The Dearly Beloved: A Novel - Hardcover

I grew up in New York City's Greenwich Village and London's South Kensington. As a child I read books, especially biography and historical fiction. Every Friday night, my parents and I spent the evening at the Brentano's bookstore on 8th Street and University Place choosing our books for the weekend. After reading those books in two days, I spent every Monday afternoon in my school's library finding new books, always dismayed that I could only check out two at a time.
 
I was raised attending The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, which was led by two dignified and august co-pastors. My favorite part of Sunday School was the soft plastic Noah's Ark that was missing the second giraffe. My favorite church activities were the square dance and the Halloween party, but I also took tap dancing and played shuffle board in the church basement. For several months in 1981, my parents and I lived in the sexton's apartment on the fifth floor of the church building, and for several years we managed to survive our church friends' annual whitewater canoe trip on the waterways above Lake George.
 
I began this book 15 years ago, in the summer of 2004. I was reading my way through Laurie Colwin's books, most of which are about family, marriage, and parenthood. I finished Happy all the Time, which tells the story of two couples through their courtships and early wedded lives. As soon as I closed the book I thought, "I could write a book like that," and Lily Barrett entered my mind's eye fully formed, elegant, guarded, and suspicious. Charles, James, and Nan followed quickly after, and I based their lives in the church I had known as a child. 

I'm often asked why I wrote about ministers, and the answer is fairly simple: because ministers think deeply about life. But, really, the book is about the kind of community in which I grew up: a community of friends committed to one another's wellbeing, interested in each other's lives, joyously celebrating the good times and supporting each other through the bad--a community of people searching for the meaning of life in their relationships with one another.

Cara Wall is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Stanford University. While at Iowa, Cara taught fiction writing in the undergraduate creative writing department as well as at the Iowa Young Writer's Studio in her capacity of founder and inaugural director. She went on to teach middle school English and history and has been published by Glamour, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in New York City with her family and The Dearly Beloved is her first novel.