Stand-up comedian Deborah Kimmett, with her trademark sass, establishes the book’s central tension in chapter 1, “Losing My Faith,” in which the young Kimmett lies drunk in bed, refusing to get up for Mass, when her mother opens her bedroom door and yells, “You can’t give up Catholicism. You were born a Catholic, and you’ll die a Catholic.”
“There was a curse there,” Kimmett wrote. Window Shopping for God: A Comedian’s Search for Meaning“For the next 30 years, I’m going to try to escape that curse because I’m not going to quit the religion. Catholicism is like the Hotel California; you can check out, but you can never leave.”
Like Forrest Gump, Kimmett travels through the decades in her book, encountering nearly every major phenomenon and health crisis of the late 20th century: the end of Christendom, sexual liberation, the misogyny of women entering the nontraditional workforce, gig work, mental illness, divorce, cancer, AIDS, diet culture, alcoholism. Through it all, she intermittently keeps a pulse on post-1960s Toronto spiritual trends, from self-help books to transcendental meditation, gratitude journals, and therapy. Too much therapy.
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For the reader, Kimmett’s spiritual journey feels less like an afternoon of window shopping and more like sailing a pirate ship through rough seas as waves of social issues wash over the boat and the kraken of trendy spirituality slithers around the hull. Kimmett is armed with a cutlass of sharp wit and little else. Like the rest of us, she is simply trying to survive financially and spiritually and find meaning in life. With keen observation and humor, she shows us that these are truly strange times, and how difficult it can be to find a spiritual practice that can encompass all of this.
A longtime member of comedy troupe Second City and CBC Radio’s The Debaters, she’s a fast-talking, witty talker. Many paragraphs end with a joke, but there’s enough depth to balance the laughs with a laugh. In between laughs, Kimmett reveals that she listens and observes the wisdom shared by others: family, therapists, strangers. When a street preacher tattooed the word “repent” on the back of her head, she took the message to heart and tried to make amends for the mistakes of her childhood.
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As the book nears its end, I found myself perplexed by Kimmet’s continued jumping from place to place with no resolution in sight. Her emphasis on self-acceptance and relationships doesn’t entirely replace the communal, familial Catholic faith she left behind. She continues her spiritual quest alone, without a group of companions to share her journey.
Kimmett’s most compelling psychological description is of flow, what it feels like to be onstage as a comedian: “When it worked, I was a goddess,” she writes. “Making people laugh was an elixir like no other.” These are ecstatic moments I envy.
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This story first Broadview‘It will be published in the June 2024 issue under the title “The Sassy Seeker.”
Pieta Woolley Author living in Powell River, British Columbia
I hope you find this Broadview Fascinating article.
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