and to everybody, say yes. It was a full, round, truthful no—not off-putting, not regretful, just an answer. It perfectly matched the girl who had spoken it. She was tall and straight-standing, wearing a navy blue skirt and a white shirt one might wear to play tennis. Her hair was thick and brown—not a deep, shiny, fashionable brown—just a serviceable, reliable brown, the color of a pony. It was cut in a plain bob. She was slightly tanned and very freckled. She looked exactly like a girl Charles might meet next week at a party on Martha’s Vineyard, except that her face was entirely sad.

He didn’t think she knew she looked sad. He thought she probably looked in the mirror and saw a well-designed face, with strong cheekbones, a straight nose, and perfectly fine, rounded pink lips. He thought she probably brushed her hair every morning and thought to herself, Good enough. He acknowledged that there were men in the world who would think she was beautiful and men in the world who would find her plain. He found her both—ravishingly beautiful and exquisitely plain. She was slim and sturdy as a board, lit up with health, and quietly, eternally sad. She looked exactly like a medieval queen.

The girl picked up her books and walked away. Charles leaned over to Eileen without thinking and asked, “What’s that girl’s name?”

Eileen answered, “Lily.”

Lily Barrett’s parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was fifteen. This fact seemed absurd to her. If she had been told it might happen before it happened, she would have said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” When she talked about it afterward she said, “I know it’s ridiculous.” Often, the person to whom she was speaking did not think it was ridiculous at all. But it was ridiculous. Whose parents died? Certainly not anyone’s she knew. The parents she knew were dentists and headmistresses, men who washed their cars on Saturday and women who cultivated roses in their spare time. And really, how could her parents be dead? Last time she had seen them, they were standing at the door, dressed for an outing. Her mother was closing her purse, her father shrugging himself into a jacket. What was it—a birthday party? A wedding? An appointment at the bank? She hadn’t asked.

They had come into the living room to say their goodbyes. Lily was lying on the blue tweed sofa. “We’ll be home by six,” her mother said, leaning over to kiss Lily on the forehead.

“Love you,” her father said, wiping away the red lipstick her mother had left on her skin with his thumb.

Lily had rolled her eyes. Rolled her eyes. She was in the middle of Jane Eyre, and she wanted to finish it that afternoon. She wanted to eat potato chips, drink ginger ale, and swallow the black-licorice paragraphs whole. Her parents went out the door. Even after the room fell still, Lily could smell the straw of her father’s hat and her mother’s lemon perfume. Outside, her cousins were playing in the backyards of the houses on either side of her own; she could hear the younger boys shouting, “This is a stickup. No, this is a stickup!” She knew the older girl cousins had been sent outside to watch them, sitting on the steps with their striped summer skirts tucked under their knees, talking about boys, folding and refolding their socks so the lace trim fell just so around their ankles.

Lily thought they were frivolous. They thought Lily was dull. That didn’t stop them from bothering her, though; they were forever asking her to sit with them while they embroidered, or swing with them on the porch swing, or walk into town. The boys wanted Lily to play checkers with them, or help them find their archery sets, or referee their games of tag. If they had known she was home alone, they would have snuck inside to pull her hair. So she stayed in her living room all day, with her library book and its thick soft pages, its crisp cellophane wrapper that crackled slightly whenever she moved.

Lily was the lone only child in her big family. Her mother was one of four beautiful sisters, all of whom had married upstanding men. For wedding presents, their father had given them a string of sturdy white houses, lined up in a row on a leafy street in Maryville, Missouri, near the university on the west side of town. While their husbands served on the city council and ran the rotary club, Lily’s mother and her sisters took turns walking the children to school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoons. Birthday and anniversary celebrations rotated from dining room to dining room, lemonade stands from porch to porch. There was no yours and mine, only ours. Lily’s mother was the youngest, the most beautiful, and the most doted upon. Her father was the tallest, the best dressed, and the most fun.

At the hospital, Lily was given two gold wedding rings, two watches with leather straps, and her mother’s ruby earrings in a small brown envelope. She did not see the bodies. As she was waiting for her aunt Miriam and uncle Richard to finish talking to the doctors, she took the watches out and put them on; her father’s was too big, slipped off her wrist, and had to be held in her palm.

It was still light when they drove home. Miriam, stunned and pale, did not notice the car had stopped until her husband opened the door and touched her shoulder. She got out and helped Lily out behind her, but then stood, as if lost, on the green stretch of lawn that spanned the family homes like an apron.

“Go home, love,” Richard said, turning Miriam in the right direction. Then he took Lily’s hand, led her up to her own wide, covered porch and sat next to her on the thick, weathered swing. The two of them stayed there for what seemed like hours, without saying a word. There was a slight breeze. The cicadas came out, and then the lightning bugs.

Uncle Richard was a big man, tall, who wore blue-and-white-striped shirts and kept his grey hair in the same buzz cut he had been given in the army. His stillness was as big as his being, and even then, tangled in shock, Lily realized this was why he was sitting with her, rather than anyone else. Not just because he had been first to the hospital, or because he was the oldest man and only lawyer in the family, but because he was solid enough to feel real while everything else in the world dissolved.

“Want to go in?” Richard said, finally.

Lily shook her head.

“All right. It will be here tomorrow.” He looked over at her. “It’s your house,” he said. “It will be until you don’t want it to be. We’ll leave it unlocked, and we won’t go in it much without you.”

Lily looked at him.

“So you can come here for privacy,” he said. “But you’ll live with us.”

It was then that Lily started to cry, because the offer to live in someone else’s house made her feel completely and utterly alone.

For most of Charles’s undergraduate life, the history of the Saxons, Plantagenets, Lancasters, and Yorks had stretched out across reading tables in front of him, full of petty politics and sweeping consequences, courtly love and syphilis, mental incapacity and strength beyond compare. There were wars brothers fought as enemies, and wars they won as allies. There were castles and feasts, the boundaries of Europe changed over and over, and there were the Crusades, which took his mind to the mosques and mullahs of the Middle East. He studied well and got good grades, for which he worked diligently. He wanted to distinguish himself as an academic in his own right, separate from his father. He sought no favoritism, but he sometimes thought he was being graded harder than his classmates in an effort by his professors to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were showing him none.

Those professors were not pleased when Charles decided to take a class given by Tom Adams, a young academic prodigy who ran seminars called If Henry the Fifth Were Alive Today, Could You Have Conquered Islam?, and Was Korea a Crusade?

It was Tom’s class on Korea that caught Charles’s attention, along with the rest of the school’s. It was being given just as young men who had fought in the war were enrolling for their long-delayed freshman year. Their presence alone disturbed Charles’s classmates, all of whom were the right age to have served, but none of whom had signed up. They had chosen their student deferments, read about the fighting in newspapers, caught glimpses of it on the televisions in their house common rooms: footage of men in shirtsleeves and loose helmets, crawling over dirt, weighed down by their backpacks, their hands and faces bare as bullets exploded next to them in the ground. Now those men were years behind them, and there was a palpable sense of awkward guilt in the air. Tom’s course seemed in poor taste to some, but those who signed up for it found the chance to discuss war with actual soldiers the most affecting experience of their college careers.

Charles’s father found it ludicrous. “That man,” Charles’s father told him, “needs to align himself more closely with tradition.” He pointed meaningfully at Charles, and Charles nodded deferentially, but spent the night before registration sleeping in the drafty hall of the history building to guarantee himself a spot in Tom’s fall tutorial: Martyrs and Their Murderers.

Tom Adams was not much older than his students; he wore the same penny loafers and horn-rimmed glasses they wore and had the same cut of tidy dark hair. But when he walked into the room on the first day of class, he was not like them at all. He was intense, electric, and inspired. They leaned forward in their chairs.

“We study the past to illuminate the present,” Tom said loudly, staring at them. “Is the present, then, illuminated?” He paused, shook his head, paced the perimeter of the room.

“Study does not engender wisdom,” he continued, his voice stern and challenging. “Analysis does not inspire insight.” He raised his eyebrows, exhorting Charles and his classmates to pay attention. “Only empathy allows us to see clearly. Only compassion brings lasting change.”

Tom strode to his desk, hoisted himself up to sit on one corner. “I am going to ask you to imagine yourself into the history we read. I am going to ask you to feel it. Because only living it will convince you to stop it from happening again.”

Charles knew that, in a classroom down the hall, his father was giving his own beginning-of-the-year speech, about discipline and meticulous scholarship. “Do not extrapolate; do not embellish,” he was saying. “Never underestimate the gravity of your undertaking: to analyze the ages, to evaluate what has come before.”

Tom put his hands in the pockets of his sport coat and smiled. “Everyone imagines himself a king,” he said. There were chuckles around the seminar table.

Tom nodded indulgently and shrugged. “That’s perfectly fine,” he said. “It’s what makes history fun.” He opened a drawer and took out a thick stack of stapled paper—the semester’s reading list. “But I’m not going to encourage you,” he said, throwing a syllabus down in front of each of them with a thud. “Kings are champions of the status quo. I want you all to pay attention to the serf. I’m certainly going to work you like some.” There were scattered grins; Tom stared them down. “I’m going to force each of you—you of sound, incredible, impressionable minds—to understand at least one thing here that will make you want to change the world.”

Charles felt chastened. He had been imagining himself a king. While boys his age had set up tents in South Korea, he had studied. While they slept on cots, he had played a game: the study of history for history’s sake. Now, for the first time, he was asked to ponder the purpose of his studies.

Charles realized with a start that if his father thought harder about it, he would see that he and Tom held the same goal: to inspire students to strive for excellence, achievement, insight, and understanding. His father believed their training should include intellectual rigor and ruthless critique. Tom believed it should be built on imagination and depth of feeling. But their motives were the same: to pull their students into the world of useful men.

Lily’s family’s grief was immediate and unassuageable. They fell apart. Entirely. Her aunts took to their beds and the older girl cousins wept for days; in hysterics, they called their friends and cried on the phone. Even months later, there was almost always an aunt weeping over a mixing bowl or wiping her eyes with a flour-dusted apron.

Lily’s mother had loved to bake, had held court in the kitchen as she cut out sugar cookies or spooned biscuits into a skillet. She had talked and baked, and Lily’s older girl cousins had hung on her every word, copied her dresses, styled their hair to look like hers. Now they told Lily, “I wanted to be like your mother. I wanted to be your mother. Now I don’t have any idea who I want to be.”

Lily had never wanted to be either of her parents. When they were alive, she hadn’t fought for space on a kitchen stool next to the girls or hid under the dining room table with the boys while their fathers played endless rounds of hearts in the evenings, hoping to shoot the moon. She had just read all day and wished she lived someplace where she could do that without a boy cousin trying to steal her book, or a girl cousin asking if she had seen her other shoe, or one of her aunts asking her to clean up the dining room table, simply because she was the only child sitting still enough to be found.

Even in grief, Lily wanted to be left alone. She wanted to remember her parents the way they had been with her. The way the three of them had walked home together at the end of every family dinner holding hands. The way her mother had brushed her hair before bed and the way her father had stared into the refrigerator, looking for one last cold 7Up to drink before he went to sleep. Her parents had not been like her, but they had been hers, and it was unbearable to watch people grieve for parts of them she had never really known.

For the first year, she carried a book with her constantly, like an oxygen tank. When she was forced to venture out without one—to help carry groceries or bike one of the younger children into town—she lurched, limped, looked for things to hang on to. The outline of the world—trees, pavement, hands, the tops of buildings against the sky—was too keen, too ready to fall and slice. The unplanned chaos of people moving about her was too much to bear. She needed flat angles, thin pages, to sit quietly with her hair tucked behind her ear.

The problem was that she could no longer follow a story. Every plot seemed contrived to her: the author’s intent too clear, the layers of gears revealed. Characters were strangers. No matter how hard she tried, she could no longer care for them. They were just bland letters on a page.

She could still manage schoolwork. In fact, she liked school even more now, because it hadn’t changed; there were still assignments given, with expected page lengths and footnotes to be organized, grades received. Her teachers would have given her a pass, she was sure, but they couldn’t stop her from handing in work or discourage her from revising for hours to make certain her As were not given out of pity.

Her parents had never cared much about school. “Don’t be so serious,” they said. “Get out and have some fun.” But there was no fun to be had now, so she spent her afternoons in the library, reading textbooks and filling notecards with citations. The library closed at five. Lily packed up slowly and waited as long as the librarian would let her before heading home. It was easiest to time her arrival with Richard’s, so that she could slip in behind him as his children ran downstairs. Every night, as he hugged them and asked about their days, Lily crept away into the living room and continued studying, alone, until dinner.

After a year passed, Richard and Miriam’s house settled back into its routine. The children fed the dog under the table and stole pieces of cake off each other’s plates. Miriam shook her head in exasperation at their antics, shooed the dog outside fifteen times a day, and constantly exhorted everyone to do their chores. But not Lily. She no longer had chores. She was a guest, a doll from another dollhouse family.

Sometimes Lily went back to her old house, climbed the porch steps, opened the door, and flipped the light switch on the wall. The blue living room couch, the hooked rug, the two wooden chairs, the tall lamp with its tasseled shade were still there. The kitchen table and its chairs, the beds in the bedrooms, the bathroom sinks and the mirrors above them had not moved. But grief was there, and absence, and loss. Lily could not stay too long, never past dark. If she did, emptiness bloomed inside her, as big and cold as a night without stars. Sometimes she worried that the darkness would dissolve her, erase her like chalk until she was nothing. One endless ache and then gone.

After a few months more, there was a discussion about money. Richard sat her down in his office and put her parents’ will on the desk in front of her. It was six pages long. He had unstapled it so that he could turn the pages over into a separate stack as he read them to her, two white rectangles on the dark wood, one striped with text, the other blank: two eyes, one opened and one closed.

“It starts with small things,” he said. We, Ava and George, being of sound mind do bequeath was followed by a long list of items that felt trivial to Lily, but she knew would feel important to those who received them. To Aunt Miriam, they left the family silver, which everyone said should have gone to her in the first place. To nieces, they left pieces of jewelry, to nephews, radios and watches. To a pair of uncles, they left two cars Lily never knew they’d owned.

“Those were hot rods,” Richard told her. “They fixed them up together.” His voice was apologetic. She wondered if he thought there was any Earth on which she would ever consider sitting in one of her parents’ cars.

“Now, Lily, no one wants any of these things soon. In fact, I haven’t told anyone but you about the will. But at some point, people will start asking, and I wanted you to have the facts.”

She nodded. It was as if her parents had left her a Christmas list, asked her to go to the store, buy the presents, and wrap them.

Richard turned another page. “And finally, to our darling daughter Lily,” he read. “We leave everything else we own, anything in our possession not mentioned above, including all the money we have managed not to spend, and the house if it is still standing, and of course, all the love we have for her, forever.”

She had begun to cry, silently, at darling daughter, the now-familiar heat of grief climbing like a rash up her throat, behind her cheekbones, to her eyes. By love, tears dripped off her chin onto her lap. Richard handed her a handkerchief and turned to the last page.

There, Lily saw a list of three bank accounts and the value of the house. The amount was absurd to her, because she had never thought about money beyond nickels for library fines. Everything she needed had simply appeared. She did not know how to take this in: her parents’ worth in numbers on the page, the squiggles of a language she had not been taught to read.

“We’ll pay for everything you need right now,” Richard told her. “We want to. But I also want you to know that you’re not dependent on us for your future.”

Future was not a concept Lily could understand.

Still, she tried to move on. She presented everyone with their gifts from the will, and then some. She gave away all of her parents’ clothing. Her cousins and aunts took her mother’s dresses, blue-flowered and pink lace. Her uncles did not fit into her father’s suits, but they took his ties and lace-up shoes. She let the smaller cousins have all the toys and books they wanted. She found that the fewer things she owned, the easier it was for her to contain her grief, to pack it away in the closets and sideboards of her bones.

But every day there was an uncle standing on the lawn, wearing one of her father’s hats, shaking some small, broken thing and saying, “If only George was here to get this up and running.” There were pictures of her parents in silver frames on the mantel of every house she entered, placed at the front and freshly shined.

“Remember when he tried to fix the roof and nailed all those shingles on backward?”

“Remember how breathtaking she was in that ivory strapless gown?”

Lily couldn’t get them to stop talking, couldn’t make them understand that every memory unfurled her grief again, like a great wind heaving through the shelves of her being—plates broken, silverware scattered, sheets falling, unfolded, to the floor.

Slowly, she realized that the numbers on the page were like the pieces of a model airplane: everything she needed to build her way out, to get herself somewhere, anywhere, she could be something other than an orphan. So when she was seventeen, she asked her aunts about college, saying, “I want to go to Boston.”

She didn’t particularly want to go east. But she desperately wanted to meet people who did not know the details of her life and with whom she did not have to share her story. She wanted to go somewhere she could choose a day, any day, on which she did not have to think of her parents. She applied to, was accepted by, and left to study literature at Radcliffe.

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for The Dearly Beloved includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Cara Wall. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart.

Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not?

James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life.

In The Dearly Beloved, we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, these four forge improbable paths through their evolving relationships, each struggling with uncertainty, heartbreak, and joy. A poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives, Cara Wall’s The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. The Dearly Beloved opens with the scene of James grieving Charles’s death. In what ways does grief frame this novel? How do each of the characters respond to the feelings of abandonment that accompany grief? In whom or what do they choose to put their faith after loss? In whom or what do you put your faith in difficult times?

2. In the prologue, Nan says that “she was soft, and Lily was straight. She wavered; Lily was plumb” (2). Describe Nan and Lily. Do you agree with Nan that she and Lily are opposites? If so, how do they overcome that to become the kind of friends Lily refers to as “her stitches, her scaffold, her ballast, her home” (338).

3. Early in the novel, Charles’s father tells his son that “Obligations are the fuel of life, Charles. Reputation is their reward” (5). Do you agree? To what do each of the four characters obligate themselves, and what reputation do they receive in return? What are the obligations in your life, and what do you gain by fulfilling them?

4. When Charles and Lily first meet in the library, Charles notices that she looks “entirely sad” (9). And after their first fight, he acknowledges that he “could not bear the fact that she would always be sad” (102). What does Charles hope for Lily, and how does it feel for him to know he can’t heal her? Why do you think he married her, knowing he could never make her happy?

5. James is anxious about the difference between his upbringing and Nan’s, describing it as a chasm that loomed “dark and large” (87). What are the geographic, religious, and class differences in their upbringings? Why do they feel unbridgeable to James?

6. Love seems to come easily to Nan and Charles. Why? Conversely, James and Lily are wary of love: James has a “look of distrust . . . the look people had when they needed to be treated with dignity after so much of life had been unfair” (60) and Lily believes that “the prerequisite for love was trust; and Lily did not trust anything” (81). Why do James and Lily struggle to trust, and therefore, love, their partners? How does love relate to trust? And how does trust relate to faith?

7. Nan and Charles come to very different conclusions about what they can accept regarding their partners’ faith. Nan realizes that “of all the things she thought she could give up for [James], she could not give up her faith in God” (61). What would Nan’s life have been like if James had decided not to be a minister? How does his decision to become a minister enrich her life and faith? Conversely, Charles decides that he doesn’t need Lily to believe in order to marry her— “I don’t need you to believe in God, I just need you to believe in me” (105). Does Lily’s rejection of Charles’s religion diminish or enlarge his life and faith?

8. After Nan helps Lily with her twins, she realizes that “every right action begets another; every extension of a hand forms a rope and then a ladder” (249). When have you seen this play out in your own life? Are there actions your book club could take to help your community like coordinating a book drive or volunteering at a library?

9. In the beginning of the book, Charles’s college professor Tom says that “only empathy allows us to see clearly. Only compassion brings lasting change” (14). How does this statement apply to the struggles Charles and James encounter while leading their church? What values are they trying to engender in their congregation? To what extent do they succeed?

10. After their first meeting, Nan says that Lily makes her feel “invisible” (169) and later says that just being in proximity to her makes her feel “brittle and resentful” (183). Is there anyone in your life who makes you feel this way? Lily’s reasoning is that she “knew that she could not give Nan one inch, not one conversation. Even one gesture of friendship would lead to the expectation of more . . .” (161). Do you feel that way about anyone in your life? Why?

11. Nan desperately wants to have a child—she calls it her “fondest dream” (215)—but suffers two miscarriages over the course of the novel. Lily doesn’t want to have children, but gives birth to twins. Why is Nan hesitant to seek treatment for her infertility? What does it mean to Nan to be a mother? What does it mean to Lily?

12. After Charles’s controversial sermon, Marcus says that “these people need a good disaster. They need to know what it means for life to be hard. And I’m not talking about death hard. I’m talking about suffering” (288). Will’s diagnosis brings hard suffering into the lives of the four main characters. Were you surprised by Charles, Lily, James, or Nan’s response to Will’s diagnosis? Could you relate to the suffering it produced in them? Did you agree or disagree with the courses of action they took in response to his condition?

13. Marcus and Annelise only appear toward the end of the book. What role do each of them play in the lives of the Barrett and MacNally families? How would the book be different without them?

14. In many wedding ceremonies, the pastor welcomes the attendees with the greeting “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . .” Toward the end of the novel, Nan notes that “they were, the four of them, married to each other” (287). In what ways are the various couples tied to each other? How do they learn to love each other? Overall, why do you think Wall chose this phrase as the title of her novel?

Enhance Your Book Club (3–5 Enhance Your Book Club Suggestions)

Note: Please make sure the numbers do not populate automatically.

1. Cara Wall modeled Third Presbyterian in The Dearly Beloved after the real First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village. Read more about the history of the church here: http://fpcnyc.org/our-story/.

2. There are many excellent movies set in 1960s New York, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), West Side Story (1961), and Funny Girl (1968). Choose one to watch with your book club and discuss how the time period is represented in the movie versus how it is depicted in The Dearly Beloved.

3. There are many great television shows and movies about ministers, nuns, and other figures of faith: Sister Act (1992), The Vicar of Dibley (1994–1998), Call the Midwife (2012–present), and Granchester (2014–present). Choose one to watch with your book club and discuss how the portrayal of faith compares and contrasts to that in The Dearly Beloved.

4. Music is an important part of The Dearly Beloved, not only to Nan but in the daily workings of a church like Third Presbyterian. Plan a trip to a local concert, or host an indoor listening party of a famous choir, like the Vienna Boys Choir, the Choir of Trinity College, or the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.

A Conversation with Cara Wall

Congratulations on publishing your debut novel, The Dearly Beloved. You’ve told us that you started this novel when your daughter was born, and she’s now fourteen years old. What was it like to work on this project for almost fifteen years? What, if any, challenges did that pose? What opportunities did it present?

I didn’t work on the book continuously for fifteen years! I worked off and on, in between long stretches where I put my energy into teaching and parenting—sometimes because I wanted to, and sometimes because it was absolutely necessary for me to earn a living or be fully present for my daughter. Often, I felt quite a bit of shame about not writing faster, or not having enough discipline to write for three hours a day, every day, as we were told was the key to success at Iowa. There were many people in my life who had no idea I was writing a book because, at some point, I completely stopped talking about it—I decided that if I wasn’t actually, physically writing, I couldn’t call myself a writer.

It’s always agonizingly difficult for me to sit down, open a notebook to a blank page, and put pen to paper. Something about that moment terrifies me. I can spend days wandering around the house doing all the chores I hate most, just to avoid writing. It really is just one moment, but I’m as afraid of it as I would be of jumping out of an airplane. It’s ridiculous, because as soon as I start writing, I feel glorious. I love the shape and feel of words on the page, the rhythms they make, the emotions they can elicit. I love the feeling I get when I finally crack the code of a scene or a paragraph—when I reread it and know I’ve managed to express exactly what I wanted to say.

A friend of mine helped me reframe why it took so long to finish this book. Soon after she enrolled in her first personal essay writing class, she met me for lunch and said, “How do you keep your real life running at all while you are writing? It stirs so much up in me that I can’t concentrate on anything else—I just realized I haven’t taken my kid to get his braces tightened for eight months!” I let go of all my guilt at that moment, because she was right—writing is a fully immersive experience. To write well, you have to feel what your characters are feeling, which makes you much too sensitive to small angers and everyday annoyances. For me, trying to write and parent and teach all at once was simply too overwhelming.

The turning point came when my daughter was old enough to go to summer camp, because that gave me long stretches every summer to do nothing but write. The first summer, I reread everything I had—every scrap of paper and random margin note—and put them in an order that resembled a story. Then I sent it to a few people to read and told them they had a year to get back to me. The next summer, I read their comments and dove back in, turning a 140-page manuscript into a 360-page one. The next summer, I poked at it like a dentist, looking for soft spots and rough edges . . . and so on and so on.

One benefit to the process was that I could read with really fresh eyes every year, and it was easy to tell what stood the test of time and what didn’t. If I got goose bumps while I was reading, I kept that part in. If a passage felt like a deflated balloon, I got rid of it or figured out how to make it float again. Another gift was that I got to know these characters over time as one gets to know best friends. They lived in me patiently, and the more life experiences I encountered, the more I learned about each character—almost as if I was evaluating my real life through their eyes as well as my own point of view. I feel very enriched for having lived with Charles and Lily and James and Nan for so long—they have made me much wiser and more compassionate than I would have been without them.

Your parents moved to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and you still live in New York City today. In fact, you’ve said that much of The Dearly Beloved was written in coffee shops in the city! What was it like to write about the city where you live, especially as it has undergone so many changes over the time that you’ve lived there?

I love New York so much. I left it for long stretches to live in London, San Francisco, and Iowa, and while each have their own elegance and breathtaking beauty, none of them has the energy and possibility of New York. New York is a place where the best of everything—museums, theater, restaurants—rubs up against the worst of everything—crime, poverty, injustice, pollution. You can’t float around in a bubble in New York; you’re always challenged to notice, engage, take risks, be better, and do more. Every time we walk through Washington Square Park, I make my daughter stop and look at what’s going on—banjo players, free tango lessons, a girl riding a unicycle, the guy talking to the flock of pigeons on his head, the woman talking to the flock of crocheted pigeons she made herself. Where else in the world can you find this many people doing crazy things without anyone batting an eye?

The Dearly Beloved is set in the New York my parents encountered when they moved here in 1965. Greenwich Village really felt like a village then. Teachers, firefighters, NYU professors, cab drivers, and struggling artists could still afford rent in the neighborhood, and they all chose to live there because it felt free of the social constraints under which many of them had been raised. That’s the New York Lily falls in love with—the one that is changing at light speed, inspiring everyone to be whoever they want to be. It was fun to write those passages, because Lily and I agree that New York is the most incredible place in the world.

Nan would have preferred to be on the Upper East Side, where neighborhoods were quieter and more restrained, but I knew James would have gone insane living uptown—that seemingly unresolvable issue actually inspired the idea of the manse. Who knew a small cramped house could be a plot point? Nan’s desperation for a home was one of the struggles that helped me understand her, to recognize what depth and wisdom she would bring to the book, and to see how she and Lily would be each other’s foils. That’s why I gave Lily her own, entirely different house—a quintessentially Greenwich Village brownstone, which gave me the chance to describe another pocket of domestic life in New York.

New York has changed exponentially in my lifetime. In the seventies, Greenwich Village was full of white roller skates with rainbow laces and the exuberance of disco clubs, but it was also financially broke and falling apart. Over the summer of 1976, my parents got letter after letter from my school, P.S. 3, saying the administration was cutting art, then music, then recess. I was mugged twice before I was nine. I was once standing on a street corner with my friend Laurie when a man walked by us, picked her up, and carried her off down the block. She bit him, he let her go, and we went to school like nothing happened. I still can’t believe the Meatpacking District in now a shopping mecca—it was a literal meatpacking district even well after I graduated from college, with sawdust and blood in every gutter. And I’m always awed by how beautiful the Hudson River Promenade is—it used to be a derelict place I was never allowed to go.

So, much of the change in New York has been for the better, but for the past decade, the city has been losing much of its charm. In 2008, a small clause in a big federal housing bill made it legal for residential buildings to charge as much as they want for their ground-floor retail spaces. So instead of the small stores that sold dollhouse furniture and sheet music, we have banks and coffee chains on every single corner. One of the losses that broke my heart was the closing of Dean and Deluca on the corner of 11th Street and University Place. I wrote almost all of The Dearly Beloved there. It felt like a Parisian café—it had high ceilings, marble floors, bentwood chairs, and floor-to-ceiling windows. My parents and friends knew that was the best place to find me, so they would walk by and stop in for impromptu chats. I wish we could preserve more of those places.

That’s why I’m so grateful this book gave me the chance to pay homage to the First Presbyterian Church. I worked incredibly hard on the descriptions of that building, trying to accurately capture its gravitas and warmth. It was a true icon of my childhood, the place that felt most like home to me, and I’m glad I was able to write about it while it’s still standing, full of life and congregation, on a corner that hasn’t changed in one hundred years.

In the prologue, Nan admits that she and Lily are complete opposites. Did these characters come to you fully formed, or did you purposefully make them foils of each other? Additionally, you’ve said that Lily’s character was slightly more difficult for you to write. Why?

These four characters came to me fully formed. That’s how all of my writing starts—characters knock on my door and wait patiently for me to tell their stories. There’s a very long line in my waiting room at this point, since I was tied up with this book for so long.

I knew instantly that the women were very different from each other, but I didn’t realize how acrid Lily’s reaction to Nan would be. I couldn’t understand it at first. I knew she would be cold and aloof to Nan—that’s just who Lily is—but I was surprised by her anger. It took me a long while to understand that Nan’s warmth triggered Lily’s grief, that Lily deeply distrusted affection and that she never, ever wanted to be the subject of anyone’s pity. To be fair to her, I don’t think she ever meant to be so mean to Nan right at the beginning. I think she went into that Chinese dinner with the best of intentions. But she knew immediately that Nan wanted a friend, and that any attempt for them to become friends would end in disaster—and she was right.

Nan was easier to write because her life is simpler and more straightforward than Lily’s. She has clear reactions to events, and she isn’t guarded. She keeps secrets from other characters, but she doesn’t keep secrets from herself—she understands her own mind and heart. That’s the wisdom she has to offer the people around her. Lily is so intricately guarded—there are moats and iron spikes and huge locked doors between her and everyone else. Some readers really dislike her for that. But my overwhelming sensation of Lily, when I put myself in her skin, is that of pain. She has a constant, gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach, and she is always terrified that it will overwhelm her—that if she relaxes at all, she will have to feel the grief of her parent’s deaths all over again. Her dismissiveness of others is self-preservation. That was hard to write, because it’s complex.

The most challenging part was why she fell in love with Charles, why she decided to marry him, I had many, many conversations with Lily, directly, in my notebooks about that, and it came down to the idea that she trusted him, after all. Not that she would admit it—but she knew he was who he was. He jumped through hoops to prove that he could accept her aloofness, that he could acknowledge her pain without trying to heal it, that he could let her be the person she needed to be. Of course, over the years there were times when he couldn’t accept all of those things, when he needed more from her, and that’s when their marriage started to break down. But the interesting thing to me, about all lasting marriages—or any relationships, even friendships—is that by the time some bonds of trust break down others have been established, the way fishing nets are repaired every night, so that some ropes can break and yet the structure holds.

See? Complex. Lily didn’t want to tell me all of that, but I had more than a decade to wear her down.

Entertainment Weekly calls The Dearly Beloved “the best book about faith in recent memory.” Each of the four main characters—Charles, Lily, James, and Nan—have a very different type of faith: Charles’s faith is academic and comforting; Lily rejects faith; James’s is restless and oriented toward social justice; and Nan’s faith is sweet and straightforward. What resources did you draw upon to so vividly describe what faith felt like to each character?

The exploration of faith has been one of the central pursuits of my life for more than twenty years. But I have never limited that exploration to one religion—I have read all sorts of spiritual works from writers across belief systems: the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, Byron Katie, Marianne Williamson, Eckhart Tolle, and many more. I believe there is so much about life that we don’t yet understand, and I yearn to understand more about purpose and meaning and love. I am always searching for a deeper sense of peace and communion than I have at any given time.

I apportioned different aspects of my own faith, or lack thereof, to each character. Each of them holds a very personal aspect of my own existential angst. The sentence that describes Charles’s first experience with faith, “He could not explain this new conclusion, except to say that when he put it away, it was agony, and when he brought it out, it was the most beautiful, deepest belief he’d ever known . . .” is probably one of the truest sentences I’ve ever written about myself. When James expresses his frustration with religion as an esoteric pursuit, he is my conscience, reminding me to get out of books and into the physical world. Because I have never limited my spiritual life to Christianity, Nan’s faith was somewhat harder to write than others. But not too hard, because I do often wish that I had a clear and certain faith—no equivocation, no doubt. Wouldn’t that make life easier? I feel a little bit that way about Lily’s atheism—that solid disbelief might be easier than constant wondering.

I think the aspect of faith—and no faith—that I gave to every character was a sense of longing. They all long for different things, but they all long for those things deeply. Sometimes, I think longing in its many forms is one of the aspects of the human experience that unites us all.

After the failed baby shower, Nan realizes that “soon all of these women [in her knitting circle] would be gone. All of the women . . . who believed in baking and visiting, raising children, and long afternoons spent at home” (228). By contrast, Lily has a doctorate, teaches composition, and is paralyzed by the idea of stalling her career to raise children. “She wanted to keep teaching, to have summers off to read, to start a new school year and then another . . .” (211). Do you think we’ve moved past the time where women have these concerns?

No way! I think the working mom/stay-at-home mom decision has remained very polarizing, unfortunately. I hate that women still worry about what others will think about their personal decision of work versus home life. Only a very small population in the US, approximately 18 percent, can afford to have one parent stay at home. So, for most of us the question is moot—we have to work outside the home to feed and clothe our children. Judging one another for choices that are often out of our control distracts us from the more important issues that are not being adequately addressed in our country: childcare, health care, and education. Oh boy, I could go on and on and on.

An important development in Part Three of The Dearly Beloved is Will’s diagnosis. This leads to a search for any available information about his condition (of which there is little) and James learning about the practice of sending children with special needs away to homes. How did you learn what it was like for autistic children in the 1960s?

My parents had a friend whose youngest son was born in the sixties and was on the autism spectrum. His mother was a public school teacher, and she led the movement to integrate children with disabilities into New York City public schools. She founded a specialized public school for autistic children in First Presbyterian’s church building—and it is still located there today.

Since I am very much like Charles, I didn’t just lean on those facts to write about Will’s life—I did a lot of research, including personal and family accounts of the homes to which children with disabilities were sent—including Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which was finally closed in 1987. The institution that James and Marcus visit in The Dearly Beloved is luxurious compared to Willowbrook.

I actually moved the time line of diagnosis and education advocacy up in this novel. The word “autism” was first used in 1911, and Leo Kanner first used it to describe autism as a distinct syndrome in children in 1943. So the diagnostic word was in use in the 1960s, but many doctors still associated autism with schizophrenia and attributed its cause to “refrigerator mothers.” Lily would absolutely have been suspected as the root of her son’s condition. I found that idea deeply poignant—by the time Will is diagnosed, Lily has isolated herself from many people in her life, and is seen by many as cold and aloof, so the possibility cannot be rejected out of hand. For me, the scenes in the doctors’ offices are some of the most meaningful in the book—it was hard to be present with Charles and Lily in those moments, feeling their beliefs about themselves and each other change so abruptly, worrying that they might turn away from each other permanently. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Lily made the decision to advocate for Will, to change the whole system for him, if necessary. I think she accepted her grief in that moment and moved on from it. In finding the determination to change Will’s life, she let her old life go.

I wanted this book to end in a place of hope, so I made the assumption that because Lily and Charles lived in New York, they would have access to excellent doctors and cutting-edge research. The Lovaas method mentioned in the book was still being developed in the 1960s, so Will would have been among the first cohort of autistic children to be educated (and studied) by teachers like Annelise. Of course, it is Charles’s and Lily’s financial privilege that made this possible. Though dedicated educators and activists like Dorothea Dix had been advocating for the rights of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities since the 1800s, children with any kind of disability were excluded from public schools until the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) of 1975.

I am not an expert in autism, and I know that I have merely scratched the surface of the experience of autistic children and their parents. A short personal account of the history of the education of children with disabilities can be found here: http://theconversation.com/how-children-with-disabilities-came-to-be-accepted-in-public-schools-50820. And a short overview of the historical diagnosis of autism can be found here: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/evolution-autism-diagnosis-explained/. These are by no means exhaustive, but they are accessible entry points to further research, if you are interested.

Often, religion is categorized as a taboo topic and something that isn’t appropriate to talk about, even with those we’re close to. Why do you think this is? Do you feel comfortable talking about religion with your friends and family? Do you think there’s a benefit to talking more openly about religion and spiritual experiences? What conversations—spiritual or otherwise—would you hope readers have after reading The Dearly Beloved?

I had an interesting experience in church just a few months ago. My daughter is a chorister in the Grace Church Choir, which has a very strong community of choir moms. Over the years, I have become close to many of those women—but as I sat in church that day, I realized I had never talked to a single one of them about their faith. I had no idea if they believed in God, if they prayed at home, if they shared their faith with their partners. I could guess which families were there primarily to support their children, rather than worship, but I really didn’t know for sure. Isn’t that strange?

In the months leading up to The Dearly Beloved’s publication, I had the chance to talk to many editors, librarians, and booksellers, and I had the privilege to hear what I call people’s “origin faith stories.” I learned about their childhood churches, their minister uncles, their skeptical parents, and even then we hardly ever delved into what each of us believed personally.

It’s hard for me to talk to other people about religion because my beliefs are sort of a hodgepodge. I believe in a universal energy that connects all of us to one another and to something larger than all of us, something so large that it can’t possibly be contained in the tenets of just one religion. But I do believe that religion, in its kind and inclusive forms, gives us language to express the emotions we have for the ineffable universal force and traditions that help us connect to the deeper parts of ourselves and others. As I promoted the book, prepublication, I challenged myself to find a straightforward explanation of my own religious life that would make others feel comfortable sharing their beliefs with me, if they wanted to. It feels true, at this moment in my life, to say that my personal religion is centered in the Buddhist concept of loving-kindness, which I choose to express in the prayer: May all beings be peaceful, may all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings awaken to the light of their true nature, may all beings be free. That concrete statement has paved the way for fascinating discussions of religion with many friends and strangers—all of which have enriched my understanding of others and myself.

So, yes, I think there is a huge benefit to talking about religion with friends and family. But it’s delicate. Many of us have great differences of opinion with our friends and family. Many of us have been excluded or abused by our religious community. Many of us embrace some aspects of religious experience and strongly reject others. So the conversation is hardly ever as simple as “I believe in God, do you?”

For those who want to wade into these waters, I’ve found that a good first question is, “Did you have a religious upbringing?” That allows people to say as much or as little as they’d like to about the subject. I’ve had people answer it with Nope; Yes, but I don’t like to talk about it; and Oh, wait until you hear this! I’ve walked away from all of those answers feeling like I know something important about the person with whom I’ve been talking. And, without fail, once a person knows I’m willing to talk about religion, they seek me out to talk about it more.

Are you working on anything now? And, if so, can you tell us about it?

I am working on something new! It’s a book about a painting and the people who want to excavate its history. It’s another multicharacter saga that spans decades and continents and explores the way that the lost things of the world are found.

About The Author

Ken Hamm

Cara Wall is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Stanford University. While at Iowa, Cara taught fiction writing in the undergraduate creative writing department as well as at the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio in her capacity of founder and inaugural director. She went on to teach middle school English and History, and has been published by GlamourSalon, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in New York City with her family.

Why We Love It

“This novel has specificity of characters, a sweep of history, and wisdom on every single page. It mines the sublime and the banal. Its four characters—two couples—are recognizable and decent. It’s also gorgeously written, with each sentence socarefully composed but also effortless and dazzling. This is a book I’d give to my mother’s book group and the most erudite of critics…it tackles one of my favorite themes—faith versus reason—you need not be a god-fearing or even spiritually curious to love this book.” —Marysue R., VP, Editor-in-Chief, on The Dearly Beloved

Product Details

  • Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books (July 7, 2020)
  • Length: 384 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781982104535

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