Review: "Memoirs of an Ex-Nun" by Josephine Latorilla

Memoirs of an Ex-Nun by Josephine Latorilla
Published September 2009
★★

Latorilla entered a convent in 1983, flying from her home in the Philippines to Italy to start her journey. In 1993, having reached the sixth year of her temporary vows (nuns typically take a series of steps, including temporary vows, before their final and permanent vows), she exited the religious life and began a layperson's life.

I love this line: I would always tell myself that as long as there are different flowers in the garden so there are different forms of life, and it is a grace to appreciate the others who are not and who must not be the same as me. (loc. 220)

But on the whole I found the book to be a bit hard to follow. Part of this may be a language barrier; English is not Latorilla's first language, and since finishing her time as a nun she has lived in places where English is not the first language spoken. No criticism there, of course! I read the book partly because I was curious about a nun's experience somewhere other than the US or UK, though, and even after reading I'm not sure whether she did the initial steps of her novitiate in Italy or in the Philippines (and if the former, as I suspect, what the circumstances surrounding that were). I'm left wondering whether there was some broader call for would-be nuns from abroad to fill slots in Italy, or something else; at least some of her fellow initiates were also from the Philippines, and I'd have loved to hear a little about them and how they found integration into Italian religious life.

Midway through the book, Latorilla describes leaving the order, again with very little explanation—only that she is finding it harder to obey. It's not clear whether that's something she'd struggled with for, say, eight of the ten years she'd been a nun, or for two; it's not clear what that struggle meant to her, only that it was enough that she left. So I can't really recommend the book (just too unclear), but I bet Latorilla has interesting stories to tell in person.