Big Topics at Midnight

Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself is not only one woman's journey, but also a call for social change. Rooted in a lively spirituality, Nancy Thurston excavates history-family, personal, global-for the sake of cross-generational healing and transformed relationships.

Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself defies easy categorization. It's memoir and history and a celebration of the power of faith and myth and magic. It’s personal, and it’s about social change. Through the lenses of race, class, gender and spirituality, Nancy Thurston excavates history—personal, familial, global—for the sake of cross-generational healing and transformation. Big Topics at Midnight is one woman’s story—a Texas-born girl with an insatiable desire for awareness and an irresistible call from Spirit. On her journey, Nancy woke up to systemic abuses of money and power. She woke up to racism, classism and sexism. She woke up to herself. But that’s not all. Nancy woke up to herself as part of a much greater fabric, one that included the voices of her ancestors, the hopes of her descendants, the messy and miraculous humanity of her contemporaries and personal and global history she didn’t want to know but couldn’t ignore. Consequently, Nancy’s story belongs to all of us. Midnight is a dark time, a time when we’d like to be sleeping, but we can’t if we’re troubled and awakened by issues that won’t let us close our eyes. Now is a midnight time. Big Topics at Midnight holds the hope that the same diversity that has separated us can provide the variety of tools, perspectives and experiences we need to navigate this moment in history, together. Nancy’s hope is that her story will spark you to remember your story and to know yourself as part of a greater whole. We need each other. Future generations need us all.

Nancy Thurston was born in West Texas to a geologist father and artist mother. She tried hard to be a good Christian girl, and thought other neighborhoods looked like hers—predominantly white and upper middle class. Trained in physical therapy and spiritual formation, Nancy expanded the boundaries of her work to include bringing her money into alignment with her heart and faith. This led to questions of social justice, mystical faith and a longing for cross-class conversations and relationships. Through her work with three organizations dear to her heart— Be Present, Inc., Harvest Time and Community Wholeness Venture—Nancy woke up to the ways race, class and gender had played out historically and today in ways she’d never noticed as a child. Nancy dove right into the struggles and depths of her own life, the lives of her ancestors and the limited history she’d learned in school, trusting that the very places that had divided human beings held the key to transformation, renewal and justice. Nancy lives in Portland, Oregon with her Texas childhood sweetheart, now husband, Howard. She has two adult children. Big Topics at Midnight is her first book.