Between the Light and Me: A Memoir of Beauty and Violence

Between the Light and Me is a stirring exploration of the ways in which darkness and light bleed together in both the world and the human heart.

Just one month before September 11, Kathleen Kilcup enlisted in the US Army with all the fervent idealism of an untested teenager. Between the Light and Me is her unflinching account of encountering violence--both in the military and beyond--and a desperate, sometimes ill-conceived search for God that sustained her through addiction and trauma, on the long road to true freedom.

Tracing her singular path from a juvenile detention center in Utah to linguistic training in California, from a wildland firefighter crew in Tahoe to a lavender farm in Oregon, Kilcup explores the entanglement of violence and beauty in her own life as she hungered for something genuine while starving herself and getting blackout drunk. "I wanted something real and painful and beautiful, the mystery underneath the mystery. I wanted the truth," she writes.

Written with a poet's uncanny knack for the luminous detail, Between the Light and Me is a riveting portrait of modern spiritual hunger manifest in barracks, chapels, bars, and church basements where communion tastes like stale coffee sipped from Styrofoam cups. This is memoir as spiritual investigation, written for anyone who has ever wondered how grace might find us in the places where we least expect it.

"For a time, I lived in a midnight zone. A place of pressure and lightlessness. What I mean to say is, this is a story about being human, born into a violent world and carrying violence inside ourselves--and in that darkness, how hungry we grow for light."

Kathleen Kilcup spent five years serving in the US Army as a Russian linguist. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and an MA in religion and arts from Yale. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, Image, Salon, WesternHumanities Review, and elsewhere. She writes The Mess on Substack and lives with her family in Oklahoma City.