“The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” wrote Oscar Wilde, a sentiment that underscores PEN/Hemingway Award-winner **Jennifer Haigh’**s ripped-from-the-headlines fourth novel, Faith, which is, at its purest and simplest level, the story of a beloved Boston priest who is accused of the unspeakable (and, by now, all-too-familiar) offense. Told from the gimlet-eyed point of view of his sister, Sheila, a woman long estranged from their devout Irish Catholic clan, this moral mystery story pursues the truth behind the accusations—and, unwittingly, opens a walk-in closetful of family skeletons. With thematic echoes of **John Patrick Shanley’**s Doubt and the atmospheric tension of a Dennis Lehane thriller, Haigh’s exploration of the private aftershocks that follow a public scandal feels unusually resonant and humane. Vogue caught up with Haigh via e-mail.
What’s so compelling about Faith is its emphasis on Art’s family—his mother believes her son is beyond reproach, while his younger brother is intent on securing clear proof of either guilt or innocence. Sheila is far more ambivalent—she’s a nonbeliever who has always struggled to understand her brother’s devotion, and yet she’s the only one who is able to see the truth of his character in its complexity. How did you find Sheila’s voice?
I found the voice by accident. I’d never written a novel in the first person. I considered it too limiting, since it’s rare for a single character to know all the interesting parts of a story. But when I read about priests suspected of abusing children, I was struck by the difficulty of proving or disproving such charges. There are rarely any witnesses. Sometimes, the only people who know the truth of the story are the priest and the child, and often neither will talk about it. The rest of us can only speculate about what went on behind closed doors. That’s exactly what Sheila does in Faith. The novel is really her attempt to arrive at the truth, not merely the facts but the reasons behind them. She tries to reconstruct exactly what her brother thought and felt at critical moments, not merely what he said and did.
The crimes that rocked the Boston Archdiocese in 2002 were explored at great length in the press. What was your experience of that time, and what led you to write a novel about an accused priest?
Like many people, I was stunned. I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools, and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. It’s no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood, and it was impossible to square those tender memories with the grotesque things that had happened in Boston—and, as later became clear, in Catholic dioceses across the country. Faith was my attempt to explain the inexplicable, to understand what I couldn’t make sense of in any other way.
What authors have been most influential to your writing?
William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They’re very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what’s possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
