Maura Doherty was raised in the 1950s and 60s, one of seven siblings in the Bronx, New York. Her Irish-Catholic parents owned a duplex on a street teeming with kids who played games surrounded by the roar of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The Doherty children went to parochial schools and attended Mass on Sunday. Over time, Maura became fascinated with Catholic nuns wearing habits and rosary beads and the peace they evoked.

When Maura decided to become a Sister, she never anticipated that she would leave the convent nine years later. That decision thrust her from the security of religious life into the unknown. Crafting a new future for herself, she became an activist fighting environmental pollution and toxic hazards. Her work brought her from the Bronx to Appalachia to the West Coast, where a growing dependence on alcohol threatened to rob her of all she'd achieved. Once she chose sobriety, her life opened in ways she had never imagined.