So Salzman is an unlikely renunciant. He seems to love the world's many temptations too much to shut himself away in pursuit of an illusive higher goal. Yet that's exactly what happened. In the process of writing his unearthly new novel, "Lying Awake," he became a sort of literary penitent. For six grueling years, as he sat down each day to work on the book that he felt was failing miserably, he experienced his own version of St. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul. He wrote and rewrote -- adding first years of research then cheesy love stories to appeal to imagined masses, all the while listening to his agent's disappointed comments. His home office with its cats and other distractions bothered him so much that for a full year he cloistered himself in his car, a towel wrapped around his head to muffle sound. Demon-like, the cats pursued him, sitting on the car sunroof and delivering a graphic reminder of his place in the universe.

Finally, after he'd decided to admit defeat, he went off to a writer's colony to do nothing and think about his next book. It was there he had an epiphany that allowed him to sit down and rewrite the book from scratch in five weeks. The grand realization? He wasn't so different from his main character after all -- his faith in writing was every bit as illusive and irrational (and almost as sacrificial) as his character's burning faith in God.

In the wake of publishing this book, Salzman created not one but two stories. The novel is about a nun who learns her religious visions and channeled poetry may not be ecstatic gifts from God so much as symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Her conflict revolves around choosing between physical health and the psychic fireworks she has come to associate with her relationship to God. The other story, which he's turned into a performance piece and used as a marketing tool to sell the book, is about the tortured novelist who endures hell until he experiences a transcendent empathy with his own protagonist.

If the allegory of the struggling writer as devout mystic sounds a little self-inflating, it doesn't feel that way when you listen to Salzman detail his humiliations. In a culture enchanted by the pains and pleasures of the writing life, the tale of the self-mortifying novelist is a familiar one. But rarely does the story have such an inspirational ending, because Salzman's book feels so genuinely the product of miraculous forces.

Salzman spoke with Salon about the spirituality of doubt, the pleasure of well-earned fame and stalking a cloistered Carmelite nun in New Mexico.

I've read that you consider yourself an agnostic. How did you come to write a book that takes place inside the head of a Carmelite nun?

I don't really know! I can tell you the history of the beginning of the idea: It started after I read an essay by Oliver Sacks about temporal lobe epilepsy where the person would experience an intensification of interest in religion and spirituality. And I thought: What if somebody already committed to a religious life discovered they had this disorder and they had to make a decision about whether or not to be cured? I did research into the various contemplative orders and I discovered that Teresa de Avila -- the founder of the Carmelite order -- had all sorts of terrible illnesses and headaches along with her visions and so she was a possible candidate for having epilepsy. I thought, Wow, if the founder of the order had this disorder, you couldn't do any better than that.

Then I had to learn about Catholicism, which was a lot more involved than I'd thought. I read the mystics and essays about the Carmelites, but it was only when I started talking to real Carmelite nuns that my understanding of their lives changed.

Brilliant Careers: Sound and Vision Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles