In “Love is a Burning Thing,” Spirituality and Mental Health Set Fire to Reality

Nina St. Pierre’s debut memoir, Love Is a Burning Thing, began with a question: “Who starts two fires?”

Before St. Pierre was even born, her mother and a friend lit themselves on fire in a dual suicide attempt. Years later, St. Pierre’s mother started another fire that shook the foundation of their lives. St. Pierre grew up in California: in the tenderloin of San Francisco, in sunny San Diego, and most prominently, in rural Weed, up north where her unconventional family unit stood out in the conservative small town where everyone knew each other’s business. Throughout her childhood, St. Pierre’s mother continually chased after various forms of spiritual practice and enlightenment, as St. Pierre longed for a sense of stability that they never had. After her mother’s passing, St. Pierre began to uncover the hidden details of her past and soon realized that undiagnosed mental illness could have been the root of her mother’s struggle—that her mother’s reality was not the reality St. Pierre herself was living in.

Love Is a Burning Thing delves into issues of mental health, spirituality, self-immolation, poverty and class struggles, and more. As St. Pierre digs into her childhood, her upbringing, and her family history, this story shows how mental illness, when unchecked and unsupported, can sear through the lives of so many, not unlike a fire.

Deena ElGenaidi: My first question is very broad, but I think it’ll be a good jumping off point. So much of this book is about the relationship between mental health and spirituality. Can you talk a little bit about how the two are related?

Nina St. Pierre: Well, in this story in particular, my mom was into all these different new age, spiritual modalities. She was into Transcendental Meditation, the I AM, Christian Science, and all these sort of fringe modalities. In my experience, and in the communities that I lived in, those beliefs were taken as truths. And then at some point, probably around ages 11, 12, I started to feel like this reality I was being told about was not matching the reality that my friends and I were living in. But it wasn’t until after my mom’s death that I was really able to look back at that time through a mental health lens. 

The more I learned, the more I saw that both mental illness—particularly mental illnesses that have states of psychosis or delusion—and New Age spirituality are alternate states. They’re fringe states. In my mom’s case, and in the communities that I was a part of, often New Age language and concepts functioned to fail at addressing mental health issues because they’re trying to explain something that’s outside of consensus reality. They’re trying to explain an unreal state.

DE: Were there moments during your childhood when you had an inkling that your mom was suffering from some kind of mental illness?

NSP: The first time that I really sensed a schism between the way that she perceived reality and what I was experiencing was when I was 12 years old living in the Alpenrose Motel, and she told me that she was a “walk-in.” The way she described that to me was that before she was born, her soul had made a contract with another soul that when her initial soul had learned all the lessons it was supposed to learn, this new soul would come in and use the body to learn its lessons. That was kind of a psychedelic thing to hear at 12 years old.

DE: You were young at that time, so you probably didn’t have the language or forewithal to realize that something was not right, or to put your finger on it.

NSP: Yeah, but at that moment—and I think for a long time, I didn’t realize this—my body was telling me something was wrong. Even some of the anxiety that I carried as an adult I can trace back to moments where I felt, physically in my body, like something is off—you know, when your hair stands on end, or you just feel uneasy. That was happening. But because I had been brought up in a world where things like reincarnation or astral travel, or all these metaphysical concepts and terms were taken as truth, then what my mother was telling me didn’t ring as impossible. It was like, well, I’ve heard weirder shit. This is just reality, as it’s been explained to me. But at that moment, I had a distinct physical reaction. There was something almost eerie, but it would take me 20 years from that point to realize it.

DE: Even the way you wrote that scene was very eerie. And what you’re describing in your body feels the way it felt reading the scene. But these different belief systems and spiritualities are so prevalent in so many different ways, whether it’s religion, astrology, wellness culture, and even things like Q Anon—which is not typically what you would describe as spirituality, but it is a sort of belief system. Do you feel like the normalization of those belief systems could also work to mask signs of mental illness for some people? And in what ways?

NSP: That’s interesting, because the sort of slippery slope between believing in angels and believing there’s a super ring of pedophiles seems like, wait, how did we get from A to Z? But the unifying factor is this belief that something larger than us is controlling us. And that’s a broad umbrella. You know, religion, spirituality, even things like government—it’s this idea that there’s some bigger, even paternalistic force out there that has an agenda, whether that agenda is benign or sinister. 

In my experience, these beliefs can be a way of abdicating responsibility for the systems that we, as human beings, have created here. It’s almost impossible to talk about this stuff without talking about political systems—race, class, gender. So to answer your question, yes. I think that anything that’s taken to an extreme like wellness culture, Q Anon, and all these New Age beliefs can be used to mask symptoms of mental illness. If you’re experiencing especially extreme states of mental illness, which are limited to delusional thinking, or say psychotic states, which is more what I’m focused on in this book, then you’re experiencing a state that does not align with what everyone else is taking as reality, or with what other people are experiencing—consensus reality. 

If we had more of an open discussion around mental illness, or ways to track those symptoms, or places to go and say, “Hey, you’re feeling XYZ, you can reach out and there’s no stigma behind it, there’s no danger behind that,” then maybe there would be a clearer channel to this magical thinking. Maybe there would be more of a systemic checks and balance around it. But because it’s a free for all, I think people are looking for belief systems or justifications for what they’re experiencing, basically. 

DE: I also want to talk a little bit about the idea of social class in your book. Obviously, spirituality, wellness culture, etc., exist across all social classes. In your book, both of your parents are very spiritual, and they both get into Transcendental Meditation. But your parents also exist in very different worlds. Your dad and his family are more stable, have more traditional values, and they have money—more money than your mom at least. What do you see as the relationship between wellness and spirituality and social class? And do you think those belief systems manifest differently based on how much money or stability that you have?

NSP: Yeah, there’s so much struggle involved in daily life for those living below the poverty line. So I think there’s an even greater drive towards believing that this is all for a reason, believing that your suffering matters, that there’s some greater force orchestrating it, and there’s things you just can’t know. Taken to the extreme, that can manifest in a sort of martyrdom, in a literal sense. The daily slog of being poor can wear you down, so if we can believe there’s a reason for the suffering that’s not just capitalism, we can find relief or some sense of bliss in communing with these spiritual ideas or figures, which makes life  manageable, if not beautiful. 

With my dad, his parents were the ones who really had money, but the place I would go visit him in Texas was middle to upper middle class. It was not ostentatious. It was very simple, but it was comfortable. And in some ways I see that while my mom’s belief system gave her reason and relief, I almost think that my dad’s belief system offered protection from having to engage with the world. 

It’s so interesting because there’s a way in which both these belief systems in my particular story—in the poor and more wealthy versions—were ways of avoiding addressing social problems head on. For my father, even though he was concerned with the human condition and the state of the world, he maintained a very protected, structured life in which he did his practices, and that was that. He felt and believed this is his contribution to world peace. And not only in larger systems, but even in our direct family unit. I felt like there was a way in which his spiritual practices and beliefs created a barrier between us. It made it harder for him to see and confront concrete problems because he thought, “Well, there’s a larger meaning, and don’t get into the muck of life.” And I live in the muck.

DE: I think a lot of religious people might be like that too, where if you have a problem, their answer might be, “Everything happens for a reason. God is testing you, God knows what’s best.”

NSP: Yeah, if you just meditate, if you just pray. I guess the commonality between people with more and less money in my story is that their belief system offers them a certain remove from the problems of life because everything is in the hands of a greater being.

So I would say what my parents shared was an immaterial orientation. They were oriented towards the divine. They didn’t talk about heaven so much, it was more just that we need to be oriented toward enlightenment, or this other more divine place. So it made it hard for me in different ways. Life with my dad was more comfortable and more ordered. The basics were taken care of. Life with my mom—sometimes we were very broke—life was more chaotic. But in both settings, it was hard for me to put problems on the table. It was hard for me to say in a concrete way, this is a problem.

DE: You mentioned chaos and order just now, and those ideas come up a lot in the book. You describe growing up in a very chaotic environment. And as a result, you tried your best to maintain order, even in small ways where you just tried to keep things neat and organized. And then you have the fires in your life that are happening in the background, which are just pure chaos. You can’t control fire, but you managed to somehow contain it in this book. What was it like writing this and trying to compress the fire and chaos into a cohesive story?

NSP: I think that’s an interesting word to use, compression. I feel the final form of this book was a years-long act of expansion and compression. It had to happen over and over again. It almost felt like there were certain portals in the story I had to open and go down, like a rabbit hole. I had to go through the chaos of the story in the creation of the book. The whole thing was very meta. 

At some point, when I’d been writing the book for so long, the book started to become about the impossibility of writing the book. It was a really intense process, and to compress all that, I think I had to focus less on exactly what happened or connecting all the dots in my mind and get to a place in which I was presenting an emotional imprint of what happened. Initially, the book didn’t even have chapters. It was just all these chaotic sections. And then working with my editor, I put it into chapters. And we started thinking about how to bring the fire to life more than just talking about it. I wanted the smoke itself to be representational in some way. And we had this idea about marking it in four parts—the four parts of a fire’s lifecycle. Structurally, it helps to think about the book as a fire.

DE: We spoke recently, and you mentioned that writing this story is what made you a writer. If you didn’t feel like you needed to tell this and tell it well, you might have had a completely different life. So first, why was it so important to tell this story and share it with the world? You could have just uncovered it for yourself, but you wanted to write it in a book. And then at what moment, in the process of telling this story, did you realize, oh, I’m a writer, and now I’m going to build my life around writing?

NSP: Initially, I was writing this story to understand what had happened. It really began with a question: Who starts two fires?  Like, who literally does that? And then as I began to do some very cursory research into schizophrenia, I began to think my mom was experiencing schizo affective disorder, or states of schizophrenic psychosis. So once I determined there was some mental illness going on, I started asking myself, how did I not know? Initially, I was writing to make sense of everything for myself. 

I wrote for one year, and it just came out of me. And then when I read it, I realized how dissociated I had been from the whole experience, because it was like reading a novel. It was like reading someone else’s story. It was kind of shocking to read. I just thought, “Whoa, where was I in all of this?” At first, yes, I just wrote it all for myself to understand, but then the further removed from me the story got, the more important it seemed for people beyond just me. 

I started to share little pieces with a writing group that I had at the time in Portland, Oregon, and they were very affected by certain things. But it wasn’t an ego thing. I wanted to tell this story because it felt really powerful and startling. And then I started taking some writing courses. I took a class with Cheryl Strayed very early on, and I submitted a scene and told her, I’m taking this class because I need to understand whether this is a story. Is this a journal entry, and I just need to go to therapy? Or is this a story that needs to be in the world? She said, “Probably both.” So I went to therapy, and I kept writing. 

The more that I wrote, the more momentum the book got, until at some point, I felt like it took over. The feelings that I got from reading some of this stuff back, even to myself, and then showing it to other people and having them acknowledge and see what had been so secret for so long brought oxygen to the story. If this was a fire, here we go—bringing oxygen to this story started to grow it. 

As it grew, I felt the power of it more and more. Having people acknowledge and witness what had happened was so life affirming for me that I thought, “Oh, what if other people need this?” This is a very specific story, so it’s hard to imagine someone has this exact story, but there must be so many other people that are carrying deeply confusing family experiences that they’re ashamed of, or protective of, or, in particular, people that are that are sitting at the convergence of some unreality in which mental illness and mysticism are coming together in confusing ways. Maybe their whole lives, they’ve been asking what’s true? What’s not true? If this is life affirming for me, maybe there are other people that need this. 

It’s so cliche, but people always say write the book that you need to read. If I would have read a book like this when I was still very confused, I might not have been driving drunk down mountain roads for years. There was a way in which at my most destructive, I was trying to say, “look at this, see this,” but I didn’t have the language. It was so deep and buried. So yeah, I think bringing it to light really helped me so much, and if there are other people for whom this story might resonate, then this is so much bigger than me. And honestly, if this was just about me telling my story, or even becoming a writer, or having a career, it wouldn’t have sustained me this long. I would have done something else. Because I’ve made no money. It’s been a grind and a grind and a grind, and I’m grateful to be here, but it’s not the glory days. There were many points in which I felt despair, and I wanted to give up, and I was so fucking sick of thinking and talking about this, that if it wasn’t for some larger purpose, if it was just for me, I would have clocked out long ago.