Notes on Author Faith Adiele - P.A.W. Print

Faith Adiele

Like half a dozen other people at Robin's Bookstore on the night of May 22, 2004, I had the opportunity to meet author Faith Adiele. For me, it was the second time I met her. Several days earlier, we met for the first time on the Septa's R3 line. I was crammed into my seat during rush hour; she was revealing herself to me in the pages of her recently published memoir Meeting Faith: The Forrest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun.

Having thoroughly read the dust jacket, I began the book with an attitude of skepticism. Before I actually approached the text, I was prepared to hate Faith and her book. A Harvard student who temporarily takes the vows of a Buddhist nun on what is for all practical purposes a vacation to Thailand? Some people will pull any kind of stunt to get their memoir published, I thought. The synopsis reduced the book to a cheesy, insincere gimmick. The premise seemed to have all the makings of next season's reality TV show. It was a faux-spiritual literary version of Survivor.

Preconceived notions firmly in place, I dove in anyway. A life-long journal writer myself, I find almost anyone's personal notes riveting, even if ultimately my purpose is to entertain myself by mocking the author and the choice of subject matter. I am still recovering from earning a graduate degree in English and Creative Writing, and memoir, as a genre, is usually some light and funny fare compared to novelist heavyweights like Gustave Flaubert and philosopher/theorists like Michel Foucault.

This is why I tend to approach any memoir with a sense of superiority. If the author had a sharp literary imagination, after all, wouldn't she be writing fiction? Adiele studied at the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop alongside ZZ Packer, whose recently published short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, demolishes expectations about how race is dealt with in literature.

While her wickedly funny story, "Brownies," may be loosely autobiographical, Packer has the skill and ambition to transform her own experience into art. Contemporary memoirists ranging from Frank McCourt to Dave Eggers tend to rely on sentimentality and self-congratulations to propel their books. I fully expected the same type of "pity me" writing from Adiele. At the outset, I couldn't wait to start making fun of Adiele and her neo-hippie flirtation with meditation.


Meeting Faith: The Forrest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun is a "typical coming of age story."

To my surprise, all my expectations were challenged by the end of the introduction. As a reader, I couldn't help but warm up to Adiele as she concedes to being afraid of spiders and confesses to liking Pop Tarts. Her prose is concise and clear, eschewing compound-complex sentences and GRE vocabulary words in favor of vivid descriptions, conversational rhythm and humor.

This style is evident in her imagery of the Thai jungle and her reasons for going there. She explains that what drew her to Thailand was its status as "a place that worked in a way that America, for all its immigrant narratives about hard work paying off, did not. It was a place where merit was truly rewarded."

Beneath the uncomplicated, polished surface of Adiele's prose, lies a network of complex ideas. I was genuinely excited to discover that this Harvard-indoctrinated author is asserting that the American Dream is a really a sham. As her memoir progresses, the reader learns that Adiele is indeed questioning the basic principles that prop up American Dream Mythology, the very sociological values that earned her admission at the country's oldest and most exclusive college.

Acknowledging that she herself is on some level evidence of the existence of the American Dream, Adiele subverts her status as poster girl by detailing how her success unraveled when she flunked out of Harvard. She approaches the subject of her biggest failure with complete humility, humor, and honesty.

Adiele's conversational tone establishes a feeling of intimacy between author and reader. When I closed the book just three days after starting it, I felt I had made a friend of Faith. I had to acknowledge it takes guts as a writer to weave a narrative out of your own humiliations, insights, failures, and accomplishments. I couldn't wait to meet her in person at her reading at Robin's bookstore.

Faith approached the podium and reported that her book tour had been exhausting. She said it felt like she was "stripping publicly" night after night. It may have been her book-tour fatigue or the relatively small size of the crowd that compelled her to herd the group to a more appropriately intimate and restful setting, a round table stocked with snacks and drinks.

While she did read briefly from her book, she tried to make the event more conversation than recitation. It was easy to imagine her in her role as professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She was visibly energized by the interest of those in attendance and eagerly answered questions. She used passages from her book to spark a conversation about the craft of memoir and writing in general as well as the politics of identity.

Many of those who were drawn to the reading were interested in the role of race in Adiele's life. While her story really is in some ways, as she calls it, "a typical coming of age story," it is particularly compelling and personal for anyone who has struggled with racial identity. Adiele's half-African, half-Nordic heritage is a source of conflict throughout much the memoir.

As the child of a white woman, Adiele recounts the awkwardness she felt among black female students at Harvard. Her memories of lacking the vocabulary to talk hair-care with her peers are emblematic of her struggle, but funny and endearing as well. She details the painful isolation of being the different-looking (and therefore ugly) girl not asked on dates or to dance. She describes the ins and outs of learning how to navigate Boston's public transportation as a black woman, avoiding T stations that may be more dangerous for her because of her skin color.

In spite of these race-related anecdotes that pepper Adiele's narrative, when someone at the reading asked, "Do you struggle with race?" Faith Adiele responded instantly with a vigorous "No." She explained that Thailand is a place where few people had encountered African Americans when she first visited as a high school exchange student. This lack of context, the Thai people's inability to stereotype Adiele, made Thailand the ideal location for Adiele to shed the racial identity confusion that characterized so much of her life.

She said that Thailand finally provided "freedom from socially determined identity." Clearly, that freedom has carried over to her current life in the United States. It is evident both within the text of her memoir and in conversation, that Adiele has fully resolved her own racial identity conflict.

While she did not discourage conversation about racial politics, she spoke at greater length about the craft of nonfiction writing. She pointed out that the work she is most interested in reading and writing is "about something. It needs to be political or spiritual. This book is about the quest for building a mental life."

Adiele decided to include excerpts of her journals from her time in Thailand as part of her memoir. She explained that she made this choice "in order to preserve the young, raw, struggling voice of my daily journal and the energy and immediacy of the experience." Writing the book was like "revisiting the person that I once was."

I'm certain that she feel like she accomplished part of her mission by inspiring someone to write about things that really happened. She has certainly inspired me to give it a try.

The journal pieces are printed in the margins of the memoir itself. Adiele told her audience that she "chose to organize the chapters by theme, rather than in chronological order." This decision forces the reader to make frequent decisions about how to approach the text, forcing a sense of mindfulness.

When I asked Adiele about the risks and advantages of this format she explained, "I decided I need a non-traditional format that was multi-genre and multi-voiced, a hybrid of journal and memoir, travelogue and sociology. People warned against it, saying publishers would never go for it, but it just felt right, so I continued to hone this new structure." When I told her it made the book itself feel like a meditation to me, she smiled the beatific smile of a sincere, if retired, Buddhist nun.