Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita were, in their own words, two “miserable” graduate students at Brown University, weathering academic hardships and a global pandemic when, in 2020, they started a Spanish-language podcast about the Baroque nuns who populated the pages of their Ph.D. dissertations.
They never thought it would amount to much. Certainly not the impetus for a new book — one for general readers, not scholars — that is being translated into eight languages.
Yet in a world where pop stars like Chappell Roan and Rosalía pose in habits; young people vacation on silent retreats; glimpses of sisters’ daily lives become memoirs; and #NunTok enthralls TikTok users, the podcast’s popularity is proof of “a huge hunger” and “huge aesthetic interest in nuns,” Garriga said.
The duo’s “Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life” — which Avid Reader just published in the United States — is a cheeky exploration of the lives of cloistered nuns who, from a centuries-old vantage point, impart lessons applicable to the generational malaise and angst bedeviling modern life.
Whether it’s about whisper networks or impostor syndrome, situationships or friendship crushes, it girls, nepo babies and FOMO, the authors maintain that these sisters have a thing or two to teach adrift millennials.
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