Five-year-old Claudette Powell, watching The Nun's Story on TV, announced to her horrified mother, "That is what I want to do." In A Change of Habit, her inspiring, detailed memoir, Sister Monica Clare (Powell's saint's name) describes her circuitous, determined path to the convent, from her Southern Baptist roots through years of detours that never derailed her dream.
"I spent the first forty-six years of my life convinced I was on the wrong path. Everywhere I went I felt like a fish climbing a tree. But the truth is God was paving my way," writes Clare as she recalls a girlhood spent doodling Jesus instead of horses. At eight, Clare requested an immersion baptism in her grandmother's church, then embraced Mormonism. At 17, she met nuns, "the first women I'd met who defied the rules of southern femininity."
As she struggled to satisfy "an imaginary checklist" of expectations, her New York University graduation led to jobs in improv, a move to Hollywood, a brief unhappy marriage. In 2000, she was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and she made her decision to "come out of the closet as a nun." She was still fearful of change, and not until a "search weekend" at the Community of St. John the Baptist did she commit to the process, which led to her becoming a postulant, "basically a nun-in-training." However, Clare never wavered through years of adjustment to convent life and service. "I don't want to live my life without being a sister," she knew. Her open and often humorous memoir concludes as she joyfully anticipates achieving the next steps in living her faith. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.