Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like Kate Bowler
Bowler writes about mortality and faith with real wit and zero patience for tidy silver linings. The eight writers below share her territory: memoirs written from inside a terminal or life-altering diagnosis, and writers who take faith seriously without softening its hard edges.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 authors · Memoir · Faith · Mortality · Updated August 2026 · ~7 min read
Quick answer
The closest match to Kate Bowler is Paul Kalanithi, whose memoir When Breath Becomes Air was written while he was dying of lung cancer. For faith writing with the same irreverent honesty, read Nadia Bolz-Weber or Anne Lamott.
Why trust this list: Every author below is one I’ve actually read, not a genre tag or algorithmic match. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
- The closest match — written while dying of cancer
- A young diagnosis, and the years of living with uncertainty after
- Faith, delivered with real irreverence
- Grace and humor for people who find church exhausting
- A theologian who left the pulpit and kept writing about faith anyway
- Reinvention, told with the same unsparing honesty
- Grief turned into forward motion
- A different kind of crisis memoir, aimed at reinvention rather than mortality
- Frequently asked questions
Paul Kalanithi
Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at 36 and wrote When Breath Becomes Air, an unfinished memoir published posthumously, about facing death while still trying to figure out how to live.
The single closest match to Bowler’s project: a highly educated professional forced to confront mortality decades earlier than expected, writing with clear eyes rather than easy comfort.
Suleika Jaouad
Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms covers her leukemia diagnosis at 22, years of treatment, and the disorienting process of rebuilding a life afterward, including a 15,000-mile road trip once she was declared cancer-free.
Shares Bowler’s interest in what happens after the acute crisis passes — the long, uncertain middle of survivorship that doesn’t resolve as neatly as a recovery narrative promises.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
A tattooed, foul-mouthed former stand-up comic turned Lutheran pastor, Bolz-Weber writes about faith, addiction recovery, and grace with a directness that refuses the polished tone most religious writing defaults to.
The closest match on tone: irreverent, funny, and completely serious about faith at the same time, exactly the combination Bowler brings to writing about the prosperity gospel and her own illness.
Anne Lamott
Lamott writes about faith, addiction recovery, and imperfect parenting with self-deprecating humor and real spiritual seriousness underneath it, across decades of essay collections and memoirs.
A direct precursor to Bowler’s voice — funny, self-aware, unwilling to pretend faith makes anything simple, but genuinely committed to it anyway.
Barbara Brown Taylor
A former Episcopal priest who left parish ministry to teach religion, Brown Taylor writes theologically serious, literary memoir about doubt, darkness, and faith that doesn’t require certainty to hold up.
More explicitly theological than Bowler, but shares her refusal to treat doubt or hardship as failures of faith rather than part of it.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle’s memoirs trace addiction, a difficult marriage, and eventually leaving it to build a different kind of life, written with the same unguarded, confessional directness Bowler brings to illness.
A different subject — reinvention rather than mortality — but the same commitment to writing the messy, unresolved parts of a hard experience rather than smoothing them into a lesson.
Cheryl Strayed
Strayed’s Wild recounts her solo 1,100-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother’s death and her own life falling apart, written with the same wit-under-grief register Bowler uses for illness.
A different crisis, but the same underlying question: how do you keep moving forward through something that doesn’t have a tidy resolution.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love follows a year of travel and reinvention after a difficult divorce, written with the same accessible, personal warmth that makes Bowler’s harder subject matter approachable rather than distancing.
Lighter in subject matter than Bowler’s illness writing, but a useful comparison for the tone: warm, funny, personal, and genuinely reflective underneath the accessibility.
Frequently asked questions
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