Hi there,
I’m very happy to reveal the front cover of my forthcoming book. I hope you can see it and I hope that you like it!
That’s Ruth, love of my life, aged twentysomething. It’s a picture taken a year or two before we met. But you can see why I fell in love with her.
An Irish beauty: natural, gorgeous, smiling, unaffected, honest, freckled.
And there’s a heart-shaped lake behind her!
Last Wednesday, I blindfolded her and sat her at my computer screen. I removed her blindfold to see her first reaction to the cover. She loved it!
Let me know if you love the cover. You can click the ‘Leave a Comment’ button below.
Blue journal
The darker blue near the top of the cover is a picture of the outside of a journal of mine from the 1980s. It captures the texture and colour of my first memoir, In My Gut I Don’t Believe, creating a unified theme for the memoir series From Belief to Unbelief.
My son is a professional computer artist in the gaming world and it was his inspired idea to photograph my journal cover. John has done a great job. Thank you, son!
Series title
The series title From Belief to Unbelief links my memoirs, as they share the theme of exploring the shift within one human being from believing religious lies to choosing human reality and becoming free. It also links the book series with my RTE award-winning documentary From Belief to Unbelief, made with Nicoline Greer, with sound supervision by Mark McGrath.
Post script
I have yet to write the post script for Saved by a Woman. The book charts the six years of my life after I took leave of absence from my nine years of studying for the Catholic priesthood. The post script will be my reflection on the experience of having written the second memoir: what I’ve learnt, the insights I’ve had, and the part those six years played in my life’s journey.
Why write?
Our span of life is fleeting. For me, the most important thing is trying to create meaning. For years, I thought there was a meaning out there, comprehended by the Church. I now realise that there isn’t. We alone make our own meaning.
Some choose to buy into whatever religion is dominant in their society or into which they were born or which they opt into as an adult. My life is an exploration in breaking free from the constraints of the mind and heart that I ‘imbibed’ as a child initiated into - and thereby my mind miswired by - Catholicism.
Walking through glass
I’ve walked through glass, discarding Scripture, Tradition and the ‘Magisterium’ of the Church, leaving it behind me. It was liberating. It wasn’t real glass. I wasn’t cut. Beyond it, I found freedom to breathe and live my life, a normal, ordinary human life.
My son John created the picture above as the logo for my After God column in the Irish Freethinker. Writing that column led to my finally completing, after a 25-year effort, my first memoir!
Hi Friends and neighbours, do you like the front cover? Isn't she gorgeous?
Thanks folks for your feedback by email, WhatsApp and text.