Author Discusses Complex Framework of ‘The Shack’

By Elisa Williams, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

Aug. 2–William P. Young received a phone call from his wife on Jan. 4, 1994, that forced him to face who he had become.

She had discovered Young’s three-month affair with her best friend — the very friend she had turned to for support when her husband had become distant.

Kim Young didn’t want their six children to be without a father, so she agreed to stay in the marriage. But, Young would have to fix what was broken.

“It was like everything came out of the box. My narrow emotional life came apart,” Young said.

The process of fixing what was broken took 11 years and ultimately compelled Young to want to explain his internal journey to his children.

He wrote “The Shack” to do just that. The book tells the story of Mackenzie Allen Phillips, whose daughter Missy was abducted. He is then mysteriously lured to the shack where she was killed so he could have a conversation with God.

When Young and his three partners printed “The Shack” last year to share the story, demand for the book unexpectedly took off. With little more than word-of-mouth advertising, it is now Amazon.com’s No. 1 trade fiction book, No. 3 on USA Today’s list of top 150 best-selling books and No. 1 on the New York Times list of paperback trade fiction.

Young, who will be speaking at Vancouver’s Crossroads Community Church on Sunday, believes “The Shack” became a cultural phenomenon because of its approach.

“It’s a mystery suspense wrapped in a what-if?” said Young, 53, who lives in Gresham, Ore. “What if there actually is a God who cares about us? What if there is a God who is involved in the details of our lives? That is the framework for this story.”

Dealing with what-ifs in a work of fiction made these larger questions and God more approachable, Young said.

It also stirred debate.

Young’s story has inflamed critics because of how it portrays the Trinity, among other things. In the book, God is a black woman, Jesus is a Middle Eastern man and the Holy Spirit is an Asian woman.

This literary device, Young said, enabled him to demonstrate the importance of having a relationship with God.

That intimate approach is what prompted Crossroads Community Church Pastor Bill Ritchie to invite him to speak at the church.

“I love the way he breaks molds,” Ritchie said. “I knew he would be an encouragement to people.”

Young talked about the book, his life and future projects during a recent interview. The following are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for space and clarity:

QUESTION: You write on your Web site that if someone really wants to get to know you, they should read the book. Why is that?

ANSWER: I’m actually two characters in the book.

I’m Mackenzie, the father, and I’m Missy, the daughter who is abducted.

The best way I can explain it is the way a writer out of Nashville did. She said, ‘I don’t know your history, but my sense is that Missy represents something that was murdered in you as a child, probably your innocence. Mackenzie represents you as a child and coming to terms with that.’

She’s absolutely right.

“The Shack” is a parable and it’s a metaphor. As a metaphor, the shack is the soul. It’s the heart. You start building the shack as a child. The things that happen to you help you build the shack and then your own choices affect that structure. It’s where you store your addictions. It’s where you store your lies. It’s where you hide your secrets. It’s that inside place that for many of us is full of shame.

We then invest all of our energy in building some kind of facade, an external building that we want people to believe is really us. We make it look good and change it depending on who the audience is.

As a metaphor, it took me 38 years to build the shack. Once the facade came down, it all blew apart. Then, it took 11 years in the shack in the -transformational process. That’s where a lot of the conversations in the book come from is that 11 years. I squeezed that into a weekend for Mackenzie.

Q. You have an unusual background. Your parents were missionaries, so as child you lived oversees with a completely different culture and then you moved around quite a bit. Can you tell me more about your personal history?

A. I’m a missionary kid and a preacher’s kid, which in a lot of people’s minds is about as messed up as you get.

Missionary kids grow up in a different culture. They have a unique set of advantages, because they’re able to adapt to move in and out of different cultures. But, they don’t know where home is.

I was 10 months old when we moved to the interior of New Guinea. I grew up in a tribal environment with folks who had hardly any exposure to people outside, white people.

My parents were very sold out to doing great work for God. In that kind of situation a lot of times kids slip through the cracks.

Q. How did that shape you?

A. It shaped a lot of things. Sexual abuse started within the tribe at about age four and that was pretty intense. Then when I got to boarding school it continued among the students. And that just capped it. That just bent me around the corner.

From there I became a performer, because my life was just a load of shame.

For me, my survival mechanisms all became performance oriented. Within the religious framework that I grew up in, I became a highly perfectionist performer.

Q. You studied religion at Warner Pacific College in Portland and at one point you served on the staff of a large church. Did you expect to follow your parents example and make religion your life’s work?

A. I pursued God, put it that way.

I wasn’t pursing my parents’ history, because I was fairly antagonistic for a good chunk of my life against the whole religion thing. For a long time, that was because I had a huge chip on my shoulder. Because of all the crap that was in my own history.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your stuff and how you learned from those experiences?

A. That’s like a two-hour conversation. I had a lot of stuff.

You learn to lie because of what happens when you grow up in a damaged situation, abuse or whatever. You break your world into pieces and you’re a different person in a different environment.

But all of those kinds of skills that kept you safe as a child, they don’t serve you well as an adult.

At some point you’ve got to let them go.

Q. You mentioned abuse and you mentioned addiction. What kind of addiction did you suffer from?

A. Besides crappy ones, like pornographic stuff and sexual stuff, there’s an addiction to pleasing my dad, to doing great things for God and the addiction to winning people’s approval at any cost.

I never was a drug user or a chemically addicted person. I was definitely addicted to all kinds of other crap.

Q. When your children read this book knowing your history, it must be a very powerful experience for them. You must have been aware of that as you wrote the book. How did that influence the story?

A. I don’t want them to believe God is a white Zeus looking for every opportunity to blast them.

I want them to know it’s much more complex than that. It’s about a relationship with a God who is full of affection, who knows our stuff and meets us in the middle because it’s about a relationship, not about religion.

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