Author Sara Peters puts her therapist training to work in Mother of God

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Sara Peters isn’t interested in creating a character “whom the reader can snuggle up with,” she says, jovially quoting short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg one recent afternoon in Toronto. Dismissing the cozy, the warming and the pacific, Peters instead pursues material that “abrades,” she tells me.

Her new novel, Mother of God, is guided by an intense fidelity to her characters’ visceral yearnings and moral trials, and the generative friction produced between them all.

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It is her third book after a poetry collection, 1996 (2013) and a slim experimental novel, I Become a Delight to My Enemies (2019), and it came out of wanting to have “a less frozen, less contorted relationship with writing.”

Where I Become a Delight to My Enemies takes a choral approach, Mother of God showcases Peters’s ultrarefined poetic sensibility within a more constant first-person narrative, introducing us to Marlene and the people closest to her: her mother, Darlene; de facto stepfather, Ed; childhood best friend, Ruth; and Ruth’s brother Francis. Like much of Peters’s storytelling, it shifts fluently between now and then and is endowed with an identity-blurring root system connecting characters, contexts and environments.

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“Certain themes have remained consistent in Sara’s writing – desire, obsession and abjection, in all their mess and beauty,” British poet Emily Berry says in an e-mail. “In Mother of God, these have become even deeper excavations. Now when you’re reading Sara’s work there’s no room to breathe – in a good way.”

Marlene is a registered nurse turned professional, if doubtful, psychic wound healer. Dumped in an e-mail by her girlfriend of 10 years, she is pleased to receive an enigmatic summons from her estranged mother. Stopping at motels and meeting with exorcism-seeking clients on Zoom, Marlene drives from Vancouver to Blackwood, N.S. – a wild and cloistered little ecosystem, seeded with her formative wounds and deepest loves (the overlap is significant). Darlene’s house is a stone’s throw from the shoreline, “where the waves encroached like barbed wire.”

Mother of God mines the space between the known world and the hidden one, creating a family myth filled with Catholic cosmology, psychological insight and an almost forensic examination of natural and artificial environments. Most poignantly, the novel is about the reverberative effects of childhood sexual abuse, which Peters says was crucial for her to write about “because it is everywhere, and so common.”

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She speaks quietly and decisively during our conversation, thinking about questions for a long time before replying. Several times we return to the subject of abrasion – emotional and linguistic – which entails a level of sensitivity that Peters, as a writer and psychotherapist, is closely attuned to.

How did she approach the delicate subject of childhood sexual abuse in a way that respects the pain and shame-filled privacy of its realities? It helps that Peters, who splits her time between Toronto and Cape Breton, N.S., works intimately with people who have experienced many forms of trauma and abuse.

“I’m not at all a compartmentalized person, emotionally or intellectually,” she tells me. “There aren’t certain thoughts, images or memories dwelling in a separate chamber of my mind – fortunately or unfortunately.”

Peters identifies as non-binary, and Mother of God also delicately unpacks the expectations and treacheries of gender roles, particularly within the family. So much of Marlene’s story feels queasily familiar. At times it is reminiscent of Andrea Skinner’s account of her mother Alice Munro’s craven disregard of her own sexual abuse, and I ask what Peters made of those revelations.

“It didn’t feel remotely surprising to me that Munro could contain such depths of empathy and still simultaneously contain a monstrous narcissism,” she says. “Their whole lives, I think that women and femme people are instructed implicitly and explicitly on how to figure out narratives that exonerate men.”

“Emotions make sense to Sara – even seemingly incomprehensible, or depraved, or inconsequential, or regrettable ones,” writes Peters’s friend Anastasia Jones in an e-mail to me. “As a result, Sara can ingest and express people’s experiences with astounding clarity.”

Throughout Mother of God’s three sections, Marlene’s wound-healing sessions feel strikingly similar to therapy. Peters tells me she was interested in portraying a profession that was close to her own but without the strictures, regulations and expectations “that are part of my job for very good reasons.”

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But she also has an interest in clairvoyance and mediums. “How many believe themselves to be frauds but still feel comfortable exploiting the vulnerabilities and sorrow of their clients?”

Darlene, Peters writes, “was a woman who unabashedly hated women, except for the Virgin.” The Virgin Mary is a spectral presence in Mother of God and a domestic proxy for Darlene (there is a massive plaster statue of the Virgin in the kitchen), who has left signs of herself upon Marlene’s arrival but is otherwise nowhere to be seen.

“Growing up in a very Catholic context, the Virgin Mary was this exquisite paradox ... a blazing cliché of femininity, innocence, chastity, supplication, nurturing and, of course, self-sacrifice,” Peters says.

Her writing may be “fruitcake-level dense,” as Jones puts it, burrowing into the most tender and festering corners of the human psyche. But Peters describes the external world with equal decadence, from the tall grasses of Blackwood to the blanket that covers Darlene’s bed, “made of some fugitive polyester blend as soft as rabbits.”

In Mother of God’s compassionate, penetrating exploration of Marlene’s home reckoning, Peters may not create characters to snuggle up with. But she ensures that they are, finally, seen.