'Love and Salt' offers beautiful, bittersweet story told in letters

(CNS photo)

"Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters" is a bittersweet book about conversion, faith, love and loss told in beautifully crafted letters between two young women. It is hard not to treat this book, so uncommonly honest, almost with reverence, for within its pages lies such personal and raw emotion that treating it with anything less would feel wrong.
The book is a collection of nearly three years of letters between Amy Andrews, a writer and mathematics teacher at Northwestern University, and Jessica Mesman Griffith, who is also a writer. Andrews and Griffith met each other in a graduate class and formed a friendship over their mutual interest in writing about God.
One Lenten season, as Andrews was preparing to become a Catholic with Griffith as her sponsor, the two promised each other to write a letter for every day of Lent. And so the correspondence began, but did not stop. Their letters became a forum for their spiritual friendship and as a platform for personal disclosures about life, death, faith and doubt.