A Way to Forgiveness: A Memoir

by Erin R. Dooley
D.A.S.H. Publishing, 2026
148 pages
on Goodreads

Reviewed by Amy Horton | Warrenton, MO

“Be careful what you pray for,” Erin R. Dooley writes in the prologue to her Camino memoir, A Way to Forgiveness. “Because if you are praying for something that is good in God’s eyes, he will give it to you. You just may not like how the prayer is answered.”

Dooley briefly recounts that nearly two decades ago she had heard two incredible stories of people forgiving their transgressors—in the first a man forgives his daughter’s murderer and in the second a group of Amish women forgive the men who attacked their community. “Can you imagine that level of forgiveness?” Dooley ponders. So moved by these examples of “radical, almost incomprehensible, forgiveness,” she prays, asking God “to give me a deeper understanding of forgiveness.

“But here’s the thing,” Dooley continues, “about growing in any virtue: you can only grow by being placed in situations that require it. I forgot that part when I prayed. I didn’t prepare myself for what it would take to truly understand forgiveness.”

She would soon find out. In 2014, in close succession she loses her job, her husband asks for a divorce, and then they must sell their house. For 15 years, she’d thought about making a Camino pilgrimage. Suddenly feeling like her life is crumbling, there is no time like the present to take a 500-mile walk to heal from her divorce and forgive her ex-husband for his betrayals during their marriage of more than a dozen years.

An authentic storyteller, Dooley shares what she learns about forgiveness through that experience in A Way to Forgiveness. Dooley, also a filmmaker, released a documentary by the same name in 2016. Ten years on, she’s followed up with the memoir to go beyond what the film captures, sharing more of her journey, both external and internal, that didn’t make it onto the screen. In neither the film nor the memoir does she bare the private details of her marriage’s dissolution. Rather, she focuses on what she learned about forgiveness through the experience.

While the memoir and film can each stand on their own, they make excellent companion pieces for audiences interested in bearing witness to and drawing lessons from one woman’s journey as she comes to understand mercy “from the inside out” and finds a way to forgiveness.

Editor’s note: Find a 2023 La Concha review of Dooley’s documentary by the same name here.

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