Between the Light and Me

“This is a propulsive, harrowing, and ultimately ennobling book. Kathleen Kilcup has been to the abyss and back, and her writing shines with the grace of one who knows she’s been saved. ‘God’s truth is life, ’ wrote Patrick Kavanagh, ‘even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.’ Kilcup has suffered some of those shapes. The miracle–and it does seem that–is that she has emerged with God’s other, higher kind of fire.”
–Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss

“Kilcup’s debut defies easy characterization: It’s a coming-of-age chronicle, a military memoir, a story of addiction, and a spiritual quest. Poetry and God are Kilcup’s two most constant companions on her winding journey to sobriety and a kind of personal peace accord. As I read, troubling news reports clamored for my attention and anger. And yet Kilcup held me rapt and filled my heart with compassion for all on similar journeys.”
–Kayla Williams, author of Love My Rifle More Than You

“At once an orison and an odyssey, Between the Light and Me captures the edges of our fallen world with striking clarity. Kathleen Kilcup establishes herself here as a top-end writer, seeking and wise, and her meditations on faith, recovery, and military service deserve wide readership.”
–Matt Gallagher, author of Daybreak

“This memoir is both devastating and gorgeous. Kilcup tells an unflinching story of longing, both for God and for human connection, and the human frailty–what the author calls sin–that gets in the way. I savored every sentence, delighted in every page, and readers will too.”
–Joanna Eleftheriou, author of This Way Back

“Here’s a life that refuses to lie down in defeat–a life of drama, complexity, and challenge. Between the Light and Me is not only exceedingly intelligent, it is spiritually moving. Reading it, you will be challenged and grateful, giving glory to God.”
–+Luci Shaw, author of Reversing Entropy

“Recalling the loose and desperate writing group that formed among her military peers while she was serving in the army, Kathleen Kilcup writes, ‘They wrote about limbs blown from bodies; I wrote about God. And somehow we knew we were all writing about the same thing.’ As its subtitle suggests, Between the Light and Me traces the porous boundary between beauty and violence in our messy, blessed human experience. Kilcup’s memoir does not flinch from a candid record and does not dishonor the difficult details of her disoriented and at times self-destructive story by prettying them up, but rather patiently sits with the hard episodes out of a manifest faith that they, too, are beautiful, though that designation may require a divine reevaluation of what constitutes beauty. The result is a narrative in which holiness settles into the mundane, the vulgar (in both senses of those terms)–which is indeed the very principle of the sacramental, and specifically of the eucharistic. Kilcup’s brave telling argues that life–real, unperfect life–is not a shame that holiness must fast from but rather food for the journey.”
–Kimberly Johnson, author of Fatal and Uncommon Prayer

Kathleen Kilcup spent five years serving in the US Army as a Russian linguist. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and an MA in religion and arts from Yale. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, Image, Salon, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She writes The Mess on Substack and lives with her family in Oklahoma City.

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