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Novelist, memoirist, columnist for the online magazine Salon, and author of an idiosyncratic and popular how-to-write book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott will admit with only the slightest embarrassment that she is a born-again Christian. As she explains in her new book, Traveling Mercies,

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned me and then held me while I grew. Each prepared for me the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear. When I look back at some of these early resting places—the boisterous home of Catholics, the soft armchair of the Christian Science mom, adoption by ardent Jews—I can see how flimsy and indirect a path they make. Yet each step brought me closer to the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today.

There is much in my own Christian walk that I recognize in Traveling Mercies—as when Lamott finds herself on a plane sitting next to a right-wing home-schooler who recognizes her for what she is: a fellow Christian, perhaps, but one who "will be on the same curling team in heaven as Tom Hayden and Vanessa Redgrave."

But the part of Lamott's tale that made me feel I was reading my own autobiography was the lily-pad journey to Christ. I have never identified with those archetypal conversion narratives where, in one sudden moment, a Heart Is Warmed and a Life Changed, the convert receiving Christ with glee and maybe a whispered, "What took you so long?" In my case, it was Jesus who wondered what had taken me so long when I finally decided to stop fighting against him and say, with Anne Lamott, "F___ it: I quit. … You can come in." (Wait a minute, some readers will protest. Does the Hound of Heaven really pursue people who talk like that? Are there no standards? You'll have to take that up with him.)

Anne Lamott is hardly alone in writing about a curious path to God. Indeed, there is now a flourishing subset of the memoir genre: Quirky Routes to Faith. Kathleen Norris—who, if I read the introduction to Amazing Grace correctly, has finally admitted that she is, in the words of Lamott, not just Christian-ish, but a Christian—reconfigured her struggling-poet career by spinning out no fewer than three books about her midwestern, Benedictine journey to faith.

Christians don't have the market cornered. In With Roots in Heaven, Tirzah Firestone relates how an Orthodox Jewish childhood, a college-aged backpack across Europe, the suicide of her Buddhist older brother, one remarkable tea-leaf reading, a stint at an apocalyptic commune in Minnesota, meditation—and an affair—with a man named Truelove, extensive training in alternative medicine in Boulder, and marriage to a Christian minister led to her ordination as a rabbi in the fledgling Jewish Renewal movement (a very wonderful Jewish fellowship centered in Germantown, Pennsylvania; I know—I was quite involved for a while myself).

Firestone may have Lamott beat in the quirkiness category, but if you only have the patience for one memoir, I'd stick with Traveling Mercies. Many of the 25 essays collected here first appeared online, at salonmagazine.com (although for the book version, Lamott has unfortunately edited out some of her best Salon lines, including her declaration that her jazz-listening, Scotch-swilling, New Yorker-reading friends would rather believe she had become close personal friends with Strom Thurmond than with Jesus, since at least Strom, sadly, isn't a figment of anyone's imagination).

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2