**Giveaway alert! Kathryn and her publisher, Doubleday, have generously offered to send a copy of Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured to five lucky She Writers who comment on this post. Be sure to join the conversation!

Here’s how dinner goes at my house: One of our three children, whom we have tried to raise as conscious, curious citizens of the world, comments on a crisis in Egypt—it seems to involve riots. Or a plane has disappeared mysteriously over an as yet unknown ocean, somewhere in East Asia, it sounds like, vanished into thin air; an international investigation of what’s been interpreted as an act of war has been undertaken, but between which nations remains unclear. Also there is a pandemic of Ebola, but why would it start in Texas? That’s what I can’t figure out. It has to do with a wedding of all things.

I never ask questions. I stopped making eye contact after I interrupted an argument to ask who Miley Cyrus was, and what was twerking, anyway. It took a while for all of them to stop laughing long enough to say, “Really? You have no idea? How is that even possible?” Their father shrugs. He often says to me, brow wrinkled, “You are completely out of touch with your own culture.” The look accompanying this statement makes it clear this is abnormal.

On the other hand, I know the official painter for the court of Charles VII of France, to whom Joan of Arc delivered the crown of France in 1429, and the name of the Bishop who lead the Inquisition that sent her to the stake. I know the names of the angels with whom Joan spoke every day—Michael, the archangel and leader of God’s armies, and Saints Catherine and Margaret, virgin martyrs, as she herself would be. I know what herb to use for pinworms, catarrh, and even bubonic plague. It’s rue.

Last winter, my son began texting me about developments he didn’t want me to stumble upon—ones he knew would upset me. I was on a train south from Albany to New York City when I found out that my favorite actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, had overdosed. I was crying anyway. I cried a lot in the months after I parted with the final draft of Joan of Arc. I revised the last chapter thirty-six times, and sent a regrettable number of them to my editor; it’s shorter than the previous eleven, and took three times as long to write.  That’s how much I didn’t want to return to the 21st century, how much I didn’t want to part company with the most exciting heroine I’ve ever met, or could invent.

I’m always sorry to let go of characters I love. Whether they are fictional or taken from history, they are people I struggle to understand for years, people who reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately. When the heroine of The Binding Chair drowned herself, I moped for days, maybe even weeks. I reviewed the life she’d lived—chapters I’d written—the trials she’d endured, and what hints she’d given me as to the state of her soul. After she died, I asked myself what people always ask at such times: How it could be that I hadn’t seen it coming? And why hadn’t I’d done something? After all, I was the only one who could have. But it didn’t feel that way. Suicide was the inevitable end of what never seemed like a life I’d invented, but a story my heroine dictated. The intensity of my grieving over a woman who “didn’t exist” suggested that separating from Joan would prove that much harder.

Of course saints are stories—as are gods. There is a historical Jesus and the Jesus of Christianity—a Jesus constructed around an ever more distant man. There is a historical Joan, and there is Saint Joan, who belongs to the Catholic Church, equally subject to mythologizing. One of the surprises of researching Joan’s life was learning how closely her messianic trajectory echoed Christ’s. Jesus preached to a nation whose land was occupied, its people decimated by famine and disease, its surviving citizens subject to punitive taxation and violent injustice; 15th-century France staggered on, apparently doomed, under the same conditions. Through prophecy, each nation summoned a messiah, ignited his or her vertiginous rise to power, and subsequently executed that savior after a trial run by corrupt clerics, who began, rather than concluded, with a verdict of heresy.

But Jesus lived 2,000 years ago, and Joan a comparatively close 600. And she presented me with an extraordinary vantage point from which to consider what it is that I do as a writer: tell stories. Imagine: six centuries of retellings of the same life, often with loving embellishment, and a great deal of hard documentation against which to measure enhancements—Church trial records and countless letters and bulletins written from all over Europe. The prophecy that every French citizen knew, that a virgin warrior would arise to save her people, had been fulfilled. As it had been with Jesus, God’s finger had brushed the earth, and no one could turn away from the spectacle, not even those who didn’t believe in her divinity. Not 600 years after the fact. Not four years of research after the fact.

Comment below for a chance to win a copy of Kathryn's new book, Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. Comments must be in by next Friday, Dec. 19 to qualify. Winners will be chosen at random.