The Secret Life of Mother Teresa

I came at it with a sense that she was a lightweight. Like so many people, she was doing good things, but there was nothing necessarily

compelling about her. She was a nun working with the poor, but a lot of nuns and laypeople work with the poor.

That was shattered during the course of writing the book. It blew me away how deeply spiritual her life was. Her whole approach to life, and the hardships she faced, was carried out at a very deep spiritual level.

I came at it very underwhelmed about her; it was a journalistic project. When I walked away, it had become a spiritual challenge to my own life.

Every aid worker encounters difficulties and resistance, and questions why they're there. The anguish she felt was at a much higher pitch, and her response was at a much higher spiritual level of intensity.

There was information in your book about her parents that I didn't realize.

She didn't give people a lot of leads. Eileen Egan was the only biographer to report in any detail about her father's death. He was a financier of the Independence movement for Albania. People used to gather at his house, and they'd sing folk songs and plan an independence movement. It appears he was poisoned by Yugoslav authorities. She was 9 or 10.

Her mother gets reduced to stereotypes in a lot of books-"she was a hard worker, she prayed her rosary." Nobody probed her too much, but her mother seems like an incredible woman and the source of everything in her personality, from her sense of humor to her love for the poor.

Her husband died and all her business partners fled. So she started becoming a seamstress and built a small business. At the same time, almost every weeknight at the table were people Mother Teresa never knew, poor people. [Her mother] had a special kind of love for women in distress. Old, homeless women, unwed mothers in crisis pregnancies would stay with them.

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