While Read’s father might have been
an atheist (and insisted that his family be so, too), her choice of an altruistic profession was influenced by her father’s admonition to always help the weak. Read’s choice of profession in psychiatric nursing also speaks to a certain sturdiness of character, to be drawn while in her twenties to the sometimes overwhelming challenges presented by this type of work.
While Read’s atheism offered little consolation in her patients’ often heartbreaking stories (not to mention in the deaths of her own parents), she still felt duty-bound to care for each patient with love and respect as an intrepid Irish nun sets the example for her early on.
Some patients seemed like ghosts of their former selves, having lost their memories completely; some remembered certain details, but only a few painful or sad ones. Some seemed bedridden, immobile, and unable to communicate – or were they?
Even in those days of her avowed atheism, Read seems to have already possessed - perhaps unawares -some niggling doubts about the absoluteness of her atheistic beliefs.
When not at her parents’ home on the weekends, Read would join her fellow nurses in off-duty hours for alcohol-drenched recreation, often laced with black humor.
Others indulged in sexual adventures. Read herself had been nurturing a facsimile of a romance with a London doctor, a tenuous type of affair now so commonplace. One day, however, she wakes up to a dreary realization.
She writes, ‘I remember sitting on the floor of my flat in Belsize Park and saying lucidly, “This is hell. I’m in hell.”’ Shortly thereafter, the liaison comes to its painful end. Fortunately, Read finds that writing offers her solace from the pain, and thus is born her vocation in poetry.
Years later, she is married to Fabio, an Italian carabiniere, with a young daughter in tow. They live in the seaside town of Santa Marinella, a half hour outside Rome. After the success of her first book of poetry (which dealt with the themes of sex, motherhood and death), she starts preparing for her next book.
Steeped in the “liberated woman’s” mindset, her next project was to be a kind of “handbook” about the vagina and present “just the facts” to the reader. A physician-friend specializing in sexual health was to be her collaborator. Read had planned to interview women of all classes and worldviews, religious and non-religious alike, literally, from prostitutes to nuns.
REGINA | 25
An Atheist Confronts Catholics’
Cringe-inducing Views on Sex