“There was no religion in my family. My parents believed salvation lay in keeping the romance alive in their marriage, and in maintaining a high economic standard of living.” Thus begins the essay “Heart of Wisdom” in Martha Gies’s beautiful, devastating, ebullient collection, Broken Open. Readers, too, may find themselves broken open by Gies’s account of her youngest sister, Toni, who at nineteen shocks her family by becoming an evangelical Christian. The family, Gies reports drily, is “appalled.” 

The four Gies children have already endured the untimely death of their father, a lawyer whose interactions with his offspring are limited, to say the least. Once, at Christmas, they beg him to come upstairs to see their tree, and it’s the one and only time Gies remembers his ever ascending to the children’s quarters. Following his sudden death, Toni’s older siblings leave home one by one, until she is alone with her mother’s drinking and stunned grief.

In short order, Toni converts, marries another young Evangelical, bears two children, becomes a missionary with her husband, endures an acute illness, spends years farming to pay off hospital debt, prepares to return to missionary work, and receives a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. She is thirty-one. She survives the cancer for five and a half years, suffering cruel treatments to gain a little more time with her family and deepen her relationship with God. The youngest sibling becomes the family’s “teacher,” and Martha, the eldest, becomes her scribe, interviewing her for the manuscript Toni wants to leave, jotting down her conversations, noting her Post-its (“Patience is accepting a difficult situation without giving God a deadline to remove it”). She describes her sister’s ordeal with the dry humor they share (when the cancer metastasizes to her lungs, Toni says: “If Jesus Christ is not who He says he is, then now would be a really good time to find out”). As her illness advances inexorably, Toni plants acres of strawberries, puts up pickles, and embarks on a public-speaking career. Her sister writes: “Toni has made a sacrament of her life.” 

If this sounds like an account of a saint’s life, it probably is—but the essay is hardly hagiography. Gies depicts Toni’s sense of humiliation and her anger and yes, her goodness, without hyperbole or sentimentality. She relies, instead, on often grim precision—“They dripped chemo down through the hole in Toni’s head, directly into her spinal column”––and on her words, including the Scripture she quotes: “He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, / He enables me to go the heights.”

The collection is organized in rough chronological order. The brief essays preceding “Heart of Wisdom” introduce us to the Gies parents, who leave Martha with her grandmother while they take off on a two-year honeymoon delayed by World War II. The siblings grow up in the Oregon countryside, isolated enough from playmates and their parents to become intensely close to each other; they all go on to lives of travel, experimentation, and engagement with politics, religion, and art. The essays following “Heart of Wisdom” resolutely move, as the siblings do, out into the world, and combine to form a conversion narrative of sorts. The essays are freestanding, so some repeat information, but this also means a reader can begin anywhere and discover richly peopled pages that stretch into breadth and depth even as they pop with propulsive energy. This is a collection that belongs on a shelf alongside Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain.

Gies’s prose shares with those memoirs an admirable clarity and specificity, whether she’s speaking about childhood or old age. Her style is rich in striking imagery (she bemoans humanity’s common plight, “stranded on the skin of the world”), but the writing doesn’t strain for effect: she credits Raymond Carver, her first mentor, with her direct, unpretentious approach to both writing and teaching. The range of her influences and collaborators is broad and includes experimental filmmaker Jill Godmilow, who invites Gies to cowrite a screenplay adaptation of Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (it was my Notre Dame colleague Godmilow who first introduced me to Gies’s writing). Carver approves the Godmilow-Gies treatment—“It’s great,” he says—and they option the rights, but he dies soon after. The rights eventually go elsewhere, a second blow, but “now his poems and stories are what is left. In these he remains my teacher.” 

Gies’s narratives are often structured in a way that deepens and complicates their subjects: an acerbic account of her time touring as a magician’s assistant, for example, includes the facts she reads about Houdini in a thirty-five-cent paperback. Her portrait of the magician who calls her “doll” is hilarious but also alarming. Gies is portraying an era in which old attitudes are dying but not dead yet. The protests of the sixties help reinforce her childhood interest in social justice and the lives of workers and the poor. In the nineties, she writes a book about night-shift workers, Up All Night. One of the chapters, included in Broken Open, portrays a formerly homeless man who now welcomes homeless men into the Peniel Mission Center, where services begin with a rendition of “Jesus Put a Yodel in My Heart.” Other essays tell the story of a former Black Panther organizer whose son, once an intern in the mayor’s office, is arrested and imprisoned for terrorism when he refuses to testify against fellow Muslims; of a taciturn physicist and former CIA agent living in voluntary poverty and attending Skid Row Mass; of Gies’s retracing of Neruda’s journey to the sea; and of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s advocacy for the poor, his anti–nuclear weapons stance, and his decision to become a tax resister. 

It is Hunthausen who, replying to a letter she sends him, inspires Gies to consider Catholicism in a new light. She discovers a progressive Jesuit parish in Seattle and joins the Church in 1984. Though she gradually comes to see that “the teaching of a parish priest will never be as radical as that of Jesus, congregate worship never as intense as private prayer, and parish membership never as demanding as a life lived in Christ,” she also learns that this insight “is well within the Church’s broad tradition.” But she questions her decision to convert when the Vatican begins an investigation of Archbishop Hunthausen and makes him subject to a coadjutor. Ultimately, she sticks with her faith, quoting the archbishop himself: “We all struggle to do the best we can to live according to our beliefs.” 

Gies closes her collection with a delightful essay on old age called “The Judicious Beauty of Memory Loss.” She suggests that rather than scramble after brain exercises to improve our memory, we follow Rumi, who advises: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” I’ll counter with a proposal to read more essays by Martha Gies, whose “heart of wisdom” informs these rich essays, equal parts spiritual challenge and solace. 

Broken Open
Essays
Martha Gies
Trail to Table Press
$18.60 | 198 pp.