Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

       When Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith met in a creative writing class in graduate school, they both confessed to writing about God. They bonded one night while reading the Book of Ruth and came to truly understand the unlikely friendship of Ruth and Naomi. In these two Old Testament women, they witnessed a beautiful spiritual friendship and a way of walking with one another toward God.
       But how could they travel this path together when they would be separated by distance and time and leading busy lives as they established marriages and careers? They decided to write letters to each other--at first, for each day of Lent, but those days extended into years. Their letters became a memoir in real time and reveal deeply personal and profound accounts of conversion, motherhood, and crushing tragedy; through it all, their faith and friendship sustained them.
       Told through the timeless medium of letters--in prose that is raw and intimate, humorous and poetic--Love & Salt is at its core the emotional struggle of how one spiritual friendship is formed and tested in tragedy, tempered and proven in hope.

Jessica Mesman Griffith is a widely published writer whose work has been noted in Best American Essays. She is the founder and curator of Sick Pilgrim, a spiritual community for writers and artists and those on the margins of the church. Visit the Sick Pilgrim blog at patheos.com/blogs/sickpilgrim

Amy Andrews is a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and teaches mathematics at Northwestern University.