Back in 2013, Randy Boyagoda began an article in First Things with these attention grabbing lines: “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor. I’m also sick of Walker Percy, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dostoevsky.” His point was that for those of us interested in the intersections of religion and literature, it was too easy, too familiar, to fall back on these old standbys. He challenged his readers to seek out contemporary writers exploring the intersections of faith and the modern world. 

I have thought a lot about this challenge over the years. I am always looking for new authors and artists who are carrying this conversation forward, and, fortunately, there is no shortage. Writers like Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Tess Gunty and even Boyagoda himself, are writing spiritually inflected fiction and winning major literary prizes. But, for me, the most surprising and moving example of a contemporary work that demonstrates the challenges of faith in the modern world is a TV show that first aired in the U.S. 10 years ago today, Sept. 16: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag.” 

“Fleabag” is a show featuring an avowedly secular protagonist, written by a woman who is not Catholic or, as far as I’ve been able to tell, religious at all (though she did attend Catholic school for a period when she was young). But Waller-Bridge uses Catholic characters, symbols and themes to depict the loneliness and despair that are so central to modern existence, and also to demonstrate that one way to counter this isolation is through the honesty, vulnerability and transformative grace found in confession. 

“Fleabag” is set in modern-day London, and in the first season’s six-episode arc, we follow the protagonist—the 30-something title character—as she deals, mostly unsuccessfully, with grief and guilt over her best friend’s death. Waller-Bridge describes the conceit of the first season as, “We’d start off with her going, ‘Hey, come into my life! This will be hilarious! We’ll have a great time!’ and in the end her going, ‘Get away from me. Stop looking at me. I’m really ashamed of myself.’” It takes a little while for the audience to pick up on this sense of guilt and shame, but it is central to her character arc. 

In Season 2, things seem to be going much better for her. She is no longer using sex to try to solve her problems or fill the emptiness inside of herself, which was a central aspect of Season 1. Her work is also going well. But she is still alone, isolated and searching for something to give her life direction and meaning. The season revolves around Fleabag’s relationship with a Catholic priest, played by Andrew Scott, who is introduced as both a romantic interest and character foil. This nameless priest echoes Graham Greene’s whiskey priest from The Power and the Glory in a number of ways—his lack of a proper name, his alcohol use, his occasional lapses against chastity. He is not necessarily the paragon of a good priest, but he is one of the better realized priests depicted in contemporary film or television. He is clearly a flawed and fallen person struggling to live up to his ideals and witness to the truth as he understands it. And like Greene’s protagonist, this priest also serves as an occasional vehicle for grace. 

In fact, there are a number of parallels between “Fleabag” and Greene’s work. The entire arc of the second season echoes The End of the Affair, in that the romantic relationship that develops between the two characters pushes them both deeper into a relationship with God, or at least, in Fleabag’s case, leads her to question her worldview, and allows her to let go of some of her guilt.

The Jesuit priest and scholar Mark Bosco, in Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, identifies a number of unifying themes of the Catholic novel, including: “the sinner at the heart of Christianity”; the tension between corrupt flesh and transcendent spirit (usually in terms of sexual tension); and the depiction of the Divine as the “Hound of Heaven.” All of these elements are present in Season 2 of “Fleabag.” There’s even a strange and puzzling subplot where the Priest tells Fleabag that he is constantly being pursued by foxes, which is perhaps best understood as a literal manifestation of this idea of the hound of heaven pursuing the wayward Christian. 

This idea of the “sinner at the heart of Christianity”— that successful Catholic fiction focuses not on good people doing holy things, but rather on the sinner’s journey toward, or away from, Christ—is the axis around which the second season of Fleabag pivots. We can best perceive the movement of grace by following it in the life of someone who most needs it. 

One of the distinctive aspects of the show’s style is that Fleabag is constantly breaking the fourth wall by turning to the camera mid-conversation, even mid-coitus, and making a witty joke or providing some commentary on what she, or the person she’s with, is thinking. In the world of the show, no one ever reacts to these asides. Until, that is, she and the Priest begin to draw closer to each other. He is able to see her break the fourth wall. He cannot hear what she is saying to us, but he notices that she is absenting herself from the conversation for a moment, and calls her out on it, asking her, “What was that, where’d you just go?” His ability to see what she’s doing, even if he can’t fully understand it, shakes Fleabag.

Waller-Bridge described Fleabag’s asides to the camera as the character “constantly on the verge of needing to confess,” but, significantly, this running commentary that she gives on her life is not really an honest or true account of what is going on. Rather, she is keeping herself from being fully present in her life, in an attempt to control and shape her narrative, while at the same time performing it for an audience—whether that audience is us as viewers, the people she is superficially interacting with, or even herself. It is significant that only the Priest can see through this performance; it indicates that the two of them share a level of emotional intimacy she has lacked in all other relationships. It also suggests that he is uniquely positioned, perhaps because of his own past and his role as a priest, to recognize what she is up to.

This all leads up to the climactic confession scene in Episode 4. Fleabag, again, is not Catholic, but she finds herself in the church one evening, praying. It is important to note that she is not there looking for the Priest, but his presence in her life has led her to wonder if there is something valuable about fostering a prayer life. While she’s praying, she hears a noise in the sacristy, and goes to find the Priest there, drinking alone. After a fair amount of banter, he tells her that the kind of clarity and meaning she’s looking for can be found in the confessional. Though she’s clearly skeptical, she eventually does go with him, leading to the most moving confessional scene in recent memory. After running through the standard form of the sacrament—confessing to sex outside of marriage and blasphemy and a number of other common sins we have seen her commit over the two seasons of the show—she begins to finally let down her ironic guard, admitting how lonely and broken she feels. 

The monologue builds to her saying, “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong, and I know that’s why people want people like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out at the end of it, and even though I don’t believe your bullshit, and I know that scientifically nothing I do makes any difference in the end anyway, I’m still scared…. So just tell me what to do.”

Readers of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer might find an echo here of Kate’s line to Binx: “What I want is to believe in someone completely and then do what he wants me to do.… Will you tell me what to do?”

To the Priest’s credit, he doesn’t tell her what to do with her life; he doesn’t attempt to control her narrative. He does kiss her, which, of course, is problematic and an abuse of his power in this vulnerable situation. The show deliberately blurs the line between the erotic connection between the characters and both of their relationships with God. At one point the Priest says, “I don’t know what this feeling is.” Fleabag asks, “Is it God or is it me?”, and he doesn’t know the answer. This is a classic Catholic literary moment—blurring the line between desire for the beloved and desire for God, leading us to ask if there is any truly meaningful difference.

Early in the season Fleabag, echoing Augustine, tells a therapist, “I spent most of my adult life using sex to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart.” In the arc of the show, she moves from using sex to fill this void to pursuing a mostly unattainable love. 

The show ends with Fleabag and the Priest going their separate ways. She asks him, “It’s God, isn’t it?” He, somewhat reluctantly, says simply, “Yeah.” And while we might initially think this means she’ll spiral down again, the final shots of the show are remarkably hopeful. She walks away from the camera and, with a little smile, shakes her head at it, at us, telling us not to follow. The music in the background swells and we hear the lyrics “I’m gonna be alright” from the Alabama Shakes song “This Feeling.”

Her ability, in this last moment, to turn away from the fourth wall indicates that she’s done distancing herself from her own life—that she no longer needs to try to craft a persona, to reshape her experiences as funny and witty and clever, and so can move from performativity to authenticity, and ultimately find some measure of peace. Perhaps she will even, like Bendrix before her, ultimately follow her unattainable beloved toward some sort of relationship with the divine. 

Michael O’Connell is the inaugural fellow at the Jesuit Media Lab, author of Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction and editor of Conversations with George Saunders. You can find more of his work on his Substack Nothing Gold.