Looking for Mary

When Beverly Donofrio entered her fortieth year, she began a love affair with the Virgin Mary. Suffering from guilt over a grown son she's neglected and unsure of where her life is really headed, she begins to meditate--and to collect statues of the Virgin Mary at yard sales. Beverly is hardly a devout Catholic: she starts out thinking of her Mary collection as nothing more than kitsch. But by effectively making a shrine of her home, she has invited the Virgin Mary in. Knowing a good opportunity when she sees one, the Virgin Mary sneaks into Beverly's heart.

Following the idea that if she could just act as if she believed, then belief might follow, Beverly the "lapsed Catholic" begins reciting Hail Marys, reading the Bible, and traveling to Mary sightings around the United States. Her search culminates in a pilgrimage to the Bosnian holy city of Medjugorje--with forty-nine rabid Catholics in tow.

At once a conversion story told by an immediately recognizable girl-like-you-and-me narrator, an irreverent look at the "cult of Mary," and a genuinely moving memoir, Looking for Mary is the remarkable story of one woman's stumble from darkness into the light.