When Grand Valley State University alumna Lauren Fitch was 15 years old, she started regularly keeping journals.

The notebooks, full of stories about boys, friends and faith, grew in numbers and when Fitch reached her senior year at GVSU in 2010, she compiled them all together in one place and titled her new book “The (Im)perfect Christian Life.”

At her time at GVSU, Fitch majored in journalism and was part of the Frederik Meijer Honors College. She acted as editor-in-chief of the Lanthorn during her final semester before graduation.

Her book began as part of her senior project, a requirement in the Honors College, but it quickly became a labor of love, and Fitch spent most of her free time cutting, pasting and editing her prose before self-publishing with Outskirts Press.

Though her book is based off of her journals, Fitch said the book is not a personal memoir. It is instead a work of fiction based off of her own experiences. She cut nearly 100 journal pages out of the mix during the editing process, but tried to keep the bulk of the story in tact.

“I think overall it was really important to me to keep it as close to the original, keep it very honest,” Fitch said.

Fitch had some assistance from Vandana Pednekar-Magal, associate professor of communications at GVSU. For the most part, Pednekar-Magal helped with setting timelines and deadlines for each chapter to help keep Fitch on track.

“I think Lauren is very diligent and committed to her work,” Pednekar-Magal said. “The book comes out of notes and keeping a journal for years. Its amazing that she was able to do this over the years and turn it into a book.”

Deeply personal, the book discusses love, loss, family and the stresses of college applications. She says due to many of the more personal details, she was the most nervous about her family reading her book.

“Now that it’s published, I just get so nervous about having people read it and I wasn’t expecting that,” Fitch said. “I guess I’m emotionally tied to it, and it’s a really personal story – and there’s the fact that I created this thing and now it’s just out there… I mean, you want to be the perfect child, you don’t want to put it all out there like, ‘yes, I made all of these mistakes that you don’t know about.’ And I mean, it’s your family so they’re going to love you, but you don’t want to disappoint them.”

Her story is a classic coming-of-age tale, focusing heavily on what Fitch calls “the disconnect between church on Sunday mornings and the rest of everyday life” as well as the unrealistic expectations set by some religious communities.

“[Churches] say, ‘of course no one is perfect,’ but there’s still a sense that you’re expected to be,” Fitch said. “So I feel like there isn’t that openness or that opportunity to say ‘I messed up, now what do I do?’ I think that’s really the disconnect in some churches, the idea that everything is black and white – like, ‘Of course that is the right thing to do, so why wouldn’t you do that?’ But when you’re going through your life it’s not like that – there’s some gray areas and reasons you don’t always do the right thing.”

Fitch wanted to stress that the book is not about converting people into believers, but rather about opening up a dialogue about their own beliefs.

The publishing process, she said, was one of the hardest things she’s ever done. She says she is happy with the final product, and said her favorite part was receiving her first hardcopy in the mail last May.

And, like every good coming-of-age story, Fitch had her own moment where everything finally made sense.

“There was one moment – this was actually before it was the finished product – but it was my final draft and I had someone read it who was mentioned in it. Just talking to her about it afterward was the moment I was like, okay, this was all worth it,” Fitch said. “After that I went home and thought ‘Wow, this is what it means to be a writer, I actually impacted someone with something I wrote.’ I guess that’s the overall goal, is to just have some kind of influence.”

Though the journey was long, and arguably one of the most difficult ones Fitch has made so far, to her, the outcome was well worth the labor and the wait. To read more about “The (Im)perfect Christian Life,” or to purchase your own copy of Fitch’s book, visit www.imperfectchristianlife.wordpress.com.

“It’s a lot harder than I thought, to really put yourself out there,” Fitch said. “I wasn’t expecting that. But I guess that is what it’s about. You just have to risk it, and you hope that you have some kind of positive impact.”

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