Divine Therapy | Anna Powell on Being Stalked, Wrestling with God & Writing the Book Anyway

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Anna Powell spent about ten years as a publicist, which is a job about telling other people’s stories well. The one she could not tell was her own. The night before her very last final exam in college, she opened an email from one of her professors confessing an obsession with her. She took the exam. She graduated. She moved to Chicago, started her career, and put it behind her. Almost two years later, to the day, she started seeing him. On her commute. In a store window she walked past. And then at 5:30 in the morning in the gym of her own building, because he had moved into it.

What we spend most of this hour on is not the six years. It is what those years did to her faith and what she did with them a decade later. Anna stopped being able to ask God why and went and studied the book of Job instead. She calls that season divine therapy, and she means it kindly. The book started in 2014 as non-fiction about suffering, got shelved when she found out she was pregnant, and sat untouched for eight years. What restarted it was a Christmas card. She had nothing to put for herself, so she wrote that she was back to pursuing her dream of writing a book, mailed it to everyone she knew, and could not take it back. Then her husband Dan asked her one question about her intention that turned the whole thing into a novel.

In His Sight came out in March, told from two points of view, Piper’s and the man following her. Anna finished it before she turned forty because she decided it was now or never. Here is the part I keep thinking about. She survived the thing. Surviving it was not the risk. The risk was handing it to strangers and letting them read it. If you are sitting on something you have been carrying for years, this one is for you.

In this episode:

The email the night before her last final exam
Two years later, and he was living in her building
What being followed does to how you see yourself
Losing her faith and going looking for it in the book of Job
Divine therapy, and what suffering built that nothing else could
Leaving a ten-year PR career, and the identity crisis on the other side
A son born with a rare heart defect, and letting the work go
The Christmas card that made the book real
The one question from her husband that turned non-fiction into a novel
Two agents, one shelved manuscript, and ten years to a finished book
Who actually shows up when you put something into the world
Now or never: finishing it before forty
The question every reader asks her about the love interest
Rapid fire, and the one risk she thinks everybody should take

Key takeaways

Anna received a two-page email from a professor confessing an obsession the night before her final college exam, and only two years later realized he had moved into her Chicago apartment building and had visited her office while she was traveling for work.
Her first response to the ordeal was to stop going to church and numb herself with partying, which she describes as empty and lonely until she hit a breaking point and searched online for a sermon series on the book of Job.
Two literary agents independently told her to fictionalize her true story, and her husband's question about her intention behind the book pushed her to rewrite it from the beginning in dual perspective.
She created accountability by announcing the project in a Christmas card sent to a couple hundred people, then hired a weekly babysitter for six hours during which she was only allowed to write.
She originally left her PR agency job in 2014 to write the book, but motherhood took over and the project took more than a decade before she self-published it in March.

In this episode

1:41A decade-long project, self-published in March
3:02The identity crisis of becoming a mom
4:56Leaving the agency and five contract hours
7:22The professor's email before finals
10:47Realizing he lived in her building
15:58Studying Job after hitting bottom
17:10Suffering as divine therapy
23:13Agents tell her to fictionalize it
25:41Accountability, set hours, and finishing

Read the full transcript55,851 words

Key takeaways

In this episode

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