I had the pleasure of talking with Anne once via email around the time she had written her first Christian novels. She was struggling with how to manage the swaths of 'church-people' who were telling her she needed to pull all of her old work off the shelves now that she was a Christian.

Among other comments, I shared with her a quote by C.S. Lewis which she hadn't heard before which read: "We read to know we are not alone." She seemed most taken by that quote and replied by saying that she thinks that she writes emails so that she wouldn't be alone.

In the end, her faith seemed more tied to the 'mystery' of the Catholic church than to Christ himself, but who am I to say? Like many, she couldn't rationalize the church's later rejection of her son for being gay, so she left it. Let's just hope that somehow she still found the truth of Jesus through all the clouds and smoke that the institutional church put in her way.