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Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir…of Sorts (Thomas Nelson, June).

Why is your book "A memoir…of sorts"? In the preface I really go out of my way to explain to people that the story dances on this hyphen between the genre of straight memoir and autobiographical fiction, and the reason it does is because first I had to change a lot of names. The preface outlines the types of things that I had to do in order to make the story really flow correctly, which includes things like compressing timelines, conflating stories, things that memoirs often do, but I wanted to really spell out and like an author such as Dave Eggers or others there are pieces of the story that are what I would call lightly fictionalized for the purpose of protecting people, identities, but also for the sake of keeping flow in the story.

What was it like for you and your three siblings growing up with your father working for the Central Intelligence Agency? We didn't know really anything about it, at least for me, until I was in high school with any certainty. You also have to remember my father was a terrible alcoholic and so it was also very difficult knowing what was the line between truth and fiction.

You sometimes blamed yourself for your father's drinking, didn't you? The whole CIA thing is an interesting metaphor for the secret that my father was to me, the fact that I didn't know him really. The story really is about my relationship with my father, about the wound that a boy, and I would also add a woman, can suffer when their father doesn't see them with the eyes of his heart and how you find forgiveness. 

You had your own battle with addiction. How did you tackle alcoholism? We all have attachments, which are displaced longings for God. … To make things worse, we're actually all the seething cauldrons of them—I don't just have one, I got a bunch. The trick is learning how to allow Jesus to remain at the center of our persons and to continue to turn away from those things which are counterfeits of that relationship, which eventually become addictions.

There was a time you said you felt there was no God. How did get over that? I prayed for so long for my dad to get better because every child of an alcoholic or an addict feels that somehow or another it's their fault that their parent chooses to love their substance more than them. At least on the outside, that's what it looks like and feels like. How many times can you pray and not have it answered before you start to believe that God either hates you or has deserted you or that there is no God? It's hard not to arrive at that conclusion for a lot of us and yet I think that little seed never departed me.

Today you are an Episcopal priest. How did you come to faith and then sense the church was to be your life's work? I actually really believe I came to faith in Christ as a little boy in the Catholic church. The experience of church itself to me was just so beautiful, the mystery of it, the prayers I didn't even understand, the atmospherics of church itself … and I could really sense God's presence in that place. It's one of those things where I think I became a follower of Jesus at such a heart level as a little boy. I was just completely convinced and in love with God … then in high school I got involved in Young Life and I had a second kind of encounter with God, and that one involved a more intellectual understanding of the gospel and being given a language with which to talk about God that I didn't have. And so I would say for me there were two pivotal moments for me.

What would you like to tell Christian retailers about this book? In the midst of the debris, I can find grace and even laughter in it. I think that's what we all want, to know that our suffering means something, that it's not arbitrary, so I think the book will inspire people to face their lives squarely, knowing that if they do, they can find that thread of redemption. 

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