I’m always a little hesitant when starting to read a memoir. I brace myself for the weight of real life and the intimacy of a stranger’s truth. But in She Blooms, Maura Doherty didn’t feel like a stranger. She felt like someone I might know. A woman who, at a critical moment, chose to leave behind the structure that once gave her identity—because her voice, her calling, had changed.
Maura entered the convent because she found peace in the presence of the Sisters. But she left, years later, to find something more elusive: a life of her own making. Her story moves from the Bronx to the far corners of the country, from faith to activism, from control to surrender. I read it in pieces, during the quiet moments between my own writing, and I kept thinking, “this is what empowerment looks like.” Not flashy. Not immediate. Just brave and honest.
Maura asks again and again what happens when the passion to care for others leaves you unable to care for yourself. That’s a question I know intimately. It’s one I write around, circle, test. Whether you’re a nun or a novelist, a mother or a daughter, that reckoning comes. And Maura faces it with clarity and grace.
Reading her story made me reflect on the ways I’ve broken from what was expected of me. The quiet rebellion of choosing my own voice over the roles others cast for me. Maura’s life reminded me that storytelling itself can be an act of recovery. And that writing—whether memoir or fiction—is one way women like us make sense of where we’ve been and where we’re still heading.
I’ve since spent some time with Maura (she’s in our Writing Cohort!) and somehow have never personally expressed my gratitude for her storytelling. Maura, thank you for showing that blooming is possible, even after the sharpest pruning.
She Blooms: Finding Home After the Convent, a Memoir
From the safety of a convent into a world of danger… Maura Doherty learned the true meaning of compassion and how to find her real home.
Maura was raised with seven siblings in the Bronx, New York. Her Irish-Catholic parents owned a duplex on a street teeming with kids surrounded by the roar of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The Doherty children went to parochial schools and attended Mass on Sunday. Over time Maura became fascinated with the peace evoked by the Catholic Sisters who taught her in school.
When she decided to enter the convent, she never anticipated that she would leave nine years later. That decision thrust her from the security of religious life into the unknown. Crafting a new future for herself, she became an activist fighting environmental pollution and toxic hazards. Her work brought her from the Bronx to Appalachia to the West Coast, where a growing dependence on alcohol threatened to rob her of all she’d achieved. Once she chose sobriety, her life opened in ways she had never imagined.
