An uncertain trumpet.

Girl Meets God On the Path to a Religious Life Lauren F. Winner Algonquin, $23.95, 320 pp.

In this tell-all age, the spiritual memoir faces a daunting storytelling challenge. Spiritual autobiography has always been confessional, of course--Augustine cannot narrate his conversion until he has recounted his sins--but the narrative stakes have been raised since Augustine "walked the streets of Babylon, and wallowed in the mire." The contemporary memoir, spiritual or otherwise, doesn't often let a reader imagine the mire: it's more likely to reveal all the sinful Technicolor details, or to describe the struggle with revelations about many lives beyond the author's.

Lauren Winner's spiritual memoir goes to some lengths to avoid these contemporary confessional trends. She begins, in fact, with this note opposite the copyright page: "In order to protect the privacy of friends and family, occasional details--names, professions, chronology, and so forth--have been changed. The character of Benjamin is a composite of two people." Here I must make my own small confession: despite its admirable concern for privacy, that kind of note sets off my memoir-phobia response. The author has changed the names? Well, certainly. That is only courteous. The professions? A little trickier, since a profession suggests something crucial. Chronology? Hang on. A memoir purports to tell what happened to somebody. We postmodern readers are all acutely aware how a personal lens filters even the most ostensibly truth-seeking memoir. But when a memoir starts moving the order of events, or splicing characters into composites, it's further manipulating reality, tidying it up for the purposes of the grand narrative design. Mightn't it be possible instead to reveal only what is absolutely necessary, and still remain truthful?

Having voiced such fierce reservations about that little author's note, let me immediately temper them, because Winner's story is fascinating, provocative in the best sense, and certainly worth telling. Perhaps Winner's prenarrative confession is so scrupulous that it suggests more manipulation than has actually occurred (that composite character Benjamin, who so irritated me before I read a word, is, it turns out, only a tiny piece of the big design). And despite my strict-constructionist objections, I found much to admire in this account, which is full of painful but necessary personal revelations and, indeed, struggle.

Winner is a young woman brought up in North Carolina by a Reform Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother--neither deeply involved in religion. She was raised in the Jewish tradition and, after her parents divorced, chose to embrace Orthodox Judaism, which--because she was not born of a Jewish mother--required conversion. Like Augustine's, her story begins in adolescence. Her conversion account is meticulous, involving description of her studies, conversations, and friendships. Her loving depictions of Jewish Orthodox traditions--cooking, singing, dancing--enlarge her theological concerns and help make it clear why she decided to embrace Orthodoxy. By then she has also decided to attend Columbia University, "because it had hundreds of Orthodox Jews."

Even as Winner is converting, however, her interest in Jesus is growing. When she contacts a Presbyterian chaplain about her new call to Christianity, he is shocked. (He thought perhaps she was going to declare herself a lesbian.) Winner says that, "on a campus obsessed with identity politics, [this] might have been more congenial than a Jewish student prattling on about Jesus." Neither are her parents pleased to hear the latest twist. Unable to face many of her Jewish friends with her change of faith, she avoids them. Her instruction and baptism as an Anglican take place in England, far from the Jewish culture that has sheltered and nurtured her in New York.

At one point, Winner attributes her conversion to Christianity to a dream of Jesus rescuing her from a kidnapping, and to At Home in Mitford, a "charming if saccharine novel about an Episcopal priest in North Carolina." The references to a popular novel and to a dream with many possible interpretations are a little puzzling, even troubling. Winner's intellectual explanation, however--"I describe myself, my Christianity, as radically incarnational. The Incarnation, that God took flesh, is the whole reason that I am not an Orthodox Jew"--is as precise as she can make it.

So, too, is the telling of the emotional part of this story, of the pain inflicted and received upon a second conversion that many of her friends regard as treacherous. Winner is smart enough not to overplay the emotional: a Ph.D. candidate in American history during the writing of this book, she is an intellectual first, well-versed in literary criticism, feminism, popular culture. She is wisely self-aware and witty about the ways she might delude herself as well as her readers, and about how she may be misinterpreted: "She converted, scholars perusing my diary would suggest, because she couldn't figure out how to be Southern and be Jewish. She missed that pulled pork barbecue too much."

There are, however, a few holes. Winner's explanation of why she considers herself evangelical is thoughtful, but it does not fully take into account the political company in which that places her, nor does it explain how she functions as an evangelical Episcopalian in her Manhattan church. Winner's worst tendency is to indulge in gooey metaphor. The least successful passages continue the trope of the title, the love affair with Jesus ("When I'm sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him"). Not exactly the ecstatic tradition.

The rewards of this memoir are in its rich readings of Jewish and Christian sacred texts, and in a lively account of parallel intellectual and spiritual searches. This is extremely sensitive material, a chronicle of Jewish-Christian hurt with many historical echoes. Winner feels the tug of her Orthodox past and longs for lost rituals, knowing that "the conversion of the Jews" is not a phrase to take lightly. It is generosity of spirit that leads her to include so many of her friends and family in her spiritual story. If I wish she hadn't felt compelled to create false identities for some of them, I'm nonetheless grateful for the honesty with which she faces the very real, very specific challenges of her own journey toward faith.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels.