Theology and jokes …

… Special Effects —  bookforum.com / current issue. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The essay collection comprises an ersatz autobiography of sorts to compete with Spark’s own incomplete reckoning, Curriculum Vitae. It ranges over Spark’s appreciations of predecessors (Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson might be expected, but not T. S. Eliot, Georges Simenon, or the poet laureate John Masefield, on whom she wrote a book-length study); her youthful reading habits and memories of Edinburgh, where she grew up, the daughter of a lapsed Jew and a Protestant mother; and her unorthodox approach to Catholicism, to which she converted in the mid-1950s (a number of the essays deal with Cardinal Newman, a virtual literary saint to her) and which left an indelible mark on her fiction.