There, without any training, they're expected to minister to recovering addicts and ex-convicts. Later on, when Agatha is 'all out of deference,' she's more lacerating about the 'recklessness' - sexual as well as monetary - of those priests who are 'in charge.' Abruptly booted out of their convent, the four sisters are transferred to a half-way house in the depressed Rhode Island town of Woonsocket. She and three fellow sisters - all the same age - run a day care center but, when the novel opens, the diocese is going broke because, as Agatha tactfully says, 'the men in charge had been reckless.' It's a place with walls painted 'the color of mayonnaise,' ruled by a beloved elderly Mother Superior who is 'frail as filament.' Agatha has spent seven years there, ever since she took her vows at the age of 22. Sharp and, by turns, melancholy and wry, Agatha narrates her own belated coming-of-age tale about, as she says, learning 'how to distinguish an idea of yourself from the real thing.'Īgatha tells her story in retrospect, beginning in 2005 in her convent outside of Buffalo, N.Y. I picked up Agatha of Little Neon for its unusual subject and I got pulled in by Agatha's voice. The implication is that there must be something 'off' about a woman who would choose such a life of self-abnegation.Ĭlaire Luchette's debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, offers a counter-narrative about a young 21st-century nun who's neither a holy fool nor a musical miracle worker nor a monster. Nuns, of course, have greatly diminished in number since the '60s and, in recent decades, when they do make an occasional appearance on screen they're often grim, even baroque characters like Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius in Doubt or Jessica Lange's Sister Jude in American Horror Story.

The Flying Nun starring a buoyant Sally Field was on TV, 'Singing Nun' Jeanine Deckers appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and her life was made into a movie there was The Trouble with Angels and the 'Mother Superior' of all nun movies, The Sound of Music. For a brief time, nuns, in particular, were everywhere.

I was a Catholic schoolgirl during a strange moment in the 1960s when Catholicism infiltrated American popular culture.

Agatha little neon