Sarah Perry: ‘For much of my life, I loved God. The echo of that never fades’ | Sarah Perry | The Guardian

‘Thomas, I try and try to be good but I don’t know how. I want to be free to think my own thoughts about what is good, and what is bad – sometimes I wonder what it would be like to wake up on a Sunday morning and have it be just another day – to wear make-up, and jeans, and go to parties, and not think every minute that I’ve made God angry, or been

It suited her few friends to imagine she’d been subject to a thousand physical and spiritual abuses, and been thrown out of chapel doors that then were bolted against her. It was difficult to explain that her father and her aunt received her absence with sorrow tempered by their trust in the will of God. She would return to Bethesda, or she wouldn’

Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you? That would be easy! My life would have been a happier one! But all these years there have been two fires in me and neither puts the other out!

Occasionally she would seem to become the sole focus of his interest, and he’d interrogate her with the attention of a student making notes: why did she have to wear a hat on Sundays? Why did she never wear jeans? Why didn’t she have a television? Was it true she’d never been to the cinema? When she answered, she said either it was because her fath