Success of `The Expected One’ Was Rather Unexpected

c. 2006 Religion News Service PORTLAND, Ore. _ Kathleen McGowan had a normal childhood, growing up in an Irish-American family in Granada Hills, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. She’s living a normal Southern California existence now, the mother of three boys and the wife of a musician. There’s no indication as she sits in […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ Kathleen McGowan had a normal childhood, growing up in an Irish-American family in Granada Hills, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. She’s living a normal Southern California existence now, the mother of three boys and the wife of a musician.

There’s no indication as she sits in a restaurant here on a recent sunny afternoon that the 43-year-old redhead claims to be a descendant of a union between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.


During her book tour stop in Portland, she doesn’t deny that, but doesn’t play it up, choosing instead to tell the incredible story of how she went from being a self-published novelist who was about to take out a third mortgage on her house to an international success whose book, “The Expected One,” hit The New York Times best-seller list.

For McGowan, it all starts in Ireland.

“I was a teenage activist,” she said. “Being Irish is a big part of my journey. I moved over there in the early 1980s, when it was really tense, and worked for human and political rights. I have scars on my left knee from a grenade attack, the whole nine yards.

“One thing I learned over there is that all writing is subjective. That was a big awakening for me. They say history is written by the winners, and that’s so true. Nine times out of 10, it’s the one who comes out on top who gets to write about what happened.”

McGowan started reading and researching the lives of what she called “notorious women,” including Lucretia Borgia, Marie Antoinette and Mary Magdalene. This research was planned as a book called “Maligned and Misunderstood,” but somewhere along the way, Mary Magdalene’s story took over.

“It’s so amazing and compelling,” McGowan said. “I went everywhere, looking for information about her life. It was like an extraordinary treasure hunt.”

The treasure hunt led to southern France, where there have long been legends that Mary Magdalene lived after Jesus’ death. Specifically, McGowan became fascinated with the Languedoc region and the Cathars, a 12th-century religious movement that was heavily suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Innocent III ordered a crusade against the Cathars in 1208, triggering the infamous 1209 massacre at Beziers in which 7,000 people were killed in the church of St. Mary Magdalene.

By 1997, McGowan was working on a proposal for a nonfiction book about Mary Magdalene, who McGowan believes had children with Jesus. McGowan said she believes she is their descendant, and that she has experienced visions involving Mary Magdalene.


“No traditional publisher would touch my book,” she said. “Everyone said you can’t go up against traditional biblical scholars without a graduate degree. Everyone will say you’re crazy.”

McGowan reworked her book as fiction. “Suddenly I had all this freedom,” she said. “It was liberating. I could surrender to the storytelling.”

Publishers still weren’t interested. “The Da Vinci Code,” which also posits a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, became a huge hit, a “shattering” experience for McGowan and one that she said didn’t help her quest for a book deal.

She and her husband “cashed out everything we had” and self-published 2,500 copies of “The Expected One.” They sold it on a Web site and “barely broke even,” not counting all the time and travel costs. On New Year’s Eve, they had a family meeting and decided to “do whatever it takes” to get McGowan’s story out, even if it meant a third mortgage.

Events happened fast after that meeting. A producer friend of McGowan’s sent her book to Larry Kirshbaum, the former head of Warner Books who is now a literary agent. Kirshbaum accepted McGowan as his first client and quickly sold her book to Touchstone/Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Faster than McGowan could say Mary Magdalene, she had a book contract and was out on tour. Her publisher has big plans for “The Expected One,” and McGowan does, too.

“I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself anymore,” she said. “I’m talking to the world.”


(Jeff Baker writes about books for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

KRE/RB END BAKER

To obtain a photo of McGowan or of the book cover, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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