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This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris, where she studied composition, worked on experimental music and performed on viola.

At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God. Entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work and obedience. To her, this new life seemed transcendent. But eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism and her persistent questioning - the whole reality of her outlook and personality - were rejected. After 12 years, she left the monastery. She went on to study theology at Oxford University, and she got married.

Today, Catherine Coldstream. She spoke to Terry Gross in 2024, when her memoir, "Cloistered," first was published. It's now out in paperback.

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TERRY GROSS: Catherine Coldstream, welcome to FRESH AIR. Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for 10 years. I know you had a half hour each day where you were allowed to speak. But what was it like for you to not speak?

CATHERINE COLDSTREAM: Well, it's a really strange thing because we - when I say we - the Carmelite Order is often described as a silent order. And of course, there's a huge amount of silence in the daily life. But if you look at it another way, words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life because you are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms, for example, for hours every day and other sort of theological books. So there are a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, you know, a lot of prayer bounces off words or has resource - or recourse to words. So, yes, we were very silent. But in another way, internally, words were very important.

GROSS: But it's, like, a dialogue with God and a dialogue within yourself. It's not direct interaction with people.

COLDSTREAM: Yes. Yeah.

GROSS: Why is talking considered taboo except for small amounts during the day?

COLDSTREAM: Oh, gosh. That's a very good question. The - it wasn't speech itself that was taboo. I think I mentioned that certain subjects were taboo when we did talk, say, in community meetings or recreations. So speech itself wasn't taboo, but there were loads of things that you weren't supposed to talk about. But there was a very strong culture of silence, which could feel like it was sort of antispeech because the Carmelite Order originated in the hermit ideal.

So this goes right back to St. Anthony of Egypt. And in the Alexandrian desert, people went out and lived in caves. And then a few centuries later, you find people living in caves on Mount Carmel. And these were people who wanted to dedicate themselves to seeking God in solitude. It's called the desert monasticism or desert spirituality, which is like a sort of - a subgroup within Catholic spirituality that's very much dedicated to seeking God through silence.

GROSS: What drew you to that? I mean, just to fill in your background, you're from an artist background. Your father was a painter, an art professor - your mother an actor, an opera singer who was often on the road. And there was a 28-year difference between them. Your father was considerably older. It was his second marriage. You've called it a midlife crisis when he got married. The marriage didn't work out well. But you grew up in the arts. And you're...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...A viola player. You were then. You are now. You've done it professionally as well as just for - you know, for the pleasure of it. So why did you feel called to live this life of isolation and silence?

COLDSTREAM: Wow. That's the million-dollar question. I mean, I did grow up in what - you know, we call it a sort of arty household. It was quite bohemian. And, yeah, there was a big age gap between my parents. So I'd grown up in a very sort of expressive kind of family. I loved ballet. I loved art. I loved poetry. I loved music. I was very emotional. Yeah. I mean, people couldn't understand it when I suddenly went really kind of pious and, you know, kind of quite penitential after my father's death.

I think what it was was that when my dad died, I was 24. And he had been going downhill in a really kind of very - a very, very painful decline that lasted four years. So from the age of about 20, I'd been going through an awful lot of sort of angst. And, you know, I - the word trauma is overused, but, you know, I'd been going through a very unhappy time. My family more or less disintegrated. And I think I needed something radical. I was looking for something radical. And, you know, I was looking for it through music at first. I was really into the whole kind of experimental music stuff - Stockhausen, John Cage, Boulez and all this sort of stuff. So I've probably always had slightly extreme tendencies.

When the kind of hammer blow of bereavement came, I was utterly thrown and completely bereft, obviously, and devastated. And I think I just started another kind of radical search which took me to different kind of churches. I looked at - you know, I spent time sitting in Greek Orthodox churches. I spent time, like, going to Catholic churches, Charismatic churches, all sorts of churches. I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died, and that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key.

GROSS: I think that transcendent experience you're referring to after your father died was seeing his body. Can you describe why that was a transcendent experience?

COLDSTREAM: I think it's the sort of combination of familiarity and completely alien things at the same time. So you go into the room, and it's the dead body of your beloved parent. It was the first time I'd seen a dead body, and I think the - obviously, he - there were familiar things about this body. This - the irony was his hair was moving in the breeze. There was - it might have been a ventilator system, or it might have been a window open. But his hair was moving as though he was still alive. But everything else, of course, was utterly static. And it's just the shock of seeing the complete vacancy of a body that you're used to seeing in life. And I think I just felt immediately that he couldn't possibly have died. He was somehow present in the room. And there was some sort of huge sense of presence, I suppose, divine presence that, you know, just surged through the room and that hit me at that point.

GROSS: The fundamentals of the Carmelite life revolve around total devotion to God, pretty constant prayer and reflection and total self-denial. Would you describe how that translated into daily life?

COLDSTREAM: Yes. Well, I suppose one of the big aids, as we would have called it, to self-denial and discipline and virtue and all these other things were - was the structure of the Rule and the Constitutions. So there was this ancient document called the Rule from the 13th century, but it was supplemented in the 16th century by the Constitutions of St. Teresa of Avila. So there were these kind of written texts that, you know, were meant to govern all aspects of your life.

How did it translate into actual everyday life? Well, we had a very disciplined horarium, we called it - like a sort of timetable - which started at 5:15 with a matraque, which was this kind of really large rattle that shook the whole house, almost. And you jumped out of your bed. You weren't allowed to lie there. You just had to get straight up, on your knees. You washed in a bucket of cold water. You went straight down to what we call the choir, which was our monastic chapel, and you were praying 25 minutes later.

And this went on throughout the day. There were bells. There were times of prayer that alternated with times of work, but it was all very strictly regulated. You had - you knew exactly where you had to go when. And you were silent most of the time and very focused on what you were doing. So there were all these kind of external structures, like the texts and the timetable and the bell, that meant you could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always needing to talk or sort of make decisions.

GROSS: It just strikes me you chose an order that was, like, the opposite of the family that you were brought up in, which - who you described as free-spirited, totally artistic. You were totally artistic. You'd been in Paris before returning to England and joining the monastery. You know - yeah. You were reading books of philosophy. You were playing avant-garde music - yeah - in addition to...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...A more standard repertoire of classical music. And so you chose this order where it's all about structure and all about discipline and self-denial. And the arts aren't about self-denial. They're about expressiveness...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...And creativity and trying new things, and especially the avant-garde. That's about breaking the rules and seeing what life is like - what music or literature is like outside of those borders. And you entered...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...A world that's all borders. And how did you fit yourself...

COLDSTREAM: Oh.

GROSS: ...Into that?

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. Well, it's - it was difficult, obviously. But I think the key thing is that that part of me - and obviously a huge part of me, which was searching for expression or for something transcendent through the arts - that was the part of me that found a kind of freedom in the interior life. So although the outward life for a Carmelite is regulated and full of boundaries and borders and structures, the silence and the solitude that facilitates is actually like a huge expanse of freedom in your - in terms of, like, your interior life.

So basically, we'd have two hours a day of completely silent prayer and, you know, times for reading. And although our reading material was pretty restricted, you could be as free as you liked in your prayer time. And I think we focused on prayer, which sounds really uncool and really kind of weird to people, I guess, if they - if they're not used to the idea. But prayer was - I think I approached it like an art form. Well, not an art form, but I think I approached it like a philosophy. For me, I wanted to plumb the depths of this kind of way of silent prayer because I felt, you know, almost in a philosophical sense that this was the answer.

And so I didn't - I think I went in with a kind of quite intellectual attitude to it, thinking, you know, this will follow on from my interest in - you know, in transcendence through music or searching for the truth through reading. I would be following the same sort of search, but through prayer. But of course, once you get really deeply into it and you're in a very confined and restricted world, it's not all plain sailing. But I think the prayer life was where we had freedom and a sort of sense of something really special going on on a personal level.

GROSS: I'd like you to describe the physical building that you were cloistered in and what the grounds were like around it.

COLDSTREAM: It was what we think of as, like, a sort of grand, old manor house, really. It was a large, rambling Gothic building with loads of outbuildings and sheds. But it was like a very large, grand family house from the days when minor aristocracy lived in these kind of beautiful buildings and had lots of grounds. So it was a house that had staircases - you know, great big sweeping staircases and stained-glass windows and high ceilings.

I mean, it had grown derelict after the war. And so when the nuns took it over, I think they needed to do a lot of sort of cleaning up, and they basically would have just kept it really bare. So it was like a sort of - if you think of somewhere not as grand as, like, "Brideshead Revisited," but on a much smaller scale - or "Downton Abbey." But it was a smaller version of that, but completely bare inside in a very sort of stark, austere way that was actually really kind of spiritually inspiring. You know, there's a lovely sort of echo and lovely light and a sense of space.

GROSS: And cold - cold floors, cold rooms.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. It was very cold. We didn't have central heating. It was really the far north of England - very drafty in winter. The windows rattled and the, you know, cold air would come in. But there was something really beautiful about it. It was - I think it was very - because it was very isolated. And it was in beautiful countryside - farmlands everywhere, lakes and trees and meadows and hills in the distance. So you had a sense of being protected, actually, from the modern world. You felt like you'd gone back in time to somewhere that was sort of almost magical in its beauty.

GROSS: I want you to describe your cell - 'cause each of the nuns had a cell that was just for them - and why it was so important to have this, like, totally private space.

COLDSTREAM: OK. Well, I suppose the cell idea had come down from the caves the hermits used to live in. So the idea was you had your own space that was completely dedicated to your relationship with God and to your solitary life of being a hermit and seeking God. So each of us had - basically it was, like, a medium-size or smallish bedroom. Some monasteries have much smaller cells because they're purpose-built. But because we were using this - we had this great, big old period house, the rooms were quite big, actually.

So we had a sort of medium-sized bedroom, and it was, like, you know, plain. When I first went, I think it was wood floor. And then at one point, I think they put some lino down, which seems awful today. But the walls were plain. They were, like, a creamy - we call it distemper. It was, like, a sort of creamy chalk paint, off-white. We had no images or decorations or anything like that. There was an enormous, great, black, wooden cross on the wall. When I say enormous, I mean, it was kind of about 4-foot high. I mean, it wasn't, like, a little crucifix. And there was no figure of Christ on the cross. And this was because you yourself were meant to become the sacrificial figure on the cross. So you were meant to think all the time in terms of being crucified with Christ, offering your life as a sacrifice.

BIANCULLI: Catherine Coldstream speaking to Terry Gross in 2024. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's conversation from 2024 with Catherine Coldstream, the musician and artist who had a religious epiphany and joined a monastery at age 24. Twelve years later, she'd left the monastery, studied theology at Oxford and got married. Her memoir, "Cloistered: My Years As A Nun," is now out in paperback.

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GROSS: So can you describe the first time you put on a habit and what it meant to you and if you felt transformed by it in any way?

COLDSTREAM: It was a rite of passage. And taking a new name, taking new clothes - these are all sort of quite, I guess, probably universal accoutrements of major life changes or rites of passage. I mean, if you think of it, getting married is like that. So yeah. It did trigger a sense that you were somehow changed at quite a deep level.

I mean, putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way. It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down because there were layers and layers of stuff. The main habit was made of this brown serge, which is, like, a rough, thick wool. And we had sort of basically two layers of that - the main habit, and then what we call the scapular, which was, like, an extra sort of apron-y bit on the front. And then we had - under that, we had a tunic, which was, again, a thick, cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads.

So you did feel kind of really - you felt encumbered by a lot of sort of cloth at first and all these pins, which you could easily stab yourself with, and people did. You're always, by mistake, sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit. But you felt weighed down. But quite quickly - like, with all these things, we are a very adaptable species. You quite quickly get used to it and find new ways of sort of - if you've got to work in the garden, you tuck up the habit and pin it at the back.

The actual rite of being clothed, of course, was a great sort of transition from being somebody who was hoping to become a nun to somebody who really felt she was and belonged to the community. And you often got given a new name. Mine wasn't very different. I went from being Catherine to being Sister Catherine Mary. In the book, I just say Sister Catherine as a sort of simplification. But my name didn't really radically change. But some people did want to have a new name. In the olden days, you had to have a new name. And you were just given a name, often a man's name. So yeah. It - you were taking on a new identity. You were putting yourself aside, in a way, and putting on this new identity with these new clothes.

GROSS: Yeah. 'Cause I was wondering - what's the point of a habit if you're cloistered? 'Cause in the outside world, the habit - when nuns wore habits in the outside world, the habit signaled certain things. It signaled a modesty. It signaled that you were a nun and were worthy of being related to that way. And...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: It was a symbol of, you know, a certain amount of respect that you should just automatically give to that person.

COLDSTREAM: Oh. Yeah.

GROSS: So - but inside, when you're all nuns, you don't have to communicate that to each other. So what's the point?

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. That's a really intelligent point, and I've never thought of it like that. But I think you're absolutely right. It's a symbol of having been set aside. It was - consecrated was the word we use. So you had somehow left the main body of humanity, and you're specially set aside. Why signal that when you're all doing the same thing? I think part of it is that there were strangers or visitors to the chapel who would see you - glimpse you in the distance through the grille, and they'd see you floating around sometimes, you know? You'd catch the odd glimpse of them. So you wanted to signal that to outsiders, just as the grille signaled to outsiders that you were people living a set-apart kind of life.

But within our own world, I think it was really a powerful thing that we all wore exactly the same clothes. When I say exactly, one or two people had slightly different shades of brown, and, you know, you really noticed the tiny differences. Like, some people had special shoes - you know, whatever. But basically, we were wearing the same habit.

And I think that was a very powerful symbol that we were - well, the idea was we were equal. We were meant to be - differences between us were meant to be eliminated, and that extended to other areas of the life. You weren't supposed to talk about anything about your own identity from before you'd been a nun that would be, in any way, likely to sort of set up - set yourself up as different or special or to trigger any sort of envies or rivalries. So you were subsumed into this new identity. And I think the fact that you all wear the same clothes was just a way of making everyone - trying to make everyone as equal as possible, which was a great idea. Of course, in reality, groups of people are never equal.

BIANCULLI: Catherine Coldstream speaking to Terry Gross in 2024. The former nun wrote a memoir about her dozen years in a Carmelite monastery. The book is now out in paperback. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. And critic-at-large John Powers reviews "The Hawk," the new TV series starring Will Ferrell. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Let's get back to Terry's 2024 interview with Catherine Coldstream. Her memoir, now out in paperback, is called "Cloistered: My Years As A Nun." It's about her 12 years as a Carmelite nun in the north of England. The Carmelites are an order that is focused on silence, prayer, song and work. It's a very disciplined order, and it's also a cloistered order.

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GROSS: As a nun in the Carmelite order, you were married to Christ.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. That was the idea, yeah.

GROSS: What was your interpretation of that? And did that interpretation change over the years that you were cloistered?

COLDSTREAM: That's a really good question. It certainly changed, yes. I think when you start out, it's all a matter of aspiration. You know, you want to be a bride of Christ. I mean, it all goes back to this thing of before you've actually even crossed the threshold, you've somehow or other fallen in love with this whole idea of - you know, you might have fallen in love with the monastery. You might have fallen in love with the idea of monastic life. But, you know, strange though it may sound to people, on some level, you'd fallen in love with God. You know, it was an obsessive vocation. And I think that all-consuming desire to get closer to God - it goes really deep once you really sort of go with it.

We had this idea that, you know, for us, Jesus was a real person. And he was the embodiment of perfect love and, in a sense, the answer to all our deepest desires. And we wanted to be united with him. So it was - there was a sort of analogy in romantic love that is a - there's a really ancient tradition in the Old Testament and - as well as in the New Testament, whereby God is kind of the spouse, the lover of - in the Old Testament, the lover of the people of Israel or the community of the faithful, however it's conceived.

The "Song Of Songs" in the Old Testament is all about this. And of course, the "Song Of Songs" was, you know, largely based on ancient marriage ceremonies from other cultures - Assyrian or Mesopotamian or Egyptian. I can't remember, but, I mean, I think it had drawn on other ancient cultures. And it was basically, you know, a text for celebrating a marriage between man and wife. So the Carmelite sort of relationship with God was a sort of sublimated version of marriage. You were married to Christ, and he was real for you.

GROSS: So you refer to the romantic side of being married to Christ. And I want to read something from the Bible that you quote in your book. And this is from the prophet Hosea.

(Reading) I will block her way with thorns and lure her and lead her out into the desert.

And you write...

(Reading) I think many of us felt it was quasi-erotic. And some translations went even further and said, I will seduce her and speak to her heart.

Did it feel erotic to you, or did it - do you sense that...

COLDSTREAM: (Laughter).

GROSS: ...It did to other young women...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...In the order?

COLDSTREAM: I think it's not necessarily just that passage, of course. But that passage, I think, shows in a particularly clear way and vivid way that - the extent of the sort of romance we were having with God. So in the prophet Hosea, he has a whole section where he's comparing the chosen people, as they were called - the people of Israel - to a faithless wife. And he was the loving husband pursuing her and forgiving her and all this sort of stuff. So there's a very strong sense of a nuptial, we might call it, or spousal relationship. It was a sort of metaphor for the relationship with God. And yeah. I think we felt that very strongly. We felt a very strong sense that we were in a romantic relationship with Jesus. I mean, it was very, very personal.

And just because you are wearing a habit and you're a nun and you've taken vows of chastity doesn't mean you never have erotic feelings. We were supposed to, of course, deny them and not encourage them. And so we were very sort of controlled and very strict about all these sort of things, but I think there were involuntary feelings that might sort of arise. And it wasn't necessarily arousal in a specifically sexual sense that you might feel towards Jesus, but I think there was definitely a very strong sense of romance. I think if you read some of St. Teresa's writings on her relationship with Jesus in prayer, you do also get the sense that really deep prayer can actually be quite romantic. And I think - yeah. There might be a sublimated Eros going on, definitely.

GROSS: I want to ask you about the different views of an authoritarian community. One of the older sisters referred to the supernatural spirit of obedience. But then there's...

COLDSTREAM: Yes.

GROSS: ...The question of - is that just authoritarian, or is that something that could lead to a new form of transcendence? And I suspect you saw both sides of that.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. I mean, that's such a good question. I mean, it's a really intelligent question. I mean, the supernatural spirit of obedience was a phrase we used a lot. It was very common currency. The idea was that we weren't living lives that were merely natural. We were living supernatural lives. And the supernatural was the kind of - the effects of the Holy Spirit and the effects of our relationship with God.

So obviously, you can reframe authoritarianism as - I mean, you could reframe anything, really, in supernatural terms, and we did. So was talking about a supernatural spirit of obedience, which meant we saw God through the prioress, and whatever the prioress said we saw as coming straight from God - was - you know, was it supernatural? Or were there elements of control going on that were actually less benign?

It's impossible to know. But obviously, if you accord all power and agency and authority to one person in a group of 20, and that person is continually reelected and never challenged, never questioned, never open to discussing or reviewing things, you've obviously got a setup where, you know, it's very, very open to abuse because you've got one person who is basically given carte blanche. And everybody else will let her do whatever she wants.

And I think it is a real danger in very isolated religious communities that what starts off as something that's conceived in a spiritual way can become all too human in that, you know, human beings do - you know, when they're given power, they can abuse it. And communities can be very complicit in that, too. Especially vowed communities of nuns can be - you know, can be very - in those days, very compliant and very unquestioning and timid.

So I think there was a timidity that gave free rein to one or two people. And at one point, that kind of expanded into a sort of clique. There was a sort of coterie of people who were really, like, the sort of power group who were driving everything - and their agenda was to keep everything unchanged, as it had been - and were very resistant to any suggestion that we should have more dialogue or questioning or more discussion. So yeah. It was really difficult.

GROSS: I want to ask you about something very extreme and shocking and horrifying that happened to you, which is that the sister who had become, you know, basically the mother superior of the monastery, although the word is a prioress...

COLDSTREAM: Prioress. Yeah.

GROSS: Yeah.

COLDSTREAM: Prioress.

GROSS: She beat you. She kind of, like, dragged you out of bed, across the floor and beat you.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: What happened?

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. Well, this was not the perennial prioress. It was quite strange. We had a sort of prioress who was the sort of natural leader who everybody was - everybody loved, basically, but had quite big problems with as well, I think. Some people did. This was another prioress. This was a relatively new prioress that - in my later years, when there had been some changes in the structure of the community. And I think she was having a breakdown. I think she was - I mean, I've often wondered why she took it out on me so physically.

But what was happening was this was an expression of a much wider kind of thing that was going on in the whole community. There were breakdowns happening. There were tempers flying. There were people, you know, being carted off the - to the infirmary, having had physical breakdowns. I mean, the community went through a time of sort of sickness, if you like, when there was this massive stressful eruption of disagreement about, you know, who should be prioress and how the authority of the prioress should be mediated.

And there were - it - basically, there were two points of view. There were two groups. And there was a sort of breakaway clique who resisted the rest of the community, so it felt like the community was split in two. And I think people were just struggling so much. This particular moment when I was beaten - I think that the prioress who did that to me was basically somebody who was experiencing such extreme frustration. And she just didn't know how - you know, she was just taking it out on me. I don't know.

But when you said it was an extremely shocking thing, I know it reads as shocking when I describe it in the book. And people notice that, of course. It's a dramatic moment in the book. In reality, I think that there were other things that were far more shocking.

I think that the fact that somebody cracked up and beat me - yeah. Of course, it's horrible. But, I mean, basically, I felt that the psychological sort of - psychological cruelty was much more difficult to cope with because this was something that lasted 10 minutes, when I was dragged out of bed and beaten. And nobody knew that - we were alone, again, you know, behind closed doors in an infirmary cell. And, you know, I wasn't disabled by it. I mean, I wasn't sort of - you know, I could still function afterwards. I was just a bit bruised and a bit sore and a bit shocked. But basically, psychological sort of cruelty, I suppose, for want of a better word, is something much harder to deal with when you're very isolated, and you've got nobody to talk to about it.

GROSS: So when you talk about the psychological aspects being worse, can you give us an example of what you mean?

COLDSTREAM: Well, I think there was a sort of - a withholding of human warmth and affection. And there was also lots of deliberate little humiliations that certain people might, in authority, administer to younger sisters in order to quote-unquote keep them humble or break their spirit. This was a very traditional thing in monasticism - that you would be made to feel small, that you'd be made to feel unloved or rejected, and it was all part of sort of character formation. It sounds stark just saying it in the cold light of day, but it was like that. And you felt terribly lonely and terribly crushed by some of these sort of things.

BIANCULLI: Catherine Coldstream speaking to Terry Gross in 2024. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's conversation from 2024 with Catherine Coldstream. Her memoir, "Cloistered: My Years As A Nun," is now out in paperback.

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GROSS: At some point, you decided to literally run away. So briefly, like, was there a breaking point for you where you decided...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: ...I can't handle it anymore?

COLDSTREAM: Well, I think the night I ran away, I'd obviously reached breaking point, but I didn't break. I think I - actually, I think I ran away to forestall breaking point. I'd seen others breaking, and I thought, why are so many people in my age group - we were the younger ones. You know, why are so many people having breakdowns? And a few people had had to go to hospital and then had to leave 'cause they were having, you know, mental breakdowns and things.

And I thought, gosh. You know, the pressure is so great. Maybe I'm going to have a breakdown. So I kind of ran away to maybe avoid reaching breaking point, actually. Yeah. I - but I did go back after that for two years, so I hadn't reached breaking point. I don't think I did reach breaking point in the sense that, you know, I was ever made - you know, I think I always retained a sense of buoyancy and hope somehow, on some level. And maybe that's why I had to leave. I was worried that I'd be broken if I stayed.

GROSS: You explained why you ran away from the monastery. And then you returned for two more years but decided after those two years to leave for good and to do it, you know, the legit way. Why did you leave the second time around?

COLDSTREAM: I think going back to monasticism after having done something as dramatic as running away meant it was never going to be the same again. And although there was a large part of me that was very at home in the Carmelite life in that later stage, I think I eventually realized that part of me had moved on. Part of me had developed beyond what could really be held within the cloistered life. I'd done too much questioning by then. And I felt - I think I just felt, ultimately, that it was the right thing to do. Yeah. But it was very difficult.

GROSS: When you first entered the world, and you knew it was for real and it was permanent, what were some of the hardest things to adjust to and some of the most joyful things to welcome?

COLDSTREAM: Again, beautifully put question, because it was dual. It was two-edged. The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world, so I found noise very difficult. And I found talking to people very difficult, actually. I mean, now...

GROSS: You were...

COLDSTREAM: ...I don't.

GROSS: ...Out of practice.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

COLDSTREAM: I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact of - you know, sort of I liked being left alone, and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on. So that was really difficult. And I didn't like the sense of - well, obviously I'd got used to a very ordered and structured world that had a kind of peaceful vibe, although, of course, you know, as I described, things were simmering and seething under the surface because we were human beings. But outwardly it was a very quiet and peaceful way of life.

But there were things that, of course, I hugely enjoyed. I mean, I loved the feeling of just being - the physical freedom of just being able to just go wherever you wanted to. I remember the first time I went to the sea and, you know, just sort of running along the beach, hair flapping in the wind, jumping into the waves, you know? I mean, the physical freedom was wonderful.

You know, I enjoyed going for a drink as well. I mean, you know, this was - I remember I spent a bit of time in a sort of halfway house outside the monastery where I was having a bit of counseling, and there was another nun there. It was some sort of more secular type of religious order. And there was another nun from a much more outgoing sort of apostolic order. And I remember we went to the pub together, and that was brilliant. I mean, I really enjoyed having a pint, and I really enjoyed going for an Indian meal. That was amazing.

So there were things I enjoyed, like just nice food and just freedom and being able to lie in in the mornings and have baths - you know, just creature comforts that I'd been denied and that I was - my body was aching for relief and rest. And, you know, I hadn't had any form of - you know, pleasure was all really pared - you know, drained out of our lives. So those pleasures were great, and I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by, yeah, the - a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on.

GROSS: Thank you so much for talking with us. And I have to say, I admire your courage entering a monastery because you give up so much to do it. It's such...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: It's such a stark life. No matter how rich it is, you give up so much. So I imagine - I admire your courage in doing that. I also admire your courage in leaving and at some point knowing it wasn't the life you wanted to live any longer. So...

COLDSTREAM: Yeah.

GROSS: And...

COLDSTREAM: Well, I think - yeah.

GROSS: And I thank you for talking about all of that with us.

COLDSTREAM: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Terry. I mean, it's been fantastic having this conversation. Thank you so much for, you know, your interest in the book. And yeah. It's been really good talking to you.

BIANCULLI: Catherine Coldstream speaking to Terry Gross in 2024. Her book, "Cloistered: My Years As A Nun," about her religious and emotional journey while spending a dozen years in a monastery in England, is now out in paperback.

Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews "The Hawk," the new TV series starring Will Ferrell. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. In the new TV series "The Hawk," Will Ferrell stars as a zany former golf star who's trying to regain his mojo and regain champion status. Our critic-at-large John Powers says that the show has its flaws, but delivers exactly what you would expect from Ferrell - goofy, good humor that's too wild even to be a parody of the traditional comeback story. Here is John's review.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the daunting intellects of the 20th century. But when it came to entertainment, he liked dumb comedies. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, he wrote, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Few stars have spent more time roaming these valleys than Will Ferrell. Ever since becoming beloved on "Saturday Night Live," he specialized in a brand of surreal, light-hearted goofiness striking for its lack of meanness. His trademark role is that of the blusterous man-child or overgrown boy. In Hollywood hits like "Elf," "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights," he used that persona to create carnivalesque movies. They blend genre parodies, musical numbers, physical shtick, mockery of male bravado and moments of bottom-bearing slapstick far bolder than you find in his more guarded peers, like Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller.

But movie comedy has fallen on hard times. And like many others, he's turned to Netflix for a new series - "The Hawk." Working a similar turf, if not style, to Sandler's "Happy Gilmore," it's an amiably shambly golfing comedy that finds him doing all the familiar Will Ferrell things. Although he's an acquired taste I've never fully acquired, I found myself laughing enough to watch all 10 half-hour episodes.

He plays Lonnie Hawkins - aka the Hawk - a self-absorbed pro golfer who was No. 1 in the world in 2004. Then he choked on his final putt of the U.S. Open and went into a tailspin that's kept him off the PGA Tour for years. Still hoping to get back to the top, he plays small tournaments along with his new caddie, Sam. That's Fortune Feimster, a free-wheeling lesbian he stumbles across in a Walmart parking lot. With her help, Hawk goes on a hot streak and gets back on the tour, much to the delight of his adoring fans, who always had loved the braggadocio and crowd-pleasing antics that enraged the stuffed shirts of the golf establishment.

Not everyone is delighted by his return. His mere presence annoys his foul-tongued ex-wife, Stacy - that's Molly Shannon - and unleashes an Oedipal meltdown on his son, Lance - that's Jimmy Tatro - also a professional golfer, a muscled-up ball of tension engaged to a wellness influencer who, in a witty twist, is the one character who isn't bonkers.

Lonnie and Lance head toward the inevitable golfing showdown alongside their smug nemesis, played by Luke Wilson. The question becomes, how can Lonnie win the Open and reconcile with his son? Naturally, Lonnie's golfing methods are certifiably inane. Here at the tee, he has an imaginary conversation with his golf ball before unleashing a mighty drive.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE HAWK")

WILL FERRELL: (As the Hawk) What have we got here, little Callaway 1? Want to go for a little ride? Huh? What's that? You're going to have to speak up louder than that. Oh, you want to go far. You want to go into outer space. You're going to go flying through that air, screaming your head off with pure ecstasy as you explode into the cosmos. OK. Let's do it. Let's go for a ride.

(SOUNDBITE OF GOLF BALL THWACKING)

FERRELL: (As the Hawk) That's how it's done.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

POWERS: Now, silly comedies need to be short. "The Hawk" clocks in at nearly five hours, more than three hours longer than any of Ferrell's hits. The story's too thin to support such length, even when buttressed by amusing shenanigans, of which there are plenty. There are songs and fantasy sequences, surprise cameos and insults whizzing around like gunfire. There's a ludicrous scene at a urinal, a hilariously deployed pickle jar, a nifty gag about a tower made of doughnuts, even a throwaway joke about E.M. Forster's novel "Maurice," a reminder that dumb comedies are made by smart people.

And of course, there's Ferrell, a famously nice guy whose annoying comic style is as polarizing as he himself is not. Lonnie is a good role for him, in part because he's a devoted golfer who often turns up at celebrity pro-ams, and partly because he may identify a bit with the Hawk. Although his fans still love him, his biggest movies were back in the aughts.

With his large frame and suburban dad's bland face, just perfect for portraying self-delighted narcissism, Ferrell gives Lonnie his all, whether flying into a panicked frenzy when he's trapped inside a car for 10 seconds, singing the Baby Back Ribs jingle or looking stunned when people say he's heartless for doing something heartless.

Where there's usually something nasty lurking within comics who play overgrown boys - Sandler excels at dark, dramatic roles - Ferrell always exudes innocence. Even though Lonnie lets everyone down who loves him, he never really feels like a bad guy. As "The Hawk" sloped toward its sneaky quasi-sentimental ending, I found myself respecting Ferrell's love of and commitment to unabashed silliness. Although, like Lonnie Hawkins, he's a bit too old for the young man's game he's playing, he still pulls off some unreal shots.

BIANCULLI: John Powers reviewed "The Hawk," Will Ferrell's new Netflix series. On Monday's show, novelist Leila Slimani. Her trilogy is inspired by three generations of her Moroccan family. She writes from her dual perspective as biracial, with members of her family representing the countries of the colonized and colonizer. In Morocco, it's illegal to have sex outside of marriage. She grew up associating sex with danger. Hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/thisisfreshair. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive.

(SOUNDBITE OF ERNIE KRIVDA'S "IRV'S AT MIDNIGHT")

BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Herzfeld and Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper.

For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

(SOUNDBITE OF ERNIE KRIVDA'S "IRV'S AT MIDNIGHT")

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.