Between the Light and Me is now available for preorder!

“Kilcup vividly depicts the experience of vacillating between self-destruction and joy, relapse and recovery. Especially powerful is her framing of recovery as both a death and renewal . . . A stirring testament to redemption, faith, and rebirth.”
―Publishers Weekly

“Kathleen Kilcup has written a searching and profound memoir, written in beautiful prose and packed with deep spiritual insight.”
―Phil Klay, president of PEN America and author of the National Book Award–winning story collection Redeployment

“This is a propulsive, harrowing, and ultimately ennobling book. Kathleen Kilcup has been to the abyss and back, and her writing shines with the grace of one who knows she’s been saved. ‘God’s truth is life,’ wrote Patrick Kavanagh, ‘even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.’ Kilcup has suffered some of those shapes. The miracle―and it does seem that―is that she has emerged with God’s other, higher kind of fire.” ‍ ‍
―Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss

“At once an orison and an odyssey, Between the Light and Me captures the edges of our fallen world with striking clarity. Kathleen Kilcup establishes herself here as a top-end writer, seeking and wise, and her meditations on faith, recovery, and military service deserve wide readership.” 
— ‍Matt Gallagher, author of Daybreak

“Here’s a life that refuses to lie down in defeat―a life of drama, complexity, and challenge. Between the Light and Me is not only exceedingly intelligent, it is spiritually moving. Reading it, you will be challenged and grateful, giving glory to God.”
— †Luci Shaw, author of Reversing Entropy 

“As its subtitle suggests, Between the Light and Me traces the porous boundary between beauty and violence in our messy, blessed human experience. Kilcup’s memoir does not flinch from a candid record and does not dishonor the difficult details of her disoriented and at times self-destructive story by prettying them up, but rather patiently sits with the hard episodes out of a manifest faith that they, too, are beautiful, though that designation may require a divine reevaluation of what constitutes beauty. The result is a narrative in which holiness settles into the mundane, the vulgar (in both senses of those terms)―which is indeed the very principle of the sacramental, and specifically of the eucharistic. Kilcup’s brave telling argues that life―real, unperfect life―is not a shame that holiness must fast from but rather food for the journey.”
— Kimberly Johnson, author of Fatal and Uncommon Prayer