We Broke All the Rules

And still published our book on Mary Magdalene on her feast day, July 22

For Mary.

A five petaled flower—or star—rests below her name on the very first page.

Four hundred and twenty. That was the final count: a number attempting to measure the unquantifiable, an effort and an adventure that could never be tallied in hours, days, tears, or epiphanies. A book that had been a very long time coming.

This is a book that, in another lifetime, would have been burned. And in this one, it never would have survived the machinery of traditional publishing. It would have been deemed too long, too strange, too audacious, too difficult to categorize. Its sharpest edges would have been softened. Its wildest claims restrained. Its poetic voice diminished. Its symbols reduced to ornament— overexplained, or stripped of their power to reveal what ordinary language cannot. Yes, its form would have been dismantled until whatever remained might have been marketable, but it would no longer have been this book.

We never submitted it to a publishing house. We never queried an agent. We did not wait for an editor, an institution, or an industry to decide whether this story was permissible, credible, or ready to be told. That was the road not taken, never walked, scarcely even glanced down.

From the beginning, we knew we would have to break the rules: the publishing rules, the marketing rules, the business rules, every established guideline for how to “do it right.” We wrote the book as it demanded to be written, built the path beneath our own feet, and brought it into the world ourselves.

And we did it amid the daily chaos and beauty of mothering: the dishes, diapers, practices, homework, and endless acts of care. Never in a straight line, one word neatly following another, but through years of reading, researching, learning, questioning, and turning the same ideas over and over between us. Sometimes over matcha together, but more often through endless voice notes, Notes app fragments, and sprawling Google Docs, until what we could feel but could not yet see slowly began to take form.

The seasons changed, and babies were born. Literally. Kelly had her fourth son, while Alicia’s brood of five moved through milestones of their own. The writing ebbed and flowed around our families, but remained alive within our friendship, always drawing us onward. What began as a question became a treasure hunt, where the smallest flicker of a number, a name, a woman, or a symbol could open onto another path, and then another, forming an unbroken trail of magic and mystery.

We had been on a mission. Even while this space, The Magdalene Thread, where we first began sharing our perspective on Mary Magdalene through a series of essays and conversations in the summer of 2024, appeared silent, dormant, even dead, it was nothing of the sort. Like a forest bare in winter, or the expansive darkness of the night sky, what appears to be blank space carries life within it, growing and burning deep beneath the surface.

Breathlessly, at what often felt like a bareback gallop, we worked to bring onto the page what we knew mattered: what had been left unsaid, what had been buried, what remained too dangerous to say about Mary Magdalene. We needed to see it written, printed, and placed into the hands of readers—to restore the truth to where it belonged.

It was a truth pieced together from evidence and grounded in history and scholarship, yet one that few within academia, and fewer still within Christianity, would dare to name in full:

Mary Magdalene was the Beloved Disciple—the eyewitness whose memories stand behind the Gospel attributed to “John.”

Not the hidden wife glimpsed in a painting, as The Da Vinci Code proposed in thrilling novel form.

The truth, as usual, is stranger than fiction.

And perhaps because we were so consumed with bringing that truth into form, we forgot almost entirely about the ordinary rituals of putting a book into the world. Had we pushed back our fated deadline, we might have managed some of the basics of announcing a life’s work: an email, a text, a post, some small sign to the expansive community we were so grateful to have kindled here.

To let you know that while we appeared to have gone underground, or disappeared entirely, we were excavating what had been buried and hidden, pouring every ounce of life force we could spare outside of mothering into restoring the fullest possible picture of a first century woman.

“Defying gravity, what is ancient becomes future when the memory of a woman who lived two thousand years ago arrives bearing answers to questions long surrendered to the unknowable.”

- Chapter 10, Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat

And now, somehow, she is here: our very first book, self-published by two amateur writers, devoted to an ancient woman known and beloved by millions across centuries, released into the world on her feast day, July 22.

Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat:

Stories, Symbols & the History of Mary Magdalene

Writing this asked more of us than we knew how to give and carried us far beyond where we thought we were going. But a book changes the moment it enters the world. Whatever we discovered, gathered, and placed within these pages is no longer ours alone. It belongs now to those who recognize something in its symbols, follow its questions into unexpected places, and carry its revelations farther than we ever could.

There was no preorder. No long campaign leading here. You can simply download her now on Kindle or order the paperback through Amazon or Bookshop.org.

For a limited time only, the ebook is exclusively available on Amazon Kindle—so anyone with a Kindle Unlimited account may access it for free! It is also available in paperback on Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and can be requested at your local library or bookstore.

There is much more to come.

But for now, thank you. For being here. For reading. For remaining in this space, even through the long silence.

We carried this book as far as we could. With profound gratitude, we now place her in your hands.

xx,

Alicia & Kelly

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For more on how we brought Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat to life, and future essays and conversations on Mary Magdalene and the sacred feminine, subscribe to The Magdalene Thread.