Review: "Dropping the Habit" by Marion Dante

Dropping the Habit by Marion Dante
First published 2011
★★★

When Dante was fourteen, she pledged to become a nun—and become a nun she did. Her family had emigrated from Ireland to England, and at the time (the late 1950s) it was not unheard of for a child to make the decision to go into the church...so Dante's schooling switched to something partly academic but partly vocational. And she was happy, for a while.

Most of the book is split between two periods of time: First, Dante's younger life leading up to her early years in the convent, and second, the time she spent deciding whether to leave the life she'd spent decades in, and what happened after she left. Some of the content about her early years is heartbreaking—the idea that someone who was conceived out of wedlock might be barred from religious life despite having no control over that! The idea that being conceived out of wedlock is something to be ashamed of!

I'm always curious about people's experiences with religious life—religion in general is interesting, but of course most people, even if observant, don't dedicate themselves to a religious order. Dante's order (the Salesians) emphasized education and community work, so she was by no means cloistered, but eventually she realized it wasn't enough, or it wasn't enough anymore, or there was still so much else she wanted out of her life.

There's quite a lot of back and forth about Dante deciding whether or not to stay—again, by the time she left, it had been decades; she was no longer a young woman, and not all avenues for the future (e.g., having biological children) were still open to her. I would have liked a better understanding of how her disenchantment with being a nun came about; we get quite a lot about how miserable she was over making the decision and the dread she felt at the idea of going back, but I never quite figured out when that disenchantment started or what things looked like between becoming a nun and starting the ball rolling on leaving.

Not quite what I was hoping for, but I hope it was cathartic for Dante to write.