Local author's 'Mary' biography depicts resourceful village girl

Lesley Hazleton admits that she's an unlikely channeler for the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. As she writes in her new book, "Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother," (Bloomsbury, $24.95), she first approached her search for Mary by examining her own mixed bag of religious influences, wondering to herself if she was up to the task of imagining Mary's life:

"This may be the answer to the question of 'How dare I?' Perhaps my own biography is what gives me license: as a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, as a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about becoming a nun, as an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion.

"Or perhaps I take my license as a woman for whom there is no heroism in 'meek and mild,' or as a psychologist seeking understanding, or as a journalist seeking out the real story."

It's easy to see why Hazleton, 58, would have no truck with 'meek and mild.' The daughter of an English physician, she spent 14 years in the Middle East as a psychologist, educator and foreign correspondent for Time magazine and other publications. She came to Seattle in 1992 to get her pilot's license, rented a friend's houseboat, bought it and has been here ever since.

Her career as a journalist and author is impressive and eclectic — she's written for Esquire, Harper's, Vanity Fair and Parade, as well as critically praised books on the Middle East, depression — and automobiles. The uncertain economics of freelance writing had pushed Hazleton into a comfortable niche in the relatively well-paid world of automobile writing.

Then, at a party four years ago, she met a friend with an idea for a book:

"She knew I was not religious, but was very involved with religious matters," Hazleton remembers. "She knew I had considered becoming a nun. She comes up to me and says, 'I have the perfect book for you to write.'

"I liked her, and I was also drinking grappa. 'A biography of Mary,' she said, 'as she really was.' There were instant fireworks. Huge, incredible, brilliant fireworks went off in my mind ... let's call it an epiphany. I knew she had to be far more than the meek and mild cipher of tradition — but I had no idea it would take me four years."

The result, published this month, has received early praise, but also caution that it's not likely to enthrall the more traditionally devout.

Early reviews have testified to Hazleton's inspired writing — "Readers who loved the phenomenally popular fictional account of Jacob's daughter Dinah in Anita Diamant's 'The Red Tent' will find this book about Mary, the mother of Jesus, just as enthralling," enthused Publisher's Weekly.

Seattle Times reviewer Wingate Packard said that "her fictional accounts sometimes run too seamlessly into historical facts, but Hazleton's historical grasp of the Middle East over 2,000 years and her willingness to imagine details of the life of a mortal woman-made-goddess make 'Mary' a tremendous accomplishment."

But Library Journal, while praising Hazleton's "stream-of-consciousness style," said that "some might find it a bit too breezy, too sweeping, or downright troubling" in some of its claims.

The portrait painted by "Mary" strays far from what little is known about Jesus' mother, but Hazleton's publishers hope sales are buoyed by the recent surge of interest in books and movies on religion and faith — the secrets embedded in the phenomenal best-selling thriller "The Da Vinci Code" are based on medieval Christian teachings and the history of the Catholic Church.

There could be a sales bump related to the new exposure that the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" has given to Jesus' story. Though Hazleton's view of early Christianity has little in common with Gibson's more literal interpretation of the New Testament, Bloomsbury marketing director Sabrina Faber says she expects subsequent printings after the 10,000-copy first printing of "Mary."

"We feel very strongly about this book and the message it sends about Mary, and feel fortunate that the topic is in the forefront right now," Faber wrote in an e-mail.

The speculative portrait of Mary that Hazleton sketches is heavily infused with her own experiences living in the Middle East, as well as her feminist bias that Mary was an activist participant in the life of her village, her family and her son.

Many scholars believe that Mary gave birth at age 13, and Hazleton draws an indelible portrait of the life of a young village girl at that time — the sights and smells of Judea, the day-in, day-out routines of village life, the role Roman repression played in its politics. She examines Jesus' likely role as a revolutionary and the horrible and pervasive practice of crucifixion. Hazleton immersed herself in books of anthropology, archaeology and biblical scholarship to analyze concepts such as the Virgin birth and the resurrection.

Hazleton found "astonishingly little" written about Mary from a you-are-there perspective. The four Gospels, written by Greeks two or three generations after Christ's death, treat her mostly as a "figurehead," Hazleton says: "They were writing theology, not history."

She found more material in the Apocrypha (early Christian writings not included in the New Testament) and the Quran — Mary has an entire chapter devoted to her in the Islamic religious text. She went to archaeological and historical sources to posit what the life of Mary might have been like. Throughout, she calls her Maryam, Mary's name in Aramaic, the language of the time.

She imagines Maryam as a resourceful village girl who trains as a midwife under the tutelage of Salome, a fictional grandmother. Her exposure to the vicious repression of Roman rule turns Maryam toward resistance. Both the healer and the revolutionary strains converge in the person of Jesus, her son.

Hazleton draws on her Middle-Eastern experience to draw a portrait of a typical 13-year-old, headed for a very atypical destiny:

She is thirteen. Short and wiry, with dark olive skin. The trace of a mustache on her upper lip, soft black down on her arms and legs. The muscles are hard knots in her arms, solid lines in her calves...

Her thin linen shift is torn from snagging on rocks and thorns. Even the patches are torn, and the original black has long since faded into gray. When there's a village feast — a wedding or circumcision — she begs a few threads of brightly colored wool from the old women, the ones too infirm to do anything but sit and weave, passing stories and shuttles back and forth in the sun-baked courtyards. Then she and her girl cousins huddle together, giggling as they work the threads into each other's braids. They have two colors; red from madder juice, yellow from kaolin clay. They've never seen blue wool. Only the rich can afford indigo, and in this village, as in all the Galilee villages, everyone is poor.

Hazleton did enough research to produce a 1,000-page book — the final version, with detailed footnotes and an extensive bibliography, is 245 pages. "Gloria Loomis, my agent, got worried when she heard that I'd written 30 pages on olives and olive trees," Hazleton says.

She invested heart, soul and bank account in "Mary" for four years — she had to refinance her houseboat to complete the book.

But she bristles at any notion that the Mel Gibson movie might help sales. Though she hasn't seen the movie, she says she would rather not be associated with it, though Gibson's interpretation of the last days of Jesus have helped provoke a worthwhile debate: "It's getting people to think about matters of belief and faith. Is (Christianity) focused on death, or is it focused on the teachings of Jesus, which is focused on life?"

One of the virtues of "Mary" is its respect for people of faith. Though Hazleton may not be a believer in the traditional sense, she says that people who insist on picking apart concepts such as Mary's virginity or Jesus' resurrection are missing the point. Speaking of skeptics who attack the concept of resurrection, she writes:

"There is a strong whiff of desperation in such extended reading. Certainly it reveals more about those who make such arguments than about what actually happened. It makes the male disciples into a bunch of connivers, and the women into gullible dupes fooled into believing there has been a resurrection instead of a stolen body. The resurrection is seen at best as a hysterical misunderstanding, at worst as a scam.

"This is what happens when we read the gospels as history instead of theology. We diminish the grandeur of metaphor, and find ourselves reduced from ultimate mystery to a poorly plotted detective story ... to say that it definitely did not happen makes no more sense than to say that it definitely did. For the real point of the resurrection is not literal, but metaphorical. Not physical, that is, but metaphysical."

Hazleton recalls that "my father asked me once: 'Do I really think that God exists?' To me the most wonderful thing is that there is really no way to answer that question. That there are things out there that are beyond our understanding. I think that's very, very hard for 21st-century Americans to admit."