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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

ASTONISHED

Beverly Donofrio

A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace

Beverly Donofrio had already lived two lives, first as a scrappy mother on the streets of the East Village and later as the bestselling author of RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS. By the time she reached her fifties, she thought she had seen it all. But even though she was living in a vibrant, picturesque Mexican town, where she practiced yoga, drank margaritas in her backyard, and took salsa lessons, she felt lost and was searching for monasteries to visit. The religious practice that had nourished her for several years had faded. She missed God. Then one night she woke to find a rapist holding a knife to her throat.

So begins the memoir that charts Donofrio’s journey—a long and twisting road through denial, mourning, anger, vulnerability, and retreat at five very different monasteries. Told through Donofrio’s brutally honest, often ribald, emotionally unsparing voice, ASTONISHED is a tender and hopeful narrative of healing and learning to love life again. At the age of 53, on the very same day that Beverly Donofrio had researched which monastery she should join in order to sort out her complicated relationship with God, a man used a rope ladder to break into her home in Mexico and raped her in her own bed. This unthinkably evil act comes at the very start of Astonished, the third memoir from the writer of Riding in Cars With Boys, but this book is far from an exercise in victimhood. This is the story of a woman who had already seen more than her share of hardship before the rape, on a solo odyssey of the spirit in the wake of not only a traumatic event but also an entire life spent struggling with matters of grace. What’s most compelling, besides Donofrio’s simultaneously warm and tough-as-nails voice, is the openness of her heart toward good old-fashioned faith, and her willingness to accept God into her life, if she could only figure Him out. Of course, it’s the impossibility of it that drives the narrative here, such as the frustration Donofrio feels at the maxim delivered to her by a priest: “God doesn’t cause evil. Ever. But he will use it.” And although such arguments can sometimes offend, the fact that she was able to take such ugliness and transform it into the beauty of this book is a stunning accomplishment.

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Book Published 2013-03-01 by Viking

Comments

Anyone who can read Bev Donofrio’s first paragraph and stop should be interdict for life from libraries and bookstores. She is one first-class human being and, to my mind, a down-and-dirty saint. I’m grateful for the privilege of being invited into her radiant soul.

To me Beverly Donofrio is part Abigail Thomas, part Anne Lamott, part Kathleen Norris, and 100 percent original. Terrifying and, at moments, terribly funny. Candid, compelling, and, above all else, wise. Here’s Beverly Donofrio, the rebellious teenager and tough single mother from RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS, forty years later, still vulnerable, still resilient, tested and tempered by life, and finally forging her own peace. ASTONISHED is a seeker’s and writing woman’s spiritual journey through doubt and despair, emerging in cowboy boots, green tights, and prayer.

Reading Donofrio’s memoir, ASTONISHED, is, in itself, an astonishing experience. She grapples with her faith in ways and in words that startle, move, mesmerize, wrench, enliven, and thrill the reader. It is a narrative composed of brutal honesty, tenderness, and an aching love for God. I could not put it down.

As beautiful as it is authentic, ASTONISHED is one of the most compelling, appealing, and instructive spiritual autobiographies I have read in many a year.

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