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The Mary Pages: An Atheist's Journey to the Mother of God
Raised in an atheist household, Sally Read nevertheless saw images of the Blessed Virgin Mary from earliest childhood—and they remained with her in the most remarkable ways. Conscious of the conflict between her feminist values and what came to be a fascination with Marian art, Read—through tumultuous relationships, loneliness, and distant places—began a unique quest to discover the true essence of Mary.
These pages contain the strange, raw, and epiphany-filled stories that led to Read’s dramatic nine-month conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Focusing not only on Read’s life but also on the lives of others who, knowingly or unknowingly, encountered the Virgin, this literary memoir is a testimony of how a Mother patiently brought one child home to her Son—and slowly revealed her own heart.
These pages contain the strange, raw, and epiphany-filled stories that led to Read’s dramatic nine-month conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Focusing not only on Read’s life but also on the lives of others who, knowingly or unknowingly, encountered the Virgin, this literary memoir is a testimony of how a Mother patiently brought one child home to her Son—and slowly revealed her own heart.
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Published October 31, 2024
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February 15, 2025
Some conversions are abrupt lightning-bolt affairs, charged with sudden awareness that one is trudging down the wrong path and must do an about-face. Others are subtle, almost imperceptible awakenings, like a dawning sun or dew settling on grass. You’ve done the about-face before you even knew it. God knows how to bring each soul along, both for the soul’s good and for his larger plan for the world. Think of St. Paul; he needed to go through rigorous studies and hard discipline to become a Pharisee and a fierce anti-Christian for his conversion to have the kind of effect it had. While Paul counted all he achieved as rubbish, God knew all that hard work was necessary to become a more convincing witness to the resurrected Christ.
While Sally Read’s conversion was not a lightening bolt affair like St. Paul’s, she can still look back and see how God had been preparing her for her post-conversion mission, allowing her to fall into temptation and sin to make her conversion that much more convincing and convicting. And while she fell into sin, God never abandoned her. Rather he accompanied her all along the way through the presence of his beloved Mother Mary.
In her beautiful book, Sally poetically narrates all those the little moments when the Blessed Mother made her presence known, even if she wasn’t recognized for who she was. Mary was witness to all those pre-conversion experiences that made Sally who she is and needs to be to carry out her post-conversion mission.
I loved this book. I loved the poetry of the prose, I loved the depth of experience, I loved the eloquent testimony of a soul being sought and finally found. I also loved hearing the other stories she tells about artists and their muses and the million ways that God’s glory can shine, not often in perfect virtue but in the muddled darkness of vice where the light of grace can be seen so much more starkly.
While Sally Read’s conversion was not a lightening bolt affair like St. Paul’s, she can still look back and see how God had been preparing her for her post-conversion mission, allowing her to fall into temptation and sin to make her conversion that much more convincing and convicting. And while she fell into sin, God never abandoned her. Rather he accompanied her all along the way through the presence of his beloved Mother Mary.
In her beautiful book, Sally poetically narrates all those the little moments when the Blessed Mother made her presence known, even if she wasn’t recognized for who she was. Mary was witness to all those pre-conversion experiences that made Sally who she is and needs to be to carry out her post-conversion mission.
I loved this book. I loved the poetry of the prose, I loved the depth of experience, I loved the eloquent testimony of a soul being sought and finally found. I also loved hearing the other stories she tells about artists and their muses and the million ways that God’s glory can shine, not often in perfect virtue but in the muddled darkness of vice where the light of grace can be seen so much more starkly.
December 23, 2024
A fantastically written memoir that isnt what you expect. When I say that this book is weird in the best ways I mean it as a high compliment. I read a lot of Catholic stuff and this was refreshing.
June 24, 2025
Just…wow…
“How much God (a God I did not, then, believe in) must trust us in giving us these artistic gifts; how much he risks.”
“It was also through [my boyfriend] I got to know something of pornography. Like most men I knew, he viewed pornography regularly and saw it as an entirely benign recreation that sat well between his first whiskey after work and dinner. As the internet swelled and let loose in those early years, no one, it seemed was immune from seeing other people having sex. But there were some images so graphic and violent that even the most porn-habituated men confided to their wives and coworkers that they couldn't ever be rid of them. A friend's husband kept waking at night slick with sweat, and once sat up in bed and retched. He wouldn't tell her what it was he saw online, but she identified the burnt shape of something ghastly stamped in his eyes. Some things, she told me, brand your consciousness, and the scar never fades.”
“Even from the little of what I had seen online, I knew that pornography was now no longer a question of a consenting woman and a consenting man being filmed having the kind of sex that could make a baby. Even the idea was laughable! Pornography meant distortion of the norm; it was defined by extremity. Each online image begged another image, a more dangerous image. Each scene paled after several views. The brain needed more, an extra dopamine hit. Like a heroin addict, the more it got, the more it hungered for. As I sat there with a man I theoretically would have hitched (for the art, the books, the walks), I couldn't verbalize why there should be imposed limits on porn. I could only point to the growing anemia of our own sex life. And, of course, I couldn't do that.”
“[Standing before two artists to be painted naked, t]hat’s what I was trying for in my feminist statement of ‘Here I am.’ I was aching for the sweep of divine attention that Adam and Eve knew so well in Eden; I was craving absolution and acceptance. Without knowing it, I was crawling my way toward prayer. Without having the least idea, I was dreaming of blameless, glorified bodies—Christ's in the garden when Mary Magdalene couldn't recognize him. And didn't she, the Virgin Mary, in her earthly life, contain something of that unimaginable glory? Didn't she just shine? The one lucid pebble on the beach speaking its color, with no shame, no distortion. Perhaps, standing there, I expected to sprout wings; to speak in tongues; to silence the begrudgers and the uncomprehending, the takers and the besmirchers, the blamers and the abusers…
All this time, the Virgin had been hidden in the folds of my story—in the love affairs and earnest attempts at art. Her presence, in pictures and history and feminist deconstruction, told me nothing spiritual, I thought.
“But she was preparing me. And what she told me then, what she tells me now, as I look back…is that my body was made to be a piece of Eden. A piece of that peaceful perfection. We're made in the image and likeness, they used to say, and then they said it like it was blah blah blah. Now we don't say it and have even forgotten how to think it.
“But imagine a painter sitting down to paint the face of God Almighty—the is, the everything—and being able to contemplate nothing but vapor and light. But then this artist finds himself painting a human face with deep eyes, with a long nose, with ears that might ache in the wind, with feet that might sting with blisters from the long walking. Jesus Christ is how God sees himself. Christ is the Icon of God.”
“The problem is that we do not know how to see…
The fact is that no one is ready to see Mary dance naked at the dawn of time. For us, dancing and nakedness segue quickly into the erotic, and the doors open to the stampeding dopamine hits, the snowballing fantasies of concupiscence and pornography. Which means that we are incapable of thinking of the Virgin dancing; we are incapable of thinking of her naked. We are stooped and narrow-sighted as Adam and Eve lurching out of the Garden. That afternoon in the artist's studio, I was light years from knowing that dancing and nakedness are, in fact, part of the Virgin. He made us naked; he loves us to dance, just as David danced before the tabernacle.
But holy things for the holy. We would hardly know what we were looking at if we saw a dancing Madonna, a naked Madonna. We couldn't begin to understand.”
“When, an avowed atheist, I stepped into that room containing the picture of Mary made out of excrement and cherubim made from pornographic cutouts, I gently fell to pieces. It could not have been that I minded the degradation of the Mother of God, because for me there was no such thing. It must have been that I was reeling at the sight of Womankind so mocked, so humiliated…This is womanhood beaten to a pulp of ugly incapacity.”
“Decades on, there are now a tide of young women (puzzled by what it is that makes them women who are, on the contrary, intent on becoming men. Like Reformation iconoclasts who gouged out the face of Mary in English churches, smashed her statues, and erased her presence from the core of religious de-votion, girls will let medics take scalpels to their breasts. Even washing their bodies will make some cry with disgust and despair. They cannot bear to see the form of their own curves; the texture repulses them. They will see Ofili's Madonna in elephant dung, the empty shrines in ancient churches, and, at some incalculable level, they will know what the world thinks of women…For we have long forgotten Wisdom dancing at the dawn of time.”
"My soul magnifies the Lord," Mary sang at the accomplishment of what she was made to be. It's clear to me now that in her whole and jubilant womanhood, she would never want to be separated from him. And for those who say Mary is sexless, I say: think of to whom she gives her sexuality and of what else she gives him (her everything); think of how she yielded in her extraordinary conception, of how she loves. In her, there is no division, no rupture, no forgetting of what she is, no self-hatred.
There is no falsity, no playacting, no confusion, no withholding from her Maker. She is as responsive as the sea to light and cloud, as generous as air that endlessly expands, as ecstatic as a bride and as faithful. I believe she loves her naked body and is at ease with her breasts and her rounded belly, because he does, and because he is.
Of course she knelt before him.
“For what mother, I ask de Beauvoir twenty years after that blizzard, does not kneel before her baby? What mother has not knelt before the crib and felt something like the wordless and surging adoration of prayer? A mother's love for her baby is over-whelming. It crescendos in waves. It comes like labor pains: just as she thinks that she can take no more, the intensity disperses, leaving her gasping. God knows that we can't hold the entirety of love (or pain) in one go. It would tear us to pieces. But mothers have a privileged glimpse of this infinite love that binds us so thoroughly to our children. When we kneel before our child, we are bowing at a glimpse of divine love that effortlessly holds everything.”
“It turned out that the pregnancy I had scrupulously avoided with pills and rubber for so many years wasn’t so easy to get…it refused to comply.”
“No one mentioned abortion…A child had dropped into her lap. Suddenly, this being dictated everything about her empty hands and arms, everything she would do.”
“She grieved with all of us in our eternal grief. She grieves even if we forget how to grieve. She grieves for Christ in his agony when we become nonchalant or forgetful. She prays for us all to be like her, vividly alive in our love and our sorrow for her son — whether we are the conquered or the conqueror, the good or the bad, the murdered or the murderer. Because in that final pietà as she holds her son’s body, she is the Mother of Mercy who holds Everything. And she holds us with him so we can enter his heart.”
“As we walk around them, this entwined mother and son, we see that the Virgin's hands say two things: one catches him, grasps him, possesses him—knows that, without her, he will fall from the knowable world. But the left hand gestures, What is this? It is this hand that speaks to God, like Esther's plea ("Help me, who am alone and have no helper but you"); like Job's lament ("Why is light given to one in misery?"); and like her own song ("My soul magnifies the Lord.."). The left hand says This—meaning, this is everything: all love, all sacrifice, all pain. All question and all answer.
Yes, her lap is wide; she can take anything: the world, the world's sorrow. Even—though at such cost—him. This scene is the interface of God's pain and the world's rage, the world's pain and God's rage, God's love and the world's need, the world's love and God choosing, heart-wrenchingly, to need. It is an intolerable sight cast in marble. It is the only sight.”
“She is the altar of sacrifice, the tabernacle of his being, the ears for his cries, the eyes for his wounds. The element of the Woman is essential…And she was watching me. I know now that she was walking with me. My daughter fell, picked herself up, and ran again, bouncing into a spring that was the most radiant I had ever seen. We were both hungry for discovery, for knowledge, and as my hand became distinct from her hand, and my eyes lifted from hers, we hurtled into changes that were making Mary smile, that I could never have dreamed.”
“His was a face that swallowed my attention whole. If I surrounded myself with those eyes, I wouldn't be able to walk a straight line to the kitchen. Kneeling before the tabernacle after Mass, I had the sensation of my face being pulled to that face, as though I were one of two lovers on the threshold of a kiss—that moment when flesh is millimeters from flesh, and the hairs of the skin, two auras of electricity, have engaged, and are drawing you in.
This is why I became Catholic, I told people who asked. I had—almost by accident in a little church one day—encountered this Presence: the Word made Flesh and ready to be consumed. When he came to me that day, every image and element of my life, all of its infinitesimal pixels, cohered into a whole before him and was suffused with his love; he who, when I became Catholic, would be physically, not just within grasp, but within me.
My Lord and my God.”
“Christ himself appeared in visions to Faustina, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Sister Mary of St. Peter. But Mary appeared, so often, to children: to this fourteen-year-old French girl at Lourdes who Mary taught to cross herself with feeling, with no trace of carelessness ("as one takes the hand of a child and guides it"); to shepherd children of seven, nine, and ten, to whom she—scandalously— showed a vision of hell; to a fourteen-year-old and eleven-year-old in the Alps before whom she wept, as this statue before me was said to have wept. (And, I thought as I stood before that bleeding Madonna: Mary's tears are as crucial as her joy. They express what we should always be feeling about Christ's Passion. "I wish I could always weep like that," a Desert Father said as he came out of ecstatic prayer in which he had seen Mary by the cross.) Essentially, Mary, who laughed at Lourdes and cried at La Salette, came to where these children worked and played. She spoke their language. She understands home, roots, and how important these are to us. She knows that we all sit by strange rivers and weep. We need familiarity. Her messages are still arriving, and there is never any shortage of people who claim that they see her or speak with her—at Garabandal, Medjugorje, Bavaria, Zeitoun, Seville, Laus. Our Lady, who meets us in our earthly exile, bleeds through the veil, through the centuries, around the globe, and back again.”
“It comes to me as I stand in prayer: the call has been answered. For while God swells with contentment at the response of any one of us, your answer, Mary, your yes, is the cry that he was waiting for from the beginning of all time. In all of creation, I realize now, there is no one like you. No one can answer his desperate calls the way that you do, daughter of Zion. The Son answers the Father as he hangs in his agony. But God is still crying. In the dark fields, in cities, Father, Son, and Spirit call for an answer from humanity. As a child, when I listened to the owl's cry at night, when I felt the loneliness of the vicar like the loneliness of the man-God stretched out in his Passion, I was listening, without knowing it, for your answering cry, the essential link between man and God. There is no purer response than yours. It is a song that allows all of us to sing.”
“How much God (a God I did not, then, believe in) must trust us in giving us these artistic gifts; how much he risks.”
“It was also through [my boyfriend] I got to know something of pornography. Like most men I knew, he viewed pornography regularly and saw it as an entirely benign recreation that sat well between his first whiskey after work and dinner. As the internet swelled and let loose in those early years, no one, it seemed was immune from seeing other people having sex. But there were some images so graphic and violent that even the most porn-habituated men confided to their wives and coworkers that they couldn't ever be rid of them. A friend's husband kept waking at night slick with sweat, and once sat up in bed and retched. He wouldn't tell her what it was he saw online, but she identified the burnt shape of something ghastly stamped in his eyes. Some things, she told me, brand your consciousness, and the scar never fades.”
“Even from the little of what I had seen online, I knew that pornography was now no longer a question of a consenting woman and a consenting man being filmed having the kind of sex that could make a baby. Even the idea was laughable! Pornography meant distortion of the norm; it was defined by extremity. Each online image begged another image, a more dangerous image. Each scene paled after several views. The brain needed more, an extra dopamine hit. Like a heroin addict, the more it got, the more it hungered for. As I sat there with a man I theoretically would have hitched (for the art, the books, the walks), I couldn't verbalize why there should be imposed limits on porn. I could only point to the growing anemia of our own sex life. And, of course, I couldn't do that.”
“[Standing before two artists to be painted naked, t]hat’s what I was trying for in my feminist statement of ‘Here I am.’ I was aching for the sweep of divine attention that Adam and Eve knew so well in Eden; I was craving absolution and acceptance. Without knowing it, I was crawling my way toward prayer. Without having the least idea, I was dreaming of blameless, glorified bodies—Christ's in the garden when Mary Magdalene couldn't recognize him. And didn't she, the Virgin Mary, in her earthly life, contain something of that unimaginable glory? Didn't she just shine? The one lucid pebble on the beach speaking its color, with no shame, no distortion. Perhaps, standing there, I expected to sprout wings; to speak in tongues; to silence the begrudgers and the uncomprehending, the takers and the besmirchers, the blamers and the abusers…
All this time, the Virgin had been hidden in the folds of my story—in the love affairs and earnest attempts at art. Her presence, in pictures and history and feminist deconstruction, told me nothing spiritual, I thought.
“But she was preparing me. And what she told me then, what she tells me now, as I look back…is that my body was made to be a piece of Eden. A piece of that peaceful perfection. We're made in the image and likeness, they used to say, and then they said it like it was blah blah blah. Now we don't say it and have even forgotten how to think it.
“But imagine a painter sitting down to paint the face of God Almighty—the is, the everything—and being able to contemplate nothing but vapor and light. But then this artist finds himself painting a human face with deep eyes, with a long nose, with ears that might ache in the wind, with feet that might sting with blisters from the long walking. Jesus Christ is how God sees himself. Christ is the Icon of God.”
“The problem is that we do not know how to see…
The fact is that no one is ready to see Mary dance naked at the dawn of time. For us, dancing and nakedness segue quickly into the erotic, and the doors open to the stampeding dopamine hits, the snowballing fantasies of concupiscence and pornography. Which means that we are incapable of thinking of the Virgin dancing; we are incapable of thinking of her naked. We are stooped and narrow-sighted as Adam and Eve lurching out of the Garden. That afternoon in the artist's studio, I was light years from knowing that dancing and nakedness are, in fact, part of the Virgin. He made us naked; he loves us to dance, just as David danced before the tabernacle.
But holy things for the holy. We would hardly know what we were looking at if we saw a dancing Madonna, a naked Madonna. We couldn't begin to understand.”
“When, an avowed atheist, I stepped into that room containing the picture of Mary made out of excrement and cherubim made from pornographic cutouts, I gently fell to pieces. It could not have been that I minded the degradation of the Mother of God, because for me there was no such thing. It must have been that I was reeling at the sight of Womankind so mocked, so humiliated…This is womanhood beaten to a pulp of ugly incapacity.”
“Decades on, there are now a tide of young women (puzzled by what it is that makes them women who are, on the contrary, intent on becoming men. Like Reformation iconoclasts who gouged out the face of Mary in English churches, smashed her statues, and erased her presence from the core of religious de-votion, girls will let medics take scalpels to their breasts. Even washing their bodies will make some cry with disgust and despair. They cannot bear to see the form of their own curves; the texture repulses them. They will see Ofili's Madonna in elephant dung, the empty shrines in ancient churches, and, at some incalculable level, they will know what the world thinks of women…For we have long forgotten Wisdom dancing at the dawn of time.”
"My soul magnifies the Lord," Mary sang at the accomplishment of what she was made to be. It's clear to me now that in her whole and jubilant womanhood, she would never want to be separated from him. And for those who say Mary is sexless, I say: think of to whom she gives her sexuality and of what else she gives him (her everything); think of how she yielded in her extraordinary conception, of how she loves. In her, there is no division, no rupture, no forgetting of what she is, no self-hatred.
There is no falsity, no playacting, no confusion, no withholding from her Maker. She is as responsive as the sea to light and cloud, as generous as air that endlessly expands, as ecstatic as a bride and as faithful. I believe she loves her naked body and is at ease with her breasts and her rounded belly, because he does, and because he is.
Of course she knelt before him.
“For what mother, I ask de Beauvoir twenty years after that blizzard, does not kneel before her baby? What mother has not knelt before the crib and felt something like the wordless and surging adoration of prayer? A mother's love for her baby is over-whelming. It crescendos in waves. It comes like labor pains: just as she thinks that she can take no more, the intensity disperses, leaving her gasping. God knows that we can't hold the entirety of love (or pain) in one go. It would tear us to pieces. But mothers have a privileged glimpse of this infinite love that binds us so thoroughly to our children. When we kneel before our child, we are bowing at a glimpse of divine love that effortlessly holds everything.”
“It turned out that the pregnancy I had scrupulously avoided with pills and rubber for so many years wasn’t so easy to get…it refused to comply.”
“No one mentioned abortion…A child had dropped into her lap. Suddenly, this being dictated everything about her empty hands and arms, everything she would do.”
“She grieved with all of us in our eternal grief. She grieves even if we forget how to grieve. She grieves for Christ in his agony when we become nonchalant or forgetful. She prays for us all to be like her, vividly alive in our love and our sorrow for her son — whether we are the conquered or the conqueror, the good or the bad, the murdered or the murderer. Because in that final pietà as she holds her son’s body, she is the Mother of Mercy who holds Everything. And she holds us with him so we can enter his heart.”
“As we walk around them, this entwined mother and son, we see that the Virgin's hands say two things: one catches him, grasps him, possesses him—knows that, without her, he will fall from the knowable world. But the left hand gestures, What is this? It is this hand that speaks to God, like Esther's plea ("Help me, who am alone and have no helper but you"); like Job's lament ("Why is light given to one in misery?"); and like her own song ("My soul magnifies the Lord.."). The left hand says This—meaning, this is everything: all love, all sacrifice, all pain. All question and all answer.
Yes, her lap is wide; she can take anything: the world, the world's sorrow. Even—though at such cost—him. This scene is the interface of God's pain and the world's rage, the world's pain and God's rage, God's love and the world's need, the world's love and God choosing, heart-wrenchingly, to need. It is an intolerable sight cast in marble. It is the only sight.”
“She is the altar of sacrifice, the tabernacle of his being, the ears for his cries, the eyes for his wounds. The element of the Woman is essential…And she was watching me. I know now that she was walking with me. My daughter fell, picked herself up, and ran again, bouncing into a spring that was the most radiant I had ever seen. We were both hungry for discovery, for knowledge, and as my hand became distinct from her hand, and my eyes lifted from hers, we hurtled into changes that were making Mary smile, that I could never have dreamed.”
“His was a face that swallowed my attention whole. If I surrounded myself with those eyes, I wouldn't be able to walk a straight line to the kitchen. Kneeling before the tabernacle after Mass, I had the sensation of my face being pulled to that face, as though I were one of two lovers on the threshold of a kiss—that moment when flesh is millimeters from flesh, and the hairs of the skin, two auras of electricity, have engaged, and are drawing you in.
This is why I became Catholic, I told people who asked. I had—almost by accident in a little church one day—encountered this Presence: the Word made Flesh and ready to be consumed. When he came to me that day, every image and element of my life, all of its infinitesimal pixels, cohered into a whole before him and was suffused with his love; he who, when I became Catholic, would be physically, not just within grasp, but within me.
My Lord and my God.”
“Christ himself appeared in visions to Faustina, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Sister Mary of St. Peter. But Mary appeared, so often, to children: to this fourteen-year-old French girl at Lourdes who Mary taught to cross herself with feeling, with no trace of carelessness ("as one takes the hand of a child and guides it"); to shepherd children of seven, nine, and ten, to whom she—scandalously— showed a vision of hell; to a fourteen-year-old and eleven-year-old in the Alps before whom she wept, as this statue before me was said to have wept. (And, I thought as I stood before that bleeding Madonna: Mary's tears are as crucial as her joy. They express what we should always be feeling about Christ's Passion. "I wish I could always weep like that," a Desert Father said as he came out of ecstatic prayer in which he had seen Mary by the cross.) Essentially, Mary, who laughed at Lourdes and cried at La Salette, came to where these children worked and played. She spoke their language. She understands home, roots, and how important these are to us. She knows that we all sit by strange rivers and weep. We need familiarity. Her messages are still arriving, and there is never any shortage of people who claim that they see her or speak with her—at Garabandal, Medjugorje, Bavaria, Zeitoun, Seville, Laus. Our Lady, who meets us in our earthly exile, bleeds through the veil, through the centuries, around the globe, and back again.”
“It comes to me as I stand in prayer: the call has been answered. For while God swells with contentment at the response of any one of us, your answer, Mary, your yes, is the cry that he was waiting for from the beginning of all time. In all of creation, I realize now, there is no one like you. No one can answer his desperate calls the way that you do, daughter of Zion. The Son answers the Father as he hangs in his agony. But God is still crying. In the dark fields, in cities, Father, Son, and Spirit call for an answer from humanity. As a child, when I listened to the owl's cry at night, when I felt the loneliness of the vicar like the loneliness of the man-God stretched out in his Passion, I was listening, without knowing it, for your answering cry, the essential link between man and God. There is no purer response than yours. It is a song that allows all of us to sing.”
June 24, 2025
Ah, I do appreciate a good conversion story and I love seeing the reflection on how everything connected, but man, I hate art.
I have no patience for sitting in a gallery to reflect on what is in front of me, and that is everything Sally loves and how this is written. Unfortunately, I couldn't fully appreciate this perspective. Giving this 3 stars because I was out of my element and quite bored.
I have no patience for sitting in a gallery to reflect on what is in front of me, and that is everything Sally loves and how this is written. Unfortunately, I couldn't fully appreciate this perspective. Giving this 3 stars because I was out of my element and quite bored.
February 17, 2025
Sally was raised in an atheist household but was still exposed to paintings of Mary as a child.
These paintings of Mary fascinated Sally and led her on a quest in which she discovered Mary, Catholicism, and herself.
It is an intimate and beautifully written memoir. It is different and odd, but its difference and oddity I find comforting and compelling.
The feel of feminism in each word, the relatable journey of discovery and change. Unforgettable and moving, The Mary Pages is probably not what you would expect from a memoir, but it was unique with heartfelt writing.
These paintings of Mary fascinated Sally and led her on a quest in which she discovered Mary, Catholicism, and herself.
It is an intimate and beautifully written memoir. It is different and odd, but its difference and oddity I find comforting and compelling.
The feel of feminism in each word, the relatable journey of discovery and change. Unforgettable and moving, The Mary Pages is probably not what you would expect from a memoir, but it was unique with heartfelt writing.
December 28, 2025
Sally Read's prose is out of this world but I found myself a bit adrift among her long anecdotes, unsure sometimes why she spent so much time on particular chapters from her life. The book is loosely held together by her experiences with pictures of Mary, most of them pre-conversion, and while it is all stunningly written, some of the scenes felt more on topic than others. Sometimes Read hands us a narrative non-fiction interpretation of a painter's experience painting Mary, which is a fascinating but jarring tonal and topical shift, and sometimes she spends thirty pages describing a year of her life that seems to have little to do with either images or experiences of Mary.
As a Protestant who often finds herself defending Mary and wishing for a greater emphasis on her in my own tradition, I came away feeling less inspired by the role and person of Mary than I'd expected. Maybe that's a me problem, but the vague structure of the book is also a hindrance to those on the outside of Catholicism. Still, Read is a poet, and this is worth reading just to savor her sentences.
As a Protestant who often finds herself defending Mary and wishing for a greater emphasis on her in my own tradition, I came away feeling less inspired by the role and person of Mary than I'd expected. Maybe that's a me problem, but the vague structure of the book is also a hindrance to those on the outside of Catholicism. Still, Read is a poet, and this is worth reading just to savor her sentences.
August 15, 2025
So much more interesting and beautiful than I expected. Finished it very quickly.
July 22, 2025
I’m sorry. I know “everybody” loved this book. I did not. I had to force myself to complete the reading so I could participate in the book discussion. I could not identify in any way with the author at the beginning. And while I am happy that she ends up having a nice relationship with Our Blessed Mother, the journey was way too tedious from Atheist to Convert.
Granted, the writing is poetic.
Granted, the writing is poetic.
February 17, 2025
The Mary Pages is a cerebral and abstract account of one woman’s experience with Mary. Nevertheless, it is a story of a lost lamb coming home to the Son and how Mary met her on that journey. Sally shares her experiences in a real and raw manner, inviting the reader to experience her highs and lows with her. It is an insightful autobiography of how she was drawn to Mary and her journey of embracing her Catholic faith. While I may not have connected with Sally in the telling, I can always appreciate someone’s story.
I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley and all opinions expressed are solely my own, freely given.
I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley and all opinions expressed are solely my own, freely given.
December 23, 2025
Really not what you’d expect. Much more raw and honest.
Sort of a series of essays or vignettes about chapters in her life and how Mary was working in them unbeknownst to her.
Fascinating, page turning stories. I found the characters, particularly the “real” ones from Sally’s life to be vivid.
The historical fiction blended throughout was a weak point for me. Book overall lacked cohesion. Functioned more properly as a series of essays or vignettes. I found it odd that she completely neglected the actual period of her conversion and the more proximate catalysts.
Beautiful poetic writing.
A solid 4 stars.
Sort of a series of essays or vignettes about chapters in her life and how Mary was working in them unbeknownst to her.
Fascinating, page turning stories. I found the characters, particularly the “real” ones from Sally’s life to be vivid.
The historical fiction blended throughout was a weak point for me. Book overall lacked cohesion. Functioned more properly as a series of essays or vignettes. I found it odd that she completely neglected the actual period of her conversion and the more proximate catalysts.
Beautiful poetic writing.
A solid 4 stars.
April 9, 2025
I did NOT read this on Kindle but have a hardback copy from Word on Fire Press. This is the third book I have read by Sally Read, and she just keeps getting better and better. This book is a beautiful "literary memoir" that brings us along on her journey from atheism to a deep love of our Blessed Mother and the Catholic Faith. Sally uses the various images of Mary throughout the ages, and how Mary was always beckoning her to "Do whatever He tells you". She is an award-winning poet, and her writing is stunning. Thank you, Sally Read, for an intelligent and moving memoir.
January 25, 2025
Simply stunning. Read writes memoir like the award-winning poet she is and in the process takes the reader on a sensual journey, feminist in the best sense of the word. She reflects with sensitivity on her atheist beginnings, her varied relationships with men, her deep friendship with a lesbian couple and her riveting encounter with Christ. Linked with reflections on great Marian paintings at every twist in the plot, it is an unforgettable journey of passion, beauty and grace.
February 19, 2025
Sally Read's The Mary Pages is a stunning blend of memoir and literary flourishes that resonates deeply. Her poetic leanings bring each reflection to life, whether recounting her nursing days or the profound encounters with those in her life. The book is a meditative journey, full of epiphanies and ecstasies, mirroring Mary's growing significance in Read's life. The Mary Pages is a must-read for those seeking beauty and depth in spiritual literature. Five stars!
December 4, 2024
Intimate memoir
I loved the intimate treatment of Sally Read's journey from angry atheism to loving gratitude to Mary the mother of Jesus. It's a difficult journey that I appreciate and have experienced.
I loved the intimate treatment of Sally Read's journey from angry atheism to loving gratitude to Mary the mother of Jesus. It's a difficult journey that I appreciate and have experienced.
November 23, 2024
The Mary Pages is gorgeous, inspiring and deeply moving. This is a book I will return to again and again.
February 1, 2025
Only audio available from library. I think I would have liked it better as a regular book so I could skim parts I found less interesting.
April 13, 2025
Read for book club. Interesting, but took awhile to get there.
September 28, 2025
Gratitude brings a soul closer to God.
The beginning of this book I found quite slow, but the ending is beautiful and makes the journey through the book worth it.
The beginning of this book I found quite slow, but the ending is beautiful and makes the journey through the book worth it.
Read
October 30, 2025I honestly don't know how to rate this book. it was good, definitely worth the read but it wasn't consistent throughout. It felt like each chapter was its own mini book.
January 4, 2026
DNF - valuable, but it
too artsy for me. helped to read the Goodreads review with all the excerpts.
too artsy for me. helped to read the Goodreads review with all the excerpts.
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