In 2005, William Paul Young was working three jobs and living in a 900-square-foot apartment with his wife and four of his six children after losing his home to bankruptcy.
On his daily 40-minute train commute, he began writing a novel that he hoped would express his feelings about God to his children. It was a gift from his heart, the one thing he could offer during a season where he lacked money to buy gifts. He expected it would be read by his family and maybe a few friends.
He was off by more than 20 million people.
Young’s 2007 novel, “The Shack,” about a father whose mourning of his daughter’s death prompts a visit from God, has sold over 20 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. It has also been turned into a movie that hits theaters in March, starring Sam Worthington as Mackenzie, Young’s fictionalized version of himself, and Octavia Spencer as Papa, his representation of God.
For Young, 61, it has been a true rags-to-riches tale made more poignant by the hardship he’s faced throughout his life.
Born in Grand Prairie, Alberta, Canada, he moved with his Christian evangelical parents to New Guinea when he was a year old. As they did missionary work, Young was cared for during the day by members of the local Dani tribe in an area he refers to as Cannibal Valley.
“They were spirit worshiping, warring and heavily family-systemed. They had some dark sides,” says Young. “They practiced ritualistic cannibalism, elderly euthanasia, things like that.” Young says members of the tribe began sexually abusing him around that time, and when he was sent to boarding school on the coast of West Papua a year later, he faced the same from some of the older boys there.
The residual pain from all this led to many of his problems moving forward and also influenced “The Shack.”
“Sexual abuse became part of the tearing apart of my own fabric of the soul,” says Young. “To me, ‘The Shack’ is a metaphor for the place we hold our pain.”
The family returned to Canada when Young was 10, and his father became an itinerant pastor, with Young attending 13 different schools before his high school graduation.
He wound up in Oregon, where he met his wife, Kim, and began raising a family, working various jobs over the years and never dealing with his childhood trauma.
This was his life until Jan. 4, 1994, the day he got a one-sentence phone message from his wife.
“The call was, ‘I’m waiting for you at your office, and I know,’ ” he says.
“What Kim had discovered was, I was in a three-month affair with one of her best friends. And that blew up everything. At that point, I had to decide whether to kill myself or face her.”
Choosing the latter, he endured four hours of rage from his wife before telling her, “If we’re gonna do this, I need to tell you every secret I have, because secrets have been killing me my whole life.”
He spent four days unraveling his life story and says that “it destroyed her.” “She said, ‘I’ll never believe another word that comes out of your mouth the rest of your life,’ ” says Young.
That day marked the beginning, with the help of counseling, of “an 11-year journey for me of dismantling, uncovering, exposing everything that was broken.”
The marriage survived, but new challenges loomed.
In 2004, a combination of unlucky investments and ill-advised choices led to bankruptcy, and their house and all their belongings were sold at auction, causing the move to a small apartment in Gresham, Ore.
‘I was raising issues and asking questions, and they started becoming alive.’
- William Paul Young
For several years, Kim had been asking Young to put his take on life in writing as a gift for their children. Now, lacking money for proper Christmas gifts, Young, who had written short stories and poetry, decided to fulfill Kim’s request as a present for their children.
He began jotting down thoughts as if he were having conversations with God.
“I was raising issues and asking questions, and they started becoming alive,” he says.
“There were conversations about pain, loss, suffering and being human. There was a dialogue. I started having notes, pages and drafts on backs of napkins and grocery bags of these little conversations, and I piled them all up. I thought, what if I write a story about who’s asking these questions and why.”
He developed the book’s main character, Mackenzie Allen Phillips, as a fictional version of himself. In the book’s early pages, Mack, as he’s known, takes three of his five kids camping, and while rescuing two from almost drowning, his youngest daughter becomes the victim of a serial killer. Young chose this device because in order to fully explore his relationship with God, he believed he needed to begin from the deepest possible place of loss.
Four years later, Mack receives a note from “Papa” — Mack and his wife’s name for God — to meet him at “the shack,” the place in the woods where his daughter’s body had been found. When he does, the shabby shack disappears, and is replaced by a lush wonderland inhabited by three people who turn out to be God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all in human form. The majority of the book centers on Mack’s conversations with the three, talking about the pain of loss and other travails of being human.
He finished the book in six months and scrambled together enough money to make 15 copies at Office Depot, giving one to his wife and each of his six kids, and the rest to friends. But when the friends shared it with their friends, word — and demand — spread. He began getting emails from people who wanted to discuss how the book affected them. Seeking advice on how to handle these requests, he reached out to an author he knew casually, a man named Wayne Jacobsen.
Jacobsen was entranced and sent it to a friend named Brad Cummings, and the three agreed the tale would make an excellent movie.
A plan was hatched that Jacobsen would help Young rewrite the book in hopes of selling 100,000 copies over five years, figuring that would be enough to capture Hollywood’s attention. They were unaware, says Young, that the average novel sells only 3,000 to 5,000 copies over its lifespan, and that sales of 7,500 gives you a best-seller.
Jacobsen helped with edits and rewrites over the next 18 months, and they sent it to 26 publishers — half religious, half secular — all uninterested. “Neither group could figure out what genre it was,” Young says.
“The faith-based people thought it was too edgy, and the secular people thought it had too much Jesus in it. I got caught between edgy and Jesus.”
Jacobsen and Cummings formed a publishing company, Windblown Media, just to publish “The Shack.” They ordered 10,000 copies, and sold them out of Cummings’ house. Including a website, the trio spent a total of $300 promoting the book.
Despite this, thanks in part to Jacobsen and Cummings discussing it on a religious podcast they hosted, they had 1,000 pre-orders before the book’s May 2007 first printing. Expecting to take two years to sell 10,000 copies, sales soared a bit more quickly than that.
Between May 2007 and June 2008, with no additional spending on promotion and fueled primarily by word of mouth, the book sold 1.1 million copies.
Young quit his day jobs in February 2008, and opportunities came flying. Publisher Hachette worked out a deal to sell the book around the world, and Barnes & Noble placed it at the front of their stores. It has been printed in 48 languages worldwide, and hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in June 2008, remaining there for 49 straight weeks. To date, it has spent 136 weeks on the list, and returned to it just last week, currently sitting at No. 7.
Young bought a house and hit the speaker circuit. But even as the book became a phenomenon, there was controversy over his approach to theology, especially in his depiction of God, or Papa, as an African-American woman.
Some Christian publications denounced the book, questioning whether it was heresy. For Young, it was about changing the common perception and representation of God, and also acknowledging that much of the pain in the world — in general, and to him throughout his life — has come at the hands of men.
“I was trying to get as far away from ‘Gandalf with a bad attitude’ God as I could,” he says, referring to the common depiction of God as an old white man with a long white beard. “Zeus is not a helpful presentation of the God that is revealed in Jesus, and that’s part of the reason I did that. It was so much more embracing and open [as a woman].”
Young weathered the controversy, but wound up in a protracted dispute with Jacobsen and Cummings due to their lack of a written agreement. After a lengthy legal battle, Young says he gave up the project’s film rights in exchange for complete freedom and ownership of his work moving forward. While that might seem a large concession, he says the success of “The Shack” has made him easily a millionaire and he has no regrets over the deal.
He has written two more religious-themed novels since “The Shack” — “Cross Roads” and “Eve” — and will release his first nonfiction book, “Lies We Believe About God,” in March. He spends his non-writing time doing speaking engagements and charity work.
While he’s reveling in his success, he says the spiritual growth and maturity that led him to it has been the real gift. “If the notoriety cost me the joy I had in being a dad, grandfather, husband and friend, I’d give it all away — it wouldn’t be worth it to me,” he says. “I don’t see it as a mission, and it hasn’t become a burden. I just move with the flow and see what happens. When you learn to live without expectations, everything becomes a gift. In that, I’m a very blessed man.”