Window Shopping for God: A Comedian’s Search for Meaning

“After all that time and money, you’d think that Amazon would’ve delivered me a deity in which I could believe with complete certainty, but it has not.”

Comedian Deborah Kimmett has worshipped a lot of deities. She has danced with witches, whirled with Sufis and explored the Power of Now like there was no tomorrow. And she has always looked for signs.

So in 2014, when a sidewalk preacher calls on her to repent, she believes she must right her relationship with her estranged brother. Over the next few months, they create a bond hastened along by his terminal cancer diagnosis—but as he dies, losing her sibling uses all her spiritual Air Miles, and she’s confronting her addictions again, with no God to call her own. With nothing left to give and no one left to fix, Kimmett knows she needs to find new meaning in life. But the old gods just don’t seem to be listening.

Window Shopping for God is the story of Kimmett’s lifelong flip through the catalogue of beliefs—from her teen years, when a near-death experience gave her a new, less Catholic perspective, to her struggles with addiction and mental health that led her in and out of faith—and her search, as a woman in her sixties, for meaning that could finally plant her on firmer ground. Unflinchingly honest and wildly funny, Kimmett’s writing takes us down the serpentine routes we travel in our search for certainty, and the more familiar paths that bring us back to ourselves.