Unorthodox, yes

You could say that Lauren Winner has had quite a season. The paperback rights to her religious memoir “Girl Meets God” have just fetched $100,000 -- a sum nearly unheard of for an unknown author or a religion book, much less both. Winner’s book has been named on best spiritual and religion book lists from Library Journal and USA Today and lauded in the press. But the sort of transformation that literary acclaim can bring may hardly feel transcendent to this 27-year-old daughter of a Southern Baptist mother and a Reform Jewish father. She’s used to more profound change than this. Over less than a decade, Winner converted to Orthodox Judaism in college, only to find through a few years of soul-searching and study that Christianity was her calling, a process explored in her book.

Religion, right now especially, is such a central issue globally as well as personally. Do you think your book is a step toward opening a more intimate and personalized discussion about religion?

I hope so. I do very much have an interest in -- for lack of a better phrase, and I really hate this phrase -- a Jewish-Christian dialogue. Within the church, there’s such a misunderstanding of Judaism, a failure to acknowledge the violence done to Jews in the name of the church for the past 200 years. And I will be gratified if this book can connect people.

You’re Episcopalian now, yet you also refer to yourself as an evangelical Christian. Is your memoir a form of evangelizing?

Yeah, I guess I would say I have some broadly skewed evangelical impulse. Reading spiritual memoirs was important for me in those several years when I was becoming interested in Christianity. So it’s not that I wrote this book hoping to convert the masses, but I do think that there are plenty of people who will want to read someone’s story and then choose to enter into it or not.

In your book, you write frankly about dating, personal insecurity and loneliness, struggles that some people might see as issues that are deeply compelling, but outside the realm of traditional spiritual writing. Do you think this way of relating to religion is a better way to discuss it among your generation? Has it generated some resistance?

I do think there is to some extent something generation-specific about it. Insofar as I can tell, the Christian response has been that many people find it refreshing, but of course there’s a split. In the reader responses on Amazon -- which, yes, I check daily -- one guy says quite pointedly that I’m not at all a classic evangelical because of all that. Plenty of individuals may think I’m pushing the envelope too much, but as far as the reviews have gone, no, it seems like a well-received way to talk about what I’m talking about. Postmodernism has trickled into the church -- people are becoming aware that we are all people inhabiting stories, and of course there’s quite a precedent behind that. I mean, Jesus talked in parables. It’s not exactly new.

Did writing this book feel like a risk?

Sure. I realized as I was writing it the spiritual cost of claiming that I live a particular way. I was publicly setting standards for my life in a way that’s spiritually good. I’m holding myself accountable in a way. And of course I’m aware that for the rest of my life every guy I go on a second or third date with will read this book and get a snapshot of someone separate from me -- it’s a literary construct, and I’ve changed even since I wrote it.

-- Lauren Sandler