Theological Trends Column
This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 01 (2026).
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Book Review
Beard:
A Memoir of a Marriage
Kelly Foster Lundquist,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025
Can a “system” abuse and devalue women? Most people would probably answer “yes” to that question. The idea that “the system” itself might be blamed for the ill-treatment of an individual, or a group, is one that most of us are familiar with, even if it is far too simplistic an explanation for why bad things happen. A better word for system might be “culture.” A culture, in simplest form, might be described as the shared assumptions of a group of people about the nature of reality, what it means to be a good person, how the world works. A culture is often hidden from the people inside it, just as a minnow swimming in a pond remains unaware of the water that surrounds and sustains it. The person inside of a culture might not even see the hurtful or toxic ideas and assumptions governing everyone’s behavior because that’s just how things are.
What is so fascinating, in this period in history, is to see the formation of a culture in mere decades, rather than over hundreds of years. The sudden rise of ideas like an LGBTQ “community” has come into being before our very eyes. That the assumptions inherent in that acronym obviously cut against other heretofore shared values — like the protection and care of women — seems, to me, a core irony of my lifetime. For an illustration of this devolution of the conditions of women in real time, Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (Eerdmans, 2025) is as good a place to start as any.
In another age and another culture, I think I might have been friends with Kelly Foster Lundquist, the author of this engaging, insightful, and tragic tale. Don’t pick up the book if you’re feeling peckish because you might wander into the kitchen and rummage around in the fridge, mid-paragraph. Her description of food is unctuous. Moreover, her good-humored charity towards everybody in her life makes this a breezy read, the dark pathos of betrayal hovering just under the surface.
For, a “beard,” in pop culture, is a woman destined to be cheated on. The decisions of men to misuse women and then lie and say that they are really the victims is unwittingly put on full display. Lundquist shows what happens when abandonment is recast as bravery, hate as love, and misogyny as men getting to express their true selves at the expense of women.
Disregarded. In my innocence, though the term has been around since the ’60s, I had never heard of a “beard” before I picked up this book. Everyone I tried to explain it to had, however, so perhaps the reader already knows what I am about to say. A beard is a woman, usually plain in appearance and sometimes in personality, who serves as a sort of psycho-social disguise for a man with same-sex proclivities. The man may marry such a woman knowing himself already to be inclined toward a homosexual lifestyle, or he may discover the truth about himself along the way, but his desires are almost always hidden from the woman. If and when she finds out, she is the last to know. Thus, she is also a fool.
Lundquist weaves pop culture, literary, and film references throughout the telling of her four-year marriage with Devin — a man who knew himself to be gay from early adolescence. The two met at a church camp where they served on staff. They were assigned to an afternoon of gardening, and the companionship quickly deepened in their discovery that they were both uncomfortable with Christian youth culture. Asked to “draw the image that comes to mind when we imagine God” (p. 9), Lundquist came up with a mental picture of a bowl of bland “steamed carrots” (13). “That was what health — somehow the opposite of sin — tasted like. That was eating what you ought. Suddenly that’s how I imagine God — my ultimate ‘ought’ — in this room of glowing young people: God is a bowl of carrots I don’t want to eat” (14).
Weaving together the years of her gradually dissipating faith, her gnawing hunger, and the intellectual world of the late ’90s and early 2000s, Lundquist appears to be a lot more enthusiastic and expressive about people like Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor than the biblical figures of Rachel or Leah.
Crucially, beards have been a feature of American culture because men could not safely be open about their sexuality. That is not really the case anymore. “If the beard’s beige serves as camouflage,” she writes, “gay men have got nothing for cover. In pop culture the queerness made legible on their bodies is flamboyant, meticulous, preoccupied with its own aesthetic. They are depicted as indifferent to, if not repulsed by, the bodies of the women who love them” (6–7). Lundquist thinks this depiction is unfair. The journey toward self-knowledge and self-acceptance is winding and perilous, especially when vestiges of Christian assumptions get in the way.
The men Lundquist loves — not only her husband, but all the “boys” of Boystown, Chicago, where she and Devin find their relationship shipwreck — must, she believes, love her as well. She is affectionate and accepting of them and feels it to be reciprocal. Even when they use her, ridicule her, and judge her, she never takes offense. It’s almost as if she doesn’t see it, or if she does, she experiences it as something akin to protection (187, 209–10).
In this way, Lundquist nuances and humanizes the experience of the beard. Sure, she was led along and lied to from the very first moments of her relationship with Devin. But that’s OK because Devin hadn’t yet accepted himself. She plays a crucial role in his life — not just to be cheated on, but to help him discover that following his heart — or whatever part of the body lust might best be associated with — is the only path to health and happiness.
Ravaged by Hunger. Lundquist writes that Devin resembles Montgomery Clift, “whose biography I’ve read so many times my hometown librarian used to laugh at me when I returned to check it out.” Devin’s jaw “is square like Clift’s. When he smiles to acknowledge my gaze, it’s with the same self-assured, sideways grin Clift used on Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun” (15). For those who haven’t seen the 1951 movie, Winters plays Alice Tripp, the woman the hero isn’t in love with.
Falling in love with Devin doesn’t make Lundquist a more secure and happy person. On the contrary, her anxiety about being worthy of so beautiful a man leads her to become anorexic, though she never uses that word. Lundquist describes herself as “athletic” in build, active, and strong. But she wants to fit into size 0 chinos. Her descriptions of food, throughout, are far more emotionally resonant than her relationship with Devin. Early on, she describes a scene in which she, in order to lose weight, says a bitter “no” to finishing off her friend’s dinner in a restaurant:
At least three uneaten shrimp, still warm, are left in the bowl over maybe a cup and a half of buttery pasta. I imagine pulling the plate over, my tongue beneath the first bite of shrimp, pools of its velvet sauce coating the inside of my cheeks. Sauvignon blanc and garlic. Lemon zest and shellfish stock. Crushed red pepper. Parsley. So much butter. Creamy, though, not at all greasy. Perfectly emulsified. Not even cold yet, but about to be tossed into a large black garbage bag in the rear of the restaurant. Even so, I don’t take the plate. I gnaw, instead, the green spine of my last leaf of romaine, and when the server takes our plates, Amanda stacks the still-full basket of focaccia and basil oil inside her pasta bowl. Then nothing remains on the table but my mug of steaming lemon water (I’ve been told it aids in digestion) and the syrupy dregs of her sweet iced tea. (33)
Eventually she fits into the chinos but is so bony that she catches every cold “within a one-mile radius” (36). To sleep, she writes, “I force a pillow between my newly knobby knees so I can sleep without pain. I roll one hip out further than the other in bed and trace the ridged V of each hollow socket” (36). She thinks about food continually. One night during her marriage, she goes to pick Devin up from his work in a restaurant, and she is offered pesto by the cook who says to her, “You’re getting too damn skinny, sweetheart. Eat it.” She accepts and, she writes, “I will eat that pesto so fast that I will sometimes slice my fingers along the edges of the blender blades, and I won’t care, because the licorice and pepper taste of basil overwhelms the trace of blood” (109).
Eventually, she gives up. “Even though I know I’ve been letting myself eat more than usual,” she laments, “it still surprises me when my size 0 pants suddenly become too tight to zip” (113). Fear is not “enough to contain the ravenous thing in me that doesn’t care if it cuts its fingers” (110).
Cheated On. Devin, from the first, is emotionally overwrought and conflicted about dating Lundquist and then marrying her. They are easy and comfortable around each other but whenever the idea of dating is raised, they have interminable conversations that exhaust them both. The night they finally decide to date, Devin spends a lot of it crying. Later, before they get married, they sit in his car outside of his family’s favorite restaurant for hours while he tells her about his childhood trauma. But he doesn’t tell her about the sex. “In the years to come,” she writes, “I will wonder what might have happened if he’d kept talking. As much as I’d like to believe, twenty-five years later, that I could have been a safe person for Devin to be honest with, the truth is I don’t know” (78). Later, when he and Lundquist are living in the neighborhood of Boystown in Chicago, Devin finally does admit to a heap of sexual liaisons (202–04).
As the account unfolds, Lundquist is pursuing a PhD in what she, humorously, calls “Boys.” Her dissertation has the working title Bowery Masculinity: Sexuality and Class in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Critique of Walt Whitman (193–94). The men around her in Boystown are overtly gay. The environment is saturated in sexual tropes, shops, bars, and promiscuity. Lundquist subtly allows the reader to see that everyone in Boystown knew Devin is gay. They are affectionate and kind to her, not wanting her to see the double life Devin is leading, not wanting to “hurt” her. After a while, as she begins to catch on, they pressure Devin to tell her “the truth” but he doesn’t (223).
“Counterintuitive as it might seem,” she explains,
I think part of me wanted to move to Boystown so Devin could, around us and through me, know other men who felt attracted to men. I thought if he knew other men who’d been ostracized and bullied like him and who, I assumed, knew the profound loneliness he must often have felt, that it might settle him. I wanted him to name these fears about himself until he released them and came back to me. Essentially, I wanted this gay place to make him straight. You might not call it conversion therapy, but not even Liza [Minnelli] could dance her way around the truth of what I expected from him (205).
She imagines that if Devin can “stop hating himself” he would be able to love her “no matter what sorts of sexual attraction or confusion he felt” (206). Throughout their short marriage, Lundquist and Devin are sexually active with each other, even while he is having relations with a variety of different men. Things come to a crisis, however, when Devin begins to see someone named Kevin. He persuades Lundquist that Kevin is really straight and that Devin is just helping him out — until she catches them alone in their apartment when she returns early from class. “I open the door to my apartment to find Kevin and Devin sitting closely together on the couch” (225). When Kevin leaves, she confronts Devin, “‘Kevin’s not straight, is he?’ I hear a sob and a long pause for breath. ‘No’” (243).
She doesn’t blame him, though. No one is really to blame, except perhaps God:
He tried. He’d been trying his whole life. He tried so hard he landed himself in the ER with chest pains three times before he even graduated high school. He tried so hard he’d gone to therapy for most of his adolescence. He tried so hard his entire abdomen had been filled with stress-induced shingles by the age of twenty-four. He tried. He tried. He tried. He’d prayed the prayers. He’d walked the aisles. He’d asked again and again and again to be changed, to be healed, to be redeemed. He’d written songs about God’s love for everyone, hoping to make those songs true about him too. He’d asked to be different, newer, better, kinder, more faithful. He’d beaten his body into submission countless times. He’d flagellated his heart with a thousand whips of the mind. And now, on the step, I know absolutely, more than I know my own name, more than the fact of my cold feet, that more than his fear of hell or God or exile, what Devin had feared more than anything else in the midst of all that trying, since that frozen night at camp when we almost kissed, was ever wounding me. (248–49)
Somehow recognizing Devin’s supposed efforts helps Lundquist end their marriage. She leaves her PhD program and eventually finds someone else to marry.
Deconstructed. Lundquist and her husband Devin try to attend church through their brief marriage. Before their move to Boystown they go to a well-heeled Presbyterian church that, at first, Lundquist finds comforting. “I know when to stand for the Apostle’s Creed,” she admits. “I know how to recite it without faltering, without looking at the bulletin, eyes up the whole time. I know when the enormous pipe organ will signal the beginning of the Doxology, to which I can manage a well-practiced alto part” (89). Devin, however, finds it painful to be there. “More often than not,” she recounts, “Devin writes notes to me in the church bulletin about how much he hates this church, though every now and then during the gentler sermons — about grace or the love of God or the fundamental acceptance of God — he tears up midway through and reaches for my hand and squeezes it or puts his hand on my knee” (90).
The two, though, don’t seem to have ever experienced a living, salvific encounter with Christ. Lundquist describes herself as “profoundly confused about how the God I’ve been raised to believe in can be good,” and yet she “deeply believe[s] that ignoring him, which means not attending church, is the way to have a bad life.” She understands that “only God can save me from the emptiness inside myself — dead in my trespasses and sins” (90), but it’s a knowledge that never seems to work its way to the core of her being.
Then, in a graduate level course, she is introduced to Literary Theory and Deconstruction. Her professor, David, teaches her how to move past the need for meaning. “Lack of definition often frightens us,” he explains, “which is why so many people, particularly religious fundamentalists…fear deconstruction” (143). It shouldn’t be scary, though. It should be liberating. It is the way to become a metaphorical thinker. “We have to move from literal to metaphorical thinking,” David insists. “There’s more than a one-to-one correspondence between signs and signifiers” (147). David brings up Eve as an example of the shift from the literal to the metaphorical.
What is the exit from the garden of Eden if not Eve being taught to think metaphorically? “If we eat from the fruit of this tree, we will die,” she tells the serpent. And he says back, “No, ye shall not die.” And the serpent is right! She does not literally die. She is taught that death is so much more than the cessation of breath. It is hours of despair. It is watching sadness engulf those around you. It is waiting for someone to come home who never does. It is hopelessness. It is fear. Death is so many things. “Ye shall not die, but ye shall die.” That’s how Eve learns metaphor. (147–48)
Naturally, this view of language, let alone humanity or God, causes a “dissonance” that the move to Boystown only exacerbates (167). Lundquist and Devin try out an “‘emergent’ Presbyterian church” (166), and then an “affirming and inclusive church draped in Pride flags” (167), but by the end they aren’t going anywhere. Devin prefers places “where pitchers of cocktails flow freely” (190).
This Mystery Is Profound. Lundquist comes across in Beard as the prototypical biddable woman of the late ’90s who assumes a world of basic equality between men and women, and who is quick to feel tenderhearted toward the down-trodden and oppressed. Back then, Deconstruction and Literary Theory were beginning to make their way into the Academy, and, like Lundquist, I found the Western Literary Canon (Shakespeare, Milton, etc.) supplanted by Judith Butler, Jonathan Culler, and Derrida. The central assumption of Deconstruction is that language can be torn asunder from meaning, and that it’s possible to separate the Sign from the Signifier.
As a Christian, I found the assumptions of Literary Theory interesting, but ultimately, I was able to discern that they are an attack on God Himself, who so closely identifies Himself with human speech that He becomes incarnate and is, quite literally, called The Word. All the signs and symbols of the world we inhabit — Light, Water, Bread, Wine, Mustard Seeds, the Sun — so far from being pure literalism, speak, in all the ways that anything speaks, about the second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Himself. In Him — again, quite literally — the cosmos is continually constructed and brought into being.
Deconstruction, though, isn’t just an attack on the Godhead. The so-called legibility of the body that queer theory talks about somehow never considers the meaning of women’s bodies. This isn’t a trick of metaphor, the rearrangement of words to say something clever. Women have bodies that are meant to be honored and protected because, according to the wisdom of God, they bring forth other bodies. To use and dishonor a woman by belittling her, cheating on her, using her for mere pleasure, or, through grotesque subjugation of raw power, violating her isn’t according to God’s design for His world. The threat of hell is not because God is bellicose, capricious, or lacking in salt. The threat of hell is for those who destroy God’s creatures and will not acknowledge Him or His glory. It is because He is good that we are not permitted to misuse each other.
Deconstruction isn’t the task of liberation, but the satanic work of consumption, of taking all the bits apart and then casting them aside. The great irony of someone as literarily brilliant as Lundquist relying on such moving language, drawing out the pathos of her life with Devin to illumine, for the reader, the supposed beauty of the gay “community,” should not go by unnoticed. Having had her life deconstructed by a selfish man for his own lustful purposes, she has to construct a world of meaning that makes such an action acceptable. For me, all she did was cast into sharper relief the ugliness of such destructive and ruinous beliefs.
The God she has never met, whom she has cast off with such ease, would never do the same to her. One of His primary metaphors for His relationship with us is that of marriage. The covenant relationship between a husband and a wife is like that of Christ and the Church. He dies for her so that she might live. He is faithful to her. He makes her whole and clean. He feeds her with His own Body and Blood. In every way He sacrifices Himself for her good. The literary trope of the beard is in every way contrary to the kind of love He pours out on the Church, His bride. I pray that someday, perhaps, Lundquist will look out upon a world that is legible, down to the core, with the glory of God and find, not a bland bowl of carrots, but Love Himself.
Anne Kennedy, MDiv, is the author of Nailed It: 365 Readings for Angry or Worn-Out People, rev. ed. (Square Halo Books, 2020). She blogs about current events and theological trends on her Substack, Demotivations with Anne.
