Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me

Description

Who knows how fictional or non-fictional this is.

Cf. Marro, Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican for a better-documented, non-fiction account.

Anthology containing:

1. Disguised as a Man: Malachi Mart & Me Part I: The Encounter
2. Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me Part II: Hostage to the Devil
3. Disguised as a Man: Malachi Martin & Me Part III: Windswept House

Originally published as one long book under the pseudonym, Sally Hawthorne. The longer book broke down naturally to a trilogy, so each more readable section is available now. The true story recounts the long love affair between the late Father Malachi Martin, a man whose reputation is, even now, notorious and enigmatic, and the author, who was nineteen when she first met Martin, who was nearly sixty.

Part I recounts the author's discovery of and initial interest in Malachi Martin. She was still in high school at the time and, while she developed a crush on the author, she never expected anything to come of it. But she wrote to Martin and he wrote back. Coming from a background of severe abuse and neglect, the desperate teenager was flattered but, when she met him during her first college spring break, she was shocked by Martin's rapid attempts to seduce her body as well as her mind. With no prior amorous experience, and very little kindness or care in her past, she felt obliged to submit to Martin's attentions and willingly believed his promises to make her his one and only love, provided that she find a way to be in New York because "love requires presence." This false promise, along with countless others, set in motion a series of poor decisions that brought about the catastrophic consequences recounted in Part II: Hostage to the Devil

In Part II, Hostage to the Devil, a number of ghastly events unfold and the author begins to realize that Martin is not only unreliable but dangerous and perhaps even insane.

Part III describes Martin's increasingly bizarre thinking and behavior and the author's reluctant realization that she has been just another victim in his serial seduction of the minds of people who wanted to believe what proved to be confabulation, religious fraud and spiritual exploitation.

All attempts at writing a genuine biography of Martin proved futile, for Malachi Martin was a master of confabulation. Instead, it became a memoir of infatuation, seduction, faith and its erosion, and what it means to tell the truth and to recover autonomy and integrity after living in fantasy world that Malachi fostered in the mind of the author. Martin's brilliance is apparent on almost every page, but the books raise more questions than they answer. Exorcism, extraterrestrials, politics and, of course, religion, are among the major themes of Martin's stories, tales that strain the credulity of even his most ardent lover and fan.

Sarah Colwell is a writer with a background in religious philosophy, research and design. She was born in Texas and completed a master's degree at Columbia University. Since then she has lived in New York, Japan, northern New Mexico, Ecuador and India. Now living in Algeria, Sarah has worked as a librarian, a fashion designer, a Tokyo housewife and a merchant mariner. Her literary mentor and longtime lover was the late priest-author and alleged exorcist, Malachi Martin.

cf. Héloïse et Abélard