Grandpa Jesus and me

WELL before Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” was published, Kathleen McGowan, author of “The Expected One,” quit a lucrative job as a marketing rep for Disney, maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401k and left her children for weeks at a time, all because she believed she had been chosen to tell the “real” story of Mary Magdalene: that the woman known as a reformed prostitute was actually the wife of Jesus and a spiritual leader in her own right.

McGowan is 43, chatty, warm and self-assured -- more Little League mom than hippy-dippy spiritualist. She lives with her three precocious sons and gentle, long-haired husband in Palmdale, a desert town not far from a field of Joshua trees. On a Monday evening just before dinnertime, a pack of boys from the neighborhood played in her backyard while she discussed “The Expected One” at a white-tiled kitchen table.

“We are the Kool-Aid house,” she said after a ball hit the window with a thud. “You know, the one where all the kids hang out.”

McGowan said she was laughed out of book agents’ offices and warned that she would ruin her writing career if she tried to publish a novel about Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene (although there was technically no career to ruin, as “The Expected One” is her first book). Then after “The Da Vinci Code” turned into a phenomenon, she was told she was too late, and would always be seen as the woman who jumped on the “Da Vinci” bandwagon. Because McGowan does not have an academic background (she describes her education as “dabbling in college here and there”) and because she claims to be a descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, she had trouble being taken seriously in the book world. But there were others -- notably Larry Kirshbaum, whom she met at a dinner party when he was chief executive of Warner Books and who later became her agent -- who saw the book for what it has become since it was published in August: a national bestseller, just as “The Da Vinci Code” is slipping off the lists.

In January, after McGowan went through a grueling and expensive round of self-publishing and selling the book over the Internet, a friend of a friend sent her novel to Kirshbaum, who had recently left his job at Warner Books and opened his own agency.

“I hung out the shingle and lo and behold, here comes ‘The Expected One,’ a gift from God,” Kirshbaum said in a phone interview. McGowan soon became his second client. One week later he landed her a $1.5-million advance at Touchstone (a division of Simon & Schuster).

“It’s not very often that you sit down and read something that you can just tell is special,” said Trish Todd, who bought and edited the book for Touchstone. “It is a great feeling. It makes your hands shake.”

Reviewers, though, have been more inclined to shake a fist. Rowan Pelling of the Independent on Sunday described it as “a light version of literature that reflects infinite tosh and unbearable tedium in one soul-sapping blend.” Publisher’s Weekly declared the novel “freighted with romance-fiction stylings and unadorned facts numbingly narrated.”

McGowan’s book tells the story of an Irish-American writer named Maureen Paschal who lives on Wilshire Boulevard and has a preference for Manolo Blahniks and Chanel No. 5. Although she has no religious background, it turns out she is the only person who can uncover the hidden gospel of Mary Magdalene. Over the course of the book the heroine makes a series of wacky friends who recite long dissertations on the history of Mary Magdalene, her marriage to Jesus, and the children the couple produced. The book has a little violence, a little romance (“Sinclair took Maureen’s hand and led her deeper into the rose-scented lushness of the gardens. ‘But you must stop calling me Lord Sinclair.’ ”) and snippets of how McGowan imagines the Gospel of Mary might read.

McGowan originally envisioned the book as nonfiction. She said she researched it for 20 years -- combing through art museums in Italy, France, Scotland and Israel, interviewing storytellers in the Languedoc region of France where she believes Mary Magdalene settled after fleeing Jerusalem, and investigating secret societies. And so she is touchy about any insinuation that she is riding Dan Brown’s coattails. When his book came out in 2002 she said she was devastated.

“That has been a very painful event for me for a lot of reasons,” she said. “There are many people who still to this day accuse me of chasing ‘The Da Vinci Code’ or capitalizing on ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ It is so unfair.”

Like his client, Kirshbaum is loath to compare “The Unexpected One” to “The Da Vinci Code,” but he admitted the success of Brown’s book may have helped the sale of McGowan’s book. “ ‘The Da Vinci Code’ created a virtual bookshelf of titles,” he said.

But there are other explanations besides “Da Vinci.” Since Sept. 11, the category traditionally called “New Age” (including books on goddess religions, druids, and Wicca) has been eclipsed by books offering spiritual insights into Christianity, publishing experts say. “People used to look for spiritual answers outside of their religion in other traditions or cultures,” Todd said. “Now people have gone within traditional religion and are exploring boundaries there.”

McGowan’s path has certainly been an alternative one. She is a practicing Christian, she said, but she does not have any allegiance to a specific church. Her husband is Catholic, her children have been baptized, and the family attends a Catholic church on holy days. “I love the rituals of the Catholic Church but it’s been hard for me for a long time to deal with the politics and the dogma of the church,” she said. “There have been elements of it that I find very beautiful, but we went to a service last year where they talked about Mary Magdalene being a sinner and a prostitute and I wanted to stand up and say: Don’t you read what comes out of your own church? In 1969 the Vatican said that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.”

And now McGowan has more stories to tell. She is in Ireland researching the Book of Love -- a supposed gospel written in Jesus’ own hand.

In the meantime, rights to “The Expected One” have been sold in 26 countries and it’s being translated into 26 languages. And the neighborhood kids might have to find a new house to play at. McGowan and her husband are in the midst of remodeling their Palmdale home and hunting for a place closer to Los Angeles. They can afford it now.

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deborah.netburn@latimes.com