The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Quatro, Jamie. Fire Sermon. Grove Press, January 2018.

Fire Sermon is a fictional narrative that intimately chronicles the life of a character named Margaret (Maggie) Ellman. The story of Margaret’s life is told out of chronological order, with fragmented thoughts written in a poetic style and dripping with figurative language that provides readers with an insight into Maggie’s thoughts, memories, and unspoken desires. The opening of the novel begins with the line, “Shall we walk back?” (3). This moment, this very line, is a turning point in Maggie’s life and begins an affair with a man who is not her husband. Just as the rest of the novel, this moment is told out of chronological order, with author Jamie Quatro presenting readers with Maggie’s biggest struggle and character flaw from the very opening page. The novel is broken into three unnamed chapters, all closely following Maggie as she weaves back and forth through three main sections of her life. The first is Margaret’s personal life, where she is married to her college sweetheart, Thomas, and has two children. The second section of her life is her time balancing her role as a doting mother with her strong lust for James, as the two develop deep, intimate connections with one another. The third, and final, section of Maggie’s life is her personal agony and anguish after she cheats on Thomas and tries to redefine her self-identity.

Although the organization of Quatro’s three chapters with Maggie’s three life sections seems balanced, it is merely coincidence. Each chapter swirls readers back and forth as Maggie lulls herself into and out of past memories. This, then, provides readers with a very lifelike interpretation of how a person thinks in the present when they are longing for an unattainable love who is elsewhere. Maggie forges her life path in college. She is dating a man named Thomas, who gushes to her about his abusive upbringing, growing up in a broken home with no mother and an alcoholic father. Maggie’s heart breaks as she watches her strong boyfriend crumble at the thought of his boyhood. She decides to comfort him the only way she knows how and allows Thomas to take her virginity right then. Maggie leaves Thomas after having sex and rushes back to her dorm room, terrified and anxious. Her own upbringing was in a home with married parents who were deeply religious and passed those religious beliefs onto Maggie, who saw this pre-marital affair to be highly sinful. She prays to God and vows she will marry Thomas no matter what as a way of making amends to God for her sin. The two marry shortly after she graduates, but Maggie views the union as duty more so than love. They are happy in the beginning. They have a son and a daughter, and Maggie takes care of the children while Thomas goes to work. She loses any desire to have sex with Thomas and shuts him out to the point that Thomas becomes frustrated. His own anger beacons forth in the form of rape, as he forces himself on Maggie each time she refuses to have sex with him.

Maggie becomes stifled in her marriage. Thomas does not believe in God like she does and does not enjoy talking about religion. Maggie reads poems from an author named James Abbott and is so moved by one of his pieces that she writes him a thank you note for his effect on her. James writes back and the two become intimate pen pals, sharing academic quandaries and book suggestions. Neither of their spouses can provide the academic prowess both are starving for, and James and Maggie cannot help but continue writing one another. They meet in person a few times when they both attend the same writer’s conferences. A spark ignites between them, and Maggie becomes obsessed with the thought of being with James. Her world with her family becomes gloomy and dull while her yearning fantasies for James are enlightened and poetic. Both are loyal spouses; both are devout Christians who believe adultery is a sin. Maggie tries to end their relationship before they do anything they will regret, but she cannot help it. She meets James at a conference in Chicago, where he invites himself back to her hotel room to have sex. Maggie describes the sex with James to be a religious experience and relishes the fact that she orgasms, since she has not felt any sexual urges for Thomas in years. She is relieved to finally learn what it was like to be with James.

Margaret’s thrill quickly morphs into extreme and intense guilt for her sin. The affair ends after one night, Thomas disappears, and Maggie is left alone in her marriage and questioning every decision she has ever made. She is consumed by religious contemplation and by her anger at religious rules for pinning her into positions that make her agonize over saying yes to sinful things that bring her pleasure. She cannot decide whether to tell her husband about the affair but chooses to stay married to him. James never appears in Maggie’s life again, and she grows old with Thomas. Quatro provides descriptions of Maggie’s acceptance of Thomas and of her marriage as she settles in to the idea of staying married to Thomas, a good man who she never felt passionately about but who she has grown to love and respect as her life partner and father to her children.

Jamie Quatro provides gut wrenching and religious-based themes using vivid, fiery language. The springboard for many of the themes is Maggie’s deep religious beliefs, which is what leads to her deep seeded resentment toward God, her husband, her life, and the origins of her guilt. The largest theme in this novel places religion as the primary oppressive force within a person’s life. Maggie sets her life path toward marriage with Thomas simply because her religious laws made her feel she had to. She feels guilt over her affair with James because her religion states that adultery is a sin. Maggie’s affair with James allows her to realize that her pious life is what has led to her immense unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Religion has been pushing her down, controlling her actions and spends her time in the novel going through the realization process. Maggie’s oppression leads her to extreme unhappiness, so she lashes out in unhealthy and forbidden ways. This is the second largest theme in the novel and is depicted in the level of arousal Maggie feels for anything she defines as forbidden, which is also what her religion finds to be forbidden. James is not the first person Maggie lusts over, he is merely the first person she has sex with. Prior to James, Maggie spent a lot of time lusting over forbidden men because she was turned on by the thought of temptation. She enjoys teetering on the verge of doing something sinful until James presents an opportunity to have sex with him in Chicago. As soon as Maggie crosses the line from flirting with temptation to committing a sin, she loses control of herself and her brain begins to spin out of control. In her most revealing moment, Maggie goes on a fiery and quasi-blasphemous rant in a section in Chapter Three entitled Fire Sermon, wherein she decides that she does not want to follow God and that humans were always meant to live hedonistically, as people who go after whatever satisfies their desires. God, Maggie concludes, only created restrictions because he knew the tortuous feeling one experiences when avoiding forbidden things is exactly what will drive people into religion, seeking solace and comfort in having a reason for following rules designed to torture them.