Still, by Lauren F. Winner

Lauren Winner first drew widespread literary attention in 2004 with the spritely spiritual memoir Girl Meets God: A Memoir, which told the story of her conversion first to Orthodox Judaism and then to a Christianity of a Jesus-loving-Anglican-intellectual-evangelical kind. That book, with its fun and its chatty tone, snuck up on me like a charming guest at a cocktail party. I began the interaction thinking she was just engaging in interesting spiritual small talk and only later suddenly realized that we were talking about real things of profound depth.

But there is no getting around the fact that Girl Meets God was written by a young woman in her twenties. And it should come as no surprise that the precocious Winner would have her religious midlife crisis early as well.

After Girl Meets God, Winner wrote other important books. One of the more talked-about ones, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity, concludes with the end of her newfound celibacy as she enters a happy new marriage. Since then, Winner has graduated from Duke Divinity School, signed on there as a professor and become well known around the world as an expert on Christian spirituality. She has also divorced.