"That's My Journey"

Susan Mattern, author of Out of the Lion's Den, grand-prize winner of the 10th Annual WD Self-Published E-Book Awards, talks staying true to her story and the benefits of writing at a distance from the events.

- AMY JONES

A story of survival. A medical thriller. A legal thriller. All of these could describe Susan Mattern's memoir, Out of the Lion's Den: A Little Girl's Mountain Lion Attack, A Mother's Search for Answers. But at its heart, the book is a story of one woman's journey of losing her faith.

And while that's not a typical faith-journey story, for Mattern, a former nun who left the convent after six years, it's the hard-fought truth of her experience. An experience that began on March 23, 1986-the day her 5-year-old daughter Laura was attacked by a mountain lion at Caspers Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif. but lasted for years as Laura underwent countless surgeries and her parents fought extensive legal battles to get the county to admit they could've done more to warn park guests about the known danger.

Through all that, Mattern's faith was tested and eventually provided the basis for the book. Mattern told WD, "When this trauma happened, we just tried to live through it. And then when I lost my faith, it was just such an unusual thing, because most people do come back to God.... I didn't want to write a book just about the trauma of what Laura had gone through, because there's a lot of stories that are about that, and I didn't think that was really anything that unusual or that memorable. But then the whole faith thing, that was kind of unusual. And I thought, Well, I'd like to write about that, because so many people have such a negative attitude about people who are atheists and I wanted to somehow get out the idea that atheists have morals too."