CLARA: This is "The Story Behind the Story," an author interview show produced by me Clara Sherley-Appel for KSQD 90.7 FM. Each month I'll talk to a different author about their books and their process, focusing on how and why they came to tell story they've told, and while I plan to talk to authors in all walks of life, I'm especially excited to bring you conversations with authors in or from the Bay area. My guest today is one such author.

CLARA: Carly Gelsinger is the author of ONCE YOU GO IN: A MEMOIR OF RADICAL FAITH, a coming of age story about joining and eventually leaving a Pentecostal church located in Monterey County. Gelsinger joined Pine Canyon Assemblies of God at the age of 13. Dor years she was on fire for God, speaking in tongues, slaying demons, and following her angry and abusive pastor's every word. It's only when her life literally burned to the ground that she started to make the choices that would lead her to eventually leave the church. It's the story of the lengths one teenager will go to in order to belong, and the slow, difficult process of returning to one's senses.

CLARA: Carly, welcome to The Story Behind the Story.

CARLY: Hi, thank you.

CLARA: I'd like to start by asking you how you came to write this book. What made you want to be a writer, and why was it important for you to tell this story?

CARLY: Well, when I was little I loved writing stories -- short stories about a stuffed cow that I had -- and I entered one of those stories in a contest, and it won on a national level, and it made me feel like this was something that I could do. I had this very small idea that whatever I did, I could be famous at it, and so at seven or eight years old I thought, "Well, I'm just going to be an author because this is easy," because the very first contest I ever entered I won. And it's never been that easy since then. It's been very hard and very disappointing.

CLARA: Yeah, it's a harder road than it looks at five.

CARLY: Yeah, that was like the pinnacle of my writing career. It was pretty great -- I got to ride in a limo with Levar Burton, and it aired on Reading Rainbow -- the PBS show -- so I think that got me really excited about being a writer someday.

CLARA: And why this story?

CARLY: As I left the faith, I began ... well, for a long time I hid the things that had happened to me, and as I started very slowly and shyly talking about them with my friends, they were all shocked. They were like, "You spoke in tongues? Wait what? You seem so normal! Wait, that happened to you?" The more I talked about it, the more I realized they were stories waiting to be told, and because I always wanted to be a writer, I thought that this could be my story to tell.

CLARA: In many ways this is a book about wanting to belong, and it's interesting that your wanting to belong led you to this place that, as you mentioned, so many people that you talked to later thought of as abnormal or strange or sort of out of the fold.

CARLY: Yeah, it's very unconventional yet at the same time, I had a tribe to belong to. There's a scene in the book where we're at a mall, and I had recently been baptized in the spirit -- that means speaking in tongues -- and had kind of been officially invited into the fold, and I felt so different that next day being at the mall with them because I was like, "Okay I'm still a nerdy, dorky, uncool teenager but I have people to be that with, and I have a purpose, and I have a reason for existence." So the other teenagers who I used to see as too cool for me, or who wouldn't accept me, I had a message for them. They needed God, they needed Jesus and I was the person that was supposed to give them that.

CLARA: The book, in general, is so raw and so emotional. Was it hard for you to put these stories into print?

CARLY: Definitely. I'm still struggling with that. It doesn't come out until October, so I sweat that out all the time. There's times in the shower where I think, "Just stop the presses, is it too late to back out? Burn all the advanced reader copies that are out there now and just stop all of this because I just want to hide and be anonymous and not have everything that's ever happened to me be out there in the world." Things that I've done wrong or unsightly, too, it's all in there. All my embarrassing moments are in this book.

CLARA: It's got to be a hard leap to take for your first book.

CARLY: Yeah, next time I want to write fiction I think.

CLARA: One of the things you say [is that] you found Pine Canyon Assemblies of God, but you weren't raised in any particular church.

CARLY: My dad was raised Catholic, Polish Catholic, and even went to parochial school and said that he had done his time in church because he had to go to church six days a week, and so him and God were good, he had done his time. And my mom came from something more evangelical but had left it behind herself, and so really wanted her children to explore our relationship with God on our own. So she never really pushed me in one direction or another, although when we were involved in this Pentecostal cult, they did get involved, too, for a brief time, but they were always my counterpoint to some of the fundamentalism that I got indoctrinated to because that was never them.

CLARA: It's interesting to hear you call it a cult.

CARLY: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

CLARA: It sounds like your relationship with this church, or cult, or whatever it is, has really evolved a lot.

CARLY: Sometimes I call it a cult, sometimes I call it cult-ish or cult lite, but it is definitely cult-like, diet cult, because you know if I'm comparing myself to someone who comes from Westboro Baptist, or the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, it wasn't to that intensity, but if you're comparing it to like a normal mainstream Christian church, it wasn't that either.

CLARA: Going back to your family a little bit, did they see it that way when they were a part of it? They were part of it for a little while, but they didn't have the same intensity.

CARLY: Definitely, and I think part of the reason it wasn't as intense for them is because they were adults, and so it was a less formative time for them. They definitely saw red flags, but I think by the time they saw them, I was too far in, and so especially my mom -- my mother would try to tell me things like, "I think you're being brainwashed," or, "Why don't you listen to yourself instead of what they're telling you to do?" And because of my complicated relationship with her, I would say, "Well you know, you're the brainwashed one," or, "You're of Satan." I mean there's one point in the book where I actually call her Satan because I believed that she was such a demonic influence in my life for not being the godly. I wanted parents with Godly influence, and in the church, we talked a lot about spiritual legacy.

CARLY: So it meant a lot for people to come from homes with spiritual metaphors all around them, and spending time in the Bible and prayer, and we didn't have that at home so I felt kind of like a spiritual orphan, and so I glommed onto these powerful people in the church and they became my spiritual parents, and I listened to them a lot more than I listened to my own parents, which is probably a common teenage thing anyway.

CLARA: That must have been really hard though, both for you and your parents to be in this kind of antagonistic relationship, and one that isn't just the sort of normal teenage antagonism.

CARLY: Yeah, I think at first they were proud of some of the stuff, and I think they had their own religious baggage, and so I think they were grateful that I wasn't doing drugs or having sex. They thought, "Yay, the church is keeping her" -- you know, they had some of the purity culture notions, "Yay, the church is keeping her good. We don't have to worry about her out there, doing drugs or whatever." And then as I got more and more indoctrinated, I think it was scary to them. But it was almost too late by then.

CLARA: How did joining the church change your relationship with them?

CARLY: Well, first of all, I started spending so much time at church that family was not the priority anymore, and I always felt like I had to witness to them. It was my responsibility to be the example. So even though they're the parents and I'm the 15-year-old, I had to be the witness to them, so I always had to -- in my mind -- and I didn't, I fell very short of this, but I always had to behave the right way, the godly way to show them what a Christian life could look like in hopes that they would see God. Or I had to convict them. For example, my parents loved to play cards, so there's a scene in the book where we're all playing cards and I'm thinking, "Well I really want to witness to them, and to witness to them I should play cards with them so that they don't think I'm crazy. But also playing cards is a sin, and so do I confront them on that and do I tell them that, do I lead them in the way of God?" That's a lot. That's a very heavy burden for a 15-year-old.

CLARA: That's a huge amount of pressure. When you're a kid, you expect your parents to be the ones who are leading you, and to be put in this position where you're responsible for leading them --

CARLY: Yes, and I spent many, many hours on my knees praying for their salvation.

CLARA: Have your parents read the book?

CARLY: My dad was reading it, and he was reading it slowly. He has to read it in very small doses, whereas my mom read it in like a 30-hour span, couldn't put it down. So that's just the differences in their personalities. But they both are reading it or have read it, and I've heard their reactions so far, and it was -- it was very intense for them to read. First of all, as a parent seeing the things that your child went through -- there were things in that book that I had never told them before, too. Also, it's also their story. There are things in the book that they were there for, and there were also hugely transformative moments for them. Seeing their life in print, as well, was huge. I mean my mom, when she finished it, I mean I didn't even know what she was talking about, but I picked up my phone and I got a text from my mom that said, "Beautiful." That was all it said, just "beautiful," and I thought, "Well I guess she finished the book. That's good," and then like six days later she finally said something more about it, and we've talked about it since. But there were days when she couldn't even find words for it.

CLARA: That must be hard on you too.

CARLY: Yeah, it was very anxiety-provoking. I'm really glad that aspect is behind me. I'm 31, and yet it was still a huge deal for what my parents thought of my book. There are definitely things in it that I don't sugarcoat, and things about them that I don't sugarcoat, and when I began writing this thing my mother said, "If you don't tell the truth, then it's not worth doing, so make sure that you tell the truth. However you have to portray me, or whatever you need to say about the things that really happened, that's what you need to say. Because anything less than that is not worth doing." So I had that, and I've told my writer friends, "My mom told me this.", and they're like, "Wow," because they're dealing with parents who have ostracized them or grown children who have ostracized them for writing the truth. But even with that, I still was so scared to tell the truth.

CLARA: How do you get started when you know that the things you're going to say are so personal and are going to affect your family?

CARLY: Well, I like to tell my writing students to write as if they're the only person who'll ever read it and then deal with that later. If or when they get to publish, you can deal with that later. So I mean, I did that. I wrote as if it was just for me, and so I really was able to write the truth. I guess in a way I kind of deferred the anxiety to now. Now it really is out there in the world, and now I have to deal with that. But we'll survive, we'll get through it.

CLARA: You mentioned to me when we spoke before that you felt this desire to protect your family.

CARLY: Definitely, and I still feel that. When I call my mom, and I want to tell her the good things. I don't want to tell her the hard things. I don't want her to worry about me. I definitely wrestled with that through the writing, and it's not a book about my parents. There are so many books about kids who come from abusive homes, and that is not the story that I set out to tell. My parents are barely even in the book, and readers can decide for themselves what that means, but there is a scene in the very beginning of my dad's drinking and how he -- my parents were fighting a lot, I was six years old, and he ended up moving out, and he moved back and the point was just, as a 6-year-old, I realized that my world was unstable. Just including that two paragraphs like, he sobbed for weeks. So yes, of course, you don't want to think of your adult father sobbing for weeks seeing that in print, but at the same time it was something that happened, and it's something that was huge for me as a 6-year-old.

CLARA: It was the truth.

CARLY: It's the truth. I think it's Anne Lamott who says, "If people wanted you to write nicely about them, then they should have behaved better."

CLARA: I want to change tack and ask about the actual writing of the book. What did the process look like for you?

CARLY: Well I opened a Word document one day -- I think I had just given birth to my oldest, so I was in a flurry of postpartum hormones -- and I opened a Word document and I titled it "Book," and I just started piecing together some of the stuff, some of the people who I thought could be characters in the story, some of the scenes that I knew for sure had to go in, and I just started furiously writing and I cranked out the first draft I think in eight months, because I was just writing all the time, scene-by-scene. I didn't try to organize it into a narrative arc. It was just, "Oh I want to write about the time that this happened," and so I would write that scene, and then I would write the next scene. It really was scene-by-scene. I teach memoir at a community college, and I tell them that writing a book really is just stringing scenes together. If you think about sitting down to write a book, it's daunting. But anyone can write a 750-word scene, a vignette, a window into a lived experience. Well, really, if you can just do that like a hundred times, then that's a book, and I tell them it's as simple as that. It's not but it gets them started, and it's what got me started.

CLARA: So did you write a number of different drafts?

CARLY: Oh yeah. This book has had many incarnations, one of them being that at first I saw it as a Christian book. I thought it would be a book that Evangelicals would want to read to learn about how they can do better. I quickly learned that they're not interested in learning how to do better, so I pushed up against the gatekeepers of Christian publishing over and over and over, and finally I had a fabulous developmental editor who said, "You've got to just tell the story, and you've got to stop selling your soul to these Christian publishers. Just write the story." I did that knowing that, "Okay well that means I'm not going to get a book deal with Thomas Nelson," even though for a while it seemed like that was going to happen. He said, "Suffer for your art, it's the only way," and so I did that, and I think the book is so much better now.

CLARA: What distinguishes your early drafts from the final version?

CARLY: Well the first ones are crappy, and I think just accepting that it's not gold you know? We don't crap diamonds. There's freedom in the acceptance of that. More specifically what's the difference between the early drafts and the final drafts?

CLARA: Yeah, what are the sort of big differences in the way that it looks or it reads?

CARLY: Well, one of the things in my talks with some of the agents and publishers I had been working with was, "We want readers to really get a good moral out of this story," and so the ending I think was more forced, more preachy, talking about the things that I've learned. I love the title of Lena Dunham's memoir, "A Young Woman Talks About The Things She's 'Learned." I started this book when I was in my 20s, so who am I to talk about all the things I've learned? The ending as it is now is much more open ended. It's just really what happened, and how I healed from that experience, and how I see hope for the future. That hope is a big tent kind of hope, where I think someone who is an atheist can believe in that kind of hope for humanity, someone who even is still a Christian. I kept the language very open and inclusive for that reason.

CLARA: What were your favorite parts to write?

CARLY: My favorite parts of the book are the ones where I'm happy. It's hard because so much of this book is intense, and it's intense for me to look back on. I mean, even now I had to proofread it, and it was like -- it killed me to read my own book because so much of it was so intense for me. But my favorite parts to write and to read are the ones where I'm a normal teenager doing normal teenage things with this backdrop of radicalism and revival. Those things were always there -- I was still a fundamentalist, I still believed in revival, I still believed all these things -- and yet on the day-to-day for so much of it, I was just a regular teenager. I was dancing in parking lots with Starbucks, I was falling in love on park swings, and that stuff is really fun to read.

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is "The Story Behind the Story." We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I'll ask Carly to read a passage from her book.

CLARA: I'd like to ask you now to read a passage from the book. It's the one where you describe speaking in tongues for the first time.

CARLY: Okay, that's chapter four.

CARLY: “God won’t give you your heavenly language if you don’t move your mouth. Start speaking, move your jaw, let words fall out, any words at all,” the preacher shouts. Thirty-six hours ago, speaking in tongues still freaked me out, and now I’m a Nazirite and I’m asking God to fill me with a heavenly language on the last night of this retreat. “Yes Jesus, yes Jesus, yes Jesus,” I say over and over, loosening my jaw and giving the Holy Spirit the chance to enter.

CARLY: I wish I could come up with something deep to say, closer to how Jessa prays, in lyrical metaphors and beautiful petitions based on obscure passages in the Old Testament. But I guess I could be worse. One guy near me is shouting “Watermelon!” again and again to receive his spiritual language. “Yes Jesus, yes Jesus, yes Jesus.” The words stop sounding like themselves, but I keep going. A warm sensation grows in my chest and works its way down my spine like a slow wave.

CARLY: Yes-Jesus-yes-Jesus-thank-you-God-thank-you-God-thank-you-Godthank- you-God-yes-Jesus. My heart flutters, in a good way, and tears flow. Yes-Jesus-yes-Jesus. I clumsily stretch my arms higher. I get a picture of Jesus’s robe dangling inches above me, and feel if I just reached a few inches higher I could feel the garment of God. People at church talk about having visions from the Lord, and this is my first yet.

CARLY: Yes-Jesus-thank-you-God. “Keep talking, get your mouth moving. Any words will do! Holy Spirit, fill this place with your power,” the preacher says, thrusting from his hips. His voice is as sandpapery as ever. Behind him, the worship band plays a song about Jesus fulfilling all our hopes and dreams.

CARLY: I keep babbling, exhilarated and terrified at the thought of finally receiving the gift for myself. I remember the first time I saw speaking in tongues at that summer camp. It was so scary then, and it’s still a little scary now. But the preacher says tongues are a physical evidence of a true life for God. I want the evidence.

CARLY: I feel something cold and sharp scraping the back of my neck. I whip around to see a heavyset middle-aged woman with crimson lipstick and long red fingernails pulling me in for a hug. “The Lord told me he has something special for you tonight,” the woman says. “Do you mind if I pray for you?” She places one hand on my forehead and another on the small of my back. Her touch titillates me, not in the same way I imagine it would if a boy were to touch me there, I don’t think, but in an enchanted spiritual way. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of the thick Holy Spirit air permeating the altar.

CARLY: “Rigantee-mee-yaw,” she says and exhales a big dramatic breath like Jane Fonda does on Mom’s workout videos. I peek up and see her waving her hands over me in a sweeping fluid motion like a witch crooning over her potions. I shut my eyes. This voice pops up inside. "This stuff is all made up, you know." I fight the thought with my whole body. "No, no. It can’t be. Jesus, I need to believe this is real. This is real. This is real. Jesus. This is real." I realize I am saying this out loud. The prayer woman coos in agreement . “This is real!” I shout. “Claim it!” the prayer woman says.

CARLY: My throat tightens and my tongue swells up and quivers on the roof of my mouth, and my lungs feel like they are on fire. A warm, tingly feeling spreads through my body. My jaw begins to rattle, and my tongue curls up and freezes, as if it is held hostage by an outside force. Overcome, I open my mouth. Words I have never heard before pour out from my lips as my tongue dances around my teeth, making a long string of Z sounds and clipped vowels in rapid fire syllables. I feel bile rising in my throat. I don’t recognize my own voice. It sounds so melodious, so unlike the harsh, stammering voice I know as my own.

CARLY: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” the prayer woman shouts. I begin sobbing as the words flow. My tongue is generous in its crafting of syllable after elegant syllable without my consent, and it sounds so exotic and beautiful. Never in my life have I used so many Z sounds. With each one, my teeth and throat vibrate. I don’t think I can stop, even if I want to.

CARLY: The prayer woman is celebrating my victory in the Spirit. She kicks off her leather sandals and dances around me. “Oh, the Spirit is strong in this one. Break through, Jesus! Shakotinga-linga!” she cries. I feel like I am soaring with Jesus. The preacher was right when he said the Holy Spirit is better than any pleasure the world offers. I want to bask in this moment forever. This is real.

CLARA: There are so many things that struck me about that passage when I read it, and I think one of them is just that you don't read that many first-person accounts of what is essentially a possession. Describe for me what that felt like for you when you were in that moment.

CARLY: I mean to this day, it's maybe the most out-of-body experience I've ever had. Nothing has ever matched that euphoria that I felt. I mean, I truly felt like the robe of God was dangling a few inches away from me, and I truly felt like there was something taking over my voice, and that it was no longer my own. It was bizarre.

CLARA: One of the other things that strikes me is that dialogue that you're kind of having with yourself, "This can't be real, this is real." Partly that struck me because that dialogue is there throughout the book.

CARLY: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

CLARA: When you joined Pine Assemblies of god, and you were going to church and seeing these things for the first time, we heard Carly the skeptic a lot, and yet Carly the skeptic still sort of gets subsumed by this other Carly, that wants to belong, that wants to be part of this, that is part of this, that is on fire for God.

CARLY: I think Carly the skeptic comes from just the fact that I wasn't indoctrinated from a young age. You were asking about my parents, and the truth is they told me, "Yeah God is love, Jesus is good." That's about all I knew. I didn't know about hell, I didn't know about living a pure life for God or holiness, I didn't know any of those things, and so when I first heard about those things, they didn't sit well with the logic I had already developed at a young age, and so, Carly, the skeptic is always there thinking, "Well this can't be real, the world couldn't have been created in six days, there can't be a literal hell." And yet I fought against it. I think that's just a testament to how badly I needed friends, and how badly I wanted to belong. Because I pushed back the intuition over and over.

CARLY: There's a scene in the book where I first see speaking in tongues, and I am so freaked out. I'm having what I don't realize at the time is a panic attack. I'm literally there like heaving breaths, and my heart is racing just watching the altar call from a distance. I went from that to a year and a half later actually partaking in it myself, and so it's a year and a half, it took that long to kind of wear me down. And there was always this other part of me it's like, "Well this can't be real, but then what's going on? If this isn't real, then what is happening down there? How are these people speaking in this unknown language? And how are they praying the way that they do? And how are they talking about these miracles?" I think I always had guilt for being a skeptic, and so I would have these skeptical thoughts and I would squash them down. Because I so wanted to believe it was real. I so wanted to believe in God, and I wanted to believe that God was Jesus, and I wanted to believe that Jesus manifested himself in the way that all these people said that he did.

CLARA: In the book when you describe later experiences of speaking in tongues, it never seems like it's quite the same. Is that accurate?

CARLY: Definitely accurate. There were times during altar calls where I could get the goosebumps again, but I was constantly chasing that spiritual high. Nothing ever compared to that first experience. Maybe [it's] a little bit like riding a bike. The first time, you know, you feel the wind as you go, and the next time you just kind of get on and ride. And that's how I felt. Speaking in tongues became almost a chore because you're supposed to do it every day. In some circles, it's to keep your salvation. In our circle it was more to live in the secret place of God as we told it. So to dwell in this secret place, we needed to speak in tongues every day for an hour, and so it just kind of became something I did as I was driving to school and work.

CLARA: Did it feel real to you, those other times, the way it did that first time?

CARLY: No not in the same way.

CLARA: That's got to be hard too.

CARLY: Yeah, I based so much of my life because of that one experience that I just read. Because there were times when fundamentalism didn't make sense to me anymore, especially after I became disillusioned by things that happened in my life, and yet I clung to it because of that one -- there were several experiences, but primarily that one night where I really felt like it was real. I had a lot of fear in walking away from a faith that proved itself to me. I think there's even a passage it's like, "If God proves himself to you, then who are you to walk away?" I was so afraid of doing that because, you know, we believe that God doesn't reveal himself to everyone, but once he reveals himself to you, and you turn and you close your heart to him, then you're lost. There's no coming back for you.

CLARA: Yeah, that's rough.

CARLY: It was very scary.

CLARA: I really loved that scene also because it captures that intensity so well. But for me, it's hard to imagine only experiencing something like that once and then being able to get back into the headspace to actually capture it. What did you do to help get back into that headspace?

CARLY: There was a lot of mashed knees on carpet, a lot of long, long prayer nights, praying for revival, praying for change, praying for healings and miracles, and so we would kind of recreate those experiences. And then seeing it happen for other people too always helps, so a lot of what we would do is after you have the gift of tongues specifically, you would pray for other people to get it. There were altar calls where I got to lead someone else into the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so that was always like going to a wedding after you've been married 10 years and seeing someone say their vows. It's like, "Oh yeah I remember why we're married, I don't hate you, let's recommit," you know, so maybe we did those things.

CLARA: Was that scary for you having left the church, going back and doing some of those things in order to write about it?

CARLY: Definitely, there are YouTube videos of that preacher and that was very -- it brought back some PTSD I didn't know I had. I would listen to the music that we listened to at the time to kind of dig up some of those feelings and memories, but then I realized, "Oh this music's playing in the background and I'm writing about this and why are my shoulder so tense and why do I feel like I'm about to vomit?"

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is The Story Behind The Story, we're going to take a short break, then we'll return to my conversation with Carly Gelsinger.

CLARA: Memoir as a genre is, in large part, about looking back at your life while it's still going on and that closeness, that sort of intimacy and familiarity with your subject is a big part of what makes memoirs compelling. But it takes a lot of courage and vulnerability, and we just discussed that a little bit. Is that vulnerability natural for you or is it something you've had to cultivate and develop to write?

CARLY: I have cultivated it. I wrote this book despite my private personality. Maybe for some people who are more naturally open and out there, memoir is easier. I don't think it's easy for anyone, but I think someone might read this book and come away thinking, "Wow she's so open about her experiences." Not really. That's why this has been so hard for me. I have some friendships where I've been able to be 100% honest, and they've really helped me. My husband is one of them. We talk about everything, and knowing that you can say anything and be loved anyway has really helped.

CLARA: Before we started recording, you mentioned that it was important to you that people saw the good as well as the bad, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier when we were talking about your favorite moments. So tell me about some of the moments where you were happy.

CARLY: You know there's something magical about the kind of faith that I had, and yes it was toxic and damaging and all these horrible things, we know that. But there was this beauty to it where we truly believed that we could move mountains with our prayer, and we truly believed that God was on our side. I mean when I talk about the secret place of God, it was this place that we lived where God would tell us secrets. We were part of Gods club and so we felt so special, we carried with us -- it's not healthy, but it was this eliteness to our relationship with God and to each other -- and I knew who I was in that culture. I had developed an identity. I wasn't a teenager once I found that, I wasn't a teenager trying to find who I was. I thought I had found that. And so there's a beauty in that security. It caused me to do things that were really bold. They weren't always the right thing, but there was a boldness to it, and it really was sincere.

CARLY: Some of it was definitely showy and fake, but I think the heart of it is we truly believed this stuff and we believed it with the most sincere places of our hearts. One of the things that comes to mind is how we would go to our little town's public park and pray for revival. And we were regular teenagers, we were flirtatious and loud and falling in love with each other and staying out way too late on park swings and sort of holding hands. It was this kind of magical teenage experience but laced with the Holy Spirit. So it wasn't just, "Oh I like this cute boy and we're on swings," it was, "I like this cute boy and we're on swings, and Jesus is coming back soon and he is going to redeem all of us, and revival is coming." So it was that magical feeling of being a teenager, where you feel like you're so high on hope that you might burst. It's that with this like other level of spirituality.

CLARA: It's like intensity upon intensity.

CARLY: Yeah, it was so intense.

CLARA: There are several points in the book where you talk about things that you have to give up to remain sort of in good standing in this church and in this faith, and one of the ones that is most poignant is The Beatles.

CARLY: The Beatles were the first album I ever listened to that wasn't like Broadway music or kid music. I was a very sheltered, dorky kid, and so I didn't listen to top 40 music. I listened to The Beatles, and The Beatles were the soundtrack to my life until I joined this church. Then I, as the preacher would say, "Those things neuter your heart for God," and I thought, "Well, man if I'm that close to seeing a miracle, giving up The Beatles should be easy, because what am I gaining if I give that up? I'm gaining this access this to this miraculous existence that I wouldn't otherwise know." So I tried to give them up, and probably of all the things that I had to abstain from, that was the hardest. I would count the days I would go without listening to The Beatles, and then I would listen to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and then feel so guilty, and then I'd have to start over.

CARLY: But probably one of the most painful memories is for my fourteenth birthday, my brother got me this beautiful black-and-white print of the four Beatles -- it's the one where they're looking off into the wind, I don't know looking very solemn as they do -- and I hung that in my room for years until my youth pastor's wife came over and in a very judgmental, manipulative tone told me to take it down. She said, "Carly I didn't think that you would have something so ungodly in your room. At church you come across so pure." She would say things like that and without telling me, "Carly you should take that down," and so after that, after she left I wrestled with it. You know, I felt it was the Holy Spirit telling me to take it down, it wasn't just my youth pastor's wife, it was God telling me.

CARLY: So I bargained with God, "But God, this is so important." "Take it down." "Okay well I have to listen to God, it's the Holy Spirit, if I don't listen to the Holy Spirit I'll harden my heart to the Holy Spirit, and then the Holy Spirit won't talk to me the way he does and I won't have divine opportunities the way I do." So I put the Beatles poster in my closet and I never got the chance to put it back up because that summer, there was a forest fire that took my family's home, and that was when I went to the rubble of the fire and I'm poking through looking for remnants of my old life, and I'm thinking ironically, "This can't be real, this is not real." The thing that was actually real I couldn't accept, that this had happened.

CARLY: But I was looking for that Beatles poster and I thought, "Man, I just wish that poster had burned where it deserved to burn, not in my closet but hanging up in my bedroom where it belonged." That was a wake-up call for me, in that I was like, "What am I living for? Why am I working so hard and living this exhausting life of faith when the fire's going to come and ravage you anyway, what does it matter? I could have listened to The Beatles all those years."

CLARA: Do you listen to them now?

CARLY: I do, although it's funny, they're so entrenched in memories that it's very nostalgic for me to listen to them, so it's kind of like active listening. I don't just turn them on and do chores, it's like, "I'm going to listen to The Beatles," like it's a hobby.

CLARA: That's great. What are you reading right now?

CARLY: Right now I'm slogging my way through a science fiction book for the sake of my husband. I think it's called "Red Rising." I'm sorry science fiction fans if that's not what it's called. It's by Pierce Brown. It's not my normal genre, so it's a discipline for me to read it but it's his favorite book, and he really had wanted me to read it, so I'm doing that for him.

CLARA: So what do you read?

CARLY: I read a lot of memoir, although this year I've been reading a lot of the domestic thrillers that are so popular right now and you know, some are very forgettable and some are really good. But what makes me feel most alive is when I read memoir, when I read other peoples lived experiences, especially women's. I started writing the book after I had been on this Mary Karr kick for years. I mean, my life is a Mary Karr kick, I still read her, but she takes so long to write a new book because it's her craft and she does an excellent job. So I'm always waiting for Mary Karr to release a new book, and memoirists of her ilk who have written about their life so raw and honestly but with such grace a humor that you're not reading it thinking, "Oh this poor girl, how did she endure that," you're thinking, "Wow I relate to that, I don't relate to any of the specifics of your story but I get that, that's what it means to be human, this is what it feels like to be alive." So memoir to me is like a connecting of that lived experience.

CLARA: Will you write more memoir?

CARLY: Well, since these experiences, my life has been pretty vanilla, so I'm not sure what I would write about.

CLARA: It's probably better that way.

CARLY: Yeah, I'm grateful. I'm grateful to live just a regular mediocre life now. But I am writing a novel. It's kind of a fictionalized version of a lot of the stuff I've seen in the Evangelical church, particularly some of the sexual abuse scandals, so it's told through the lens of three different women and how their stories intersect.

CLARA: That's very topical right now.

CARLY: Yeah, yeah, and it was something that man -- I mean I'm glad it didn't happen to me, but it could have, you know? Given the abuse of authority and the lack of accountability with these leaders and the brainwashing that happens in these circles, it totally could have. And it's happened to a lot of people I know.

CLARA: Who are your influences?

CARLY: Well, definitely Mary Karr. My publicist said, "'Once You Go In' is a classic memoir like Mary Karr," and I felt embarrassed that they would even put that in the same sentence. I know it's a marketing thing, but even then I was like, "No, that's wrong. Mary Karr and I should not be compared." So Saint Mary Karr, and then for fiction I love Anne Patchett. "State Of Wonder" -- I think I read that book twice. The last time I read it was three years ago, and I still think about it every day. I think about those characters and the delicious choices they made.

CLARA: You said at one point that part of what made it exciting and made for some of the happiest moments you had in the church were this feeling of genuinely doing something for God, that sort of eliteness or specialness. How do you grow up and out of that, having left the church?

CARLY: Well, it's not a sustainable way to live, because you're constantly running from a spiritual high to the next and there's so many demands on behavior to stay in the those good graces, with the people -- I mean, we said it was from God but it was from people -- with the people who would give you those opportunities. So as I fell from those graces because of one tiny sin -- as they say, "The slippery slope starts with one tiny sin" -- I started sliding down, and I got kicked out, basically. I mean, I was no longer holy enough to be a part of the elite. And I thought, "Well, screw this, I'm going to live my life the way I want to," and that part was pretty easy. I had a lot of shame and guilt for not holding on to the fire like I thought I was supposed to, or as we said, "You're forsaking your first love, your first love is God." So I was forsaking my first love for these other loves. But it felt good, it felt natural. And so I think for -- your question was, "How do you kind of acclimate yourself to the real world after that kind of experiences?" For me it felt normal. It was like, "Wow, I don't have to try so hard anymore, I can just be human."

CLARA: Can you forgive?

CARLY: Absolutely. In fact, I feel really bad that the things that I say about some people in this book because I know they're not villains. They did some really awful things, but they did it because they really believed it was the right thing to do. I recently blocked all of them from Instagram and Facebook because they would like everything I would post about the book, and I'm thinking, "You don't know what's in this book. Like, you guys look like the bad guys." But they've stayed in touch with me, and it's made me uncomfortable because I have forgiven them, and I don't want them to think that I hate them, and yet if they read this book they'll be devastated.

CLARA: Can you forgive yourself?

CARLY: Yeah. That was maybe harder in some ways, but I think that -- I was a kid. I mean I have children now, and they're younger than I was when these things happened, but I just don't hold the same moral responsibility on children as I do adults, and so I was a brainwashed kid. Of course, I was going to make some bad choices and do hurtful things. There's a meme going around right now that I've seen that says, "I'm sorry for what I said when I was Evangelical," and so I would like to say that to every one of my past. Because it wasn't me. It was this thing that I thought I had to believe in, and this cloak that I wore that wasn't myself at all. So once I shed that, I mean, I'm an okay person.

CLARA: You seem okay. Carly Gelsinger thank you so much for joining me today.

CARLY: Thank you, this has been awesome.

CLARA: Carly Gelsinger is the author of ONCE YOU GO IN: A MEMOIR OF RADICAL FAITH which came out in October. You can find her book on her website, carlygelsinger.com, or wherever books are sold. Next time I talk to author and translator Katya Apekina, whose debut novel THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH came out in September. I hope you'll join us.

CLARA: "The Story behind the Story" is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. This episode was recorded by Taylor Romo with help from Drew Lassen. It was mixed and edited by Lanier Sammons, who also wrote our theme.