The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Synopsis[edit]

The book begins with Armstrong's early life experience as a nun in an authoritarian convent; she talks about the problems she encountered there, and recounts the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, and finally her leaving the convent.^[1][2] Armstrong then recounts her time at the University of Oxford, which was also going through a period of great institutional change, where, according to one review, she "traded one kind of monasticism for another."^[1] As a student in Oxford she earned a BA and MA, but failed to achieve a doctorate; she then got a job teaching in London, but was let go- all the while dealing with serious health problems, and even attempts suicide.^[3] Finally she is given an opportunity to write a documentary about early Christianity, which sets her on a new path of researching religion.^[3] Armstrong tells her struggles with faith and religious life, in which she was "knocked back to zero over and over again before she arrived at a personally meaningful concept of the divine" according to one review.^[4]


The Spiral Staircase is not Armstrong's first attempt at a memoir, and is in a way a rewrite of her first two books: Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World, which she no longer felt gave an accurate portrait of her experience.^[1] Beginning the World especially Armstrong felt was "the worst book I have ever written" because it was too soon to write truthfully about the experience of those years.^[5]