Our theme for the month of June is “Celebrities and Me.” Writers were asked to select and write about a celebrity with whom they feel some connection.

Is Dorothy Day a “celebrity,” in the contemporary understanding of the word? Probably not; I am stretching the category, and this month’s theme, somewhat. But the Catholic church formally refers to her as a “Servant of God” and she may one day be canonized as a saint against her own objections, so I think we can agree that, generally speaking, she warrants further attention.

If you are not familiar with Ms. Day, you might do what I did while writing this piece: peruse her very long Wikipedia page, read a New Yorker profile prompted by new books about her life, and open tabs that link to several biographies, autobiographies, documentaries, and other such material. Here is the short version: as a young person, she was a socialist journalist legendary in Greenwich Village for her drinking, had several high-profile bohemian friends and lovers, and wrote a weird novel about her affair with an older writer and her subsequent abortion and suicide attempt that she later called “a very bad book.” She sold the movie rights, bought a cottage on Staten Island, got pregnant again, named her daughter Tamar, and converted to Catholicism. At which point her atheist lover and her many anarchist friends were confused and concerned. But Dorothy Day was undeterred (was she ever deterred?) and went on to become even more relentless as an advocate for the poor, even more prolific as a writer, even more likely to get thrown in jail for protesting nuclear armament, strike-breaking, poor working conditions, and the Vietnam War. 

I must admit I have not watched the documentaries. I have not read her novel or the biographies. I don’t know exactly when or how I became aware of the person of Dorothy Day. Probably college. I do remember emailing with my friend Sarah in those first disorienting months after graduation and a joke she made about the danger of adopting as a role model a woman who titled her autobiography The Long Loneliness. It was a good joke. A bleak joke, and distressingly apt. But we were in the market for role models. We were very much grieving the fact that the ideas of Christianity and womanhood we had been offered were so small, and we were drawn to Dorothy Day because she was so very, very different. Her politics, insubordination, and numerous arrests suggested that having a respectable family life, being nice, and baking casserole was not, after all, God’s indisputable plan for all women. A radical Catholic socialist seemed like a helpful counterpoint to the prevailing feminine ideal of my childhood: quiet, maternal, domestic. Here, instead: an activist, a contemplative, a woman without apology, who loved God more absolutely than I have ever managed to. 

Here is why I love Dorothy Day: she seems to have given not one single solitary shit about what other people thought about her. She had passionate convictions. She pursued them. She even managed to change her mind and regret her own choices and still carry on with unabated boldness. She made everyone mad. Her Archdiocese got so annoyed by her pacifism they sued to remove “Catholic” from the name of her newspaper, and J. Edgar Hoover opened a file on her. She also believed and advocated for a number of things on which I hold different positions. But I need women like Dorothy Day because they model what it is to live like you actually believe the stuff that you profess. I aspire to make the powers of evil one-millionth as mad as Dorothy made them. I aspire to love Jesus half as much.

I wanted to end with one small piece of wisdom from Dorothy Day herself. I found it hard to choose. But perhaps these words, to remind us that she would not want to be unusual: “We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.”

Katie Van Zanen

Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.