The Spiral Staircase is not Armstrong's first attempt at a memoir, and is in a way a rewrite of her first two books: Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World, which she no longer felt gave an accurate portrait of her experience. Armstrong tells her struggles with faith and religious life, in which she was 'knocked back to zero over and over again before she arrived at a personally meaningful concept of the divine' according to one review. Finally she is given an opportunity to write a documentary about early Christianity, which sets her on a new path of researching religion. Armstrong then recounts her time at the University of Oxford, which was also going through a period of great institutional change, where, according to one review, she 'traded one kind of monasticism for another.' As a student in Oxford she earned a BA and MA, but failed to achieve a doctorate she then got a job teaching in London, but was let go- all the while dealing with serious health problems, and even attempts suicide.

The book begins with Armstrong's early life experience as a nun in an authoritarian convent she talks about the problems she encountered there, and recounts the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, and finally her leaving the convent. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness (2005) is an autobiography by Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar and founder of the Charter for Compassion.

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong