*FYI -The numbers you see hyperlinked as you read down are Lara’s footnotes which appear at the end of the post.
THE TIME I SAW BORAT AND FIGURED OUT MY BOOK, WHICH IS NOT R RATED SO PLEASE DON’T FREAK OUT
Here’s the truth, peeps: DONUT DAYS did not come easily to me.
I knew I wanted to write a novel based on the experiences I had in the evangelical church when I was a teenager (and into my early 20s) because, seriously, you would not believe the stuff that went down in the megachurch[1] I attended.
For starters, the pastor drove a Mercedes and then paid his employees, like, minimum wage. Then, his wife had loads of plastic surgery[2] but he still divorced her. Which, in a megachurch, is a huge no-no. Then … well, okay, I guess I’m getting ahead of myself here. The point is, I had a lot of fodder for a novel. And I really wanted to pen a protagonist who saw the cracks and flaws in the church’s façade and called it like she saw it[3].
But every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t make it happen. I got words to happen, sure, and I strung them together in sentences, one right after the other. I even completed books and sent them off to agents[4]. Needless to say, I did not get multiple, competing six-figure offers.
What I did get what frustrated. What was wrong? Why couldn’t I write something that engaged people? I mean, even my husband (who was my fiancé at the time and really wanted to make it to the altar, not to mention other, a-hem, places) could slog through it and pretend he liked it. And if he couldn’t do it, no way anyone else was going to. But what was the problem?
Make it real, my fiancé (how husband) told me.
It is real, I insisted.
Except it wasn’t. It was like a shiny, plastic version of the gritty, complicated world I had known. It was like I was writing it through a filter. It was like I was scared to bring it real[5].
And then, I saw Borat. The movie (versus a live version of Borat as played by Sacha Baron Cohen).
There’s this scene in the movie where Borat goes to an evangelical church and pretends to get saved. He pretends to start speaking in tongues, to fall down, to roll on the carpet[6], to believe everything that’s being spouted at him.
It is hilarious. I laughed until I cried.
Until something else happened.
When the antics died down, people in the church started really reaching out to Borat. Believing he was a down-on-his luck guy who needed a hand, they prayed for him. They took up an offering for him. They fed him. They helped him.
And that took it from flat-out hilarious to flat-out complicated. I blinked. I face-palmed. I woke up.
Borat showed me—like nothing else had—how writing about the church couldn’t be black or white. It had to be grey and complicated. And how, at its heart, the book couldn’t really be about church. It had to be about people who were searching for answers and sometimes finding them, sometimes not; sometimes succeeding at making the world a better place, sometimes failing.
I had my epiphany. I knew what to do. I went home and immediately started rewriting the book. After a few months, I sent it to an agent who accepted it. The manuscript sold in a matter of weeks[7].
I’d figured out what I wanted to say, and how to take off the filter that was preventing me from being truly honest about what I’d experienced.
But DONUT DAYS still walks a fine line. For those of you who want to throw an ACLU petition at me right about now, please let me emphasize that DONUT DAYS is not a book about church. Not really. It’s more about people thoughtfully questioning what they believe, and why. And for those Christians who want to be mad at me because the book isn’t “Christian” enough, whatever that means, please let me emphasize that I believe in God, and I believe in the church, but I wrote DONUT DAYS because I also believe that it’s okay to question absolute power, and that no pastor is infallible.
In general[8], my great hope is that DONUT DAYS helps people remember that even if people suck, God doesn’t have to.
And I learned it all via the 21st century version of an after-school special. I learned it by watching Borat.
[1] Picture the church, synagogue or mosque where you grew up going. Now add 5,000 square feet, a bunch of purple carpet, a full band and deafness-issuing speakers, Thomas Kinkade paintings (puke), a fountain in the foyer that’s bigger than the one at the mall, and about 4,000 people. That, my friends, is a megachurch.
[2] Ironic much? Because the Bible says (and she preached it) that we’re perfect in God’s sight. But apparently not perfect enough.
[3] Instead of, say, closing her eyes and saying “praise Jesus” over and over.
[4] My apologies to the good agents who were saddled with this dribble. You know who you are.
[5] Oprah moment: I was scared to bring it real.
[6] I wish I had the space to explain what all this is but I don’t. If you want to know, please watch Borat or late-night Christian television.
[7] In publishing, where everything moves more slowly than an Ent debating whether or not to attack Mordor, this is really, really fast.
[8] Cue John Hughes movie music, God rest his awesome soul.
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