FROM HELL TO HOPE

The author of The Shack never dreamed his inspirational tale would touch 20 million hearts

Last Christmas, William Paul Young received a gift in the mail: a handcrafted clock from a prisoner who has been on death row in Tennessee for 33 years. “The Shack radically changed his life,” Young tells WHO of his bestselling novel (Hachette, $14.99), now a film starring Sam Worthington as grief-stricken young father Mackenzie, a “fictionalised” version of himself. “People have had an incredible response to it because they can identify both with the great sadness and with the great love.”

The “great sadness” in The Shack is Mackenzie’s pain over his little girl’s disappearance, an aspect that touched Worthington, then a new father. “He came on the set the first day and [first son] Rocket was 10 weeks old,” says Young, 62, who has a “two-second” cameo. “I think that really allowed him some latitude in terms of the emotional side of his character.”

In real life, the buried grief Young gave voice to in Mackenzie stemmed from his childhood. Growing up in Papua New Guinea as the son of missionaries, Canadian-born Young was sexually abused: “To me, The Shack is a metaphor for the place we hold our pain,” said the father of six, who credits his wife, Kim, for “saving my life”—and inspiring him to write The Shack. In 2005, “I finally felt healthy enough to do something that Kim had been asking me to do for about four years, which was, ‘As a gift for our children, would you write something that puts in place how you think, because you think outside the box?’” recalls Young, who was then bankrupt and working three jobs in Portland, Oregon, where he still lives. “So I wrote a story to get it done for Christmas, cause I had nothing else to give them.”

He printed 15 copies, never imagining his story about the healing power of love and forgiveness would go on to sell more than 20 million copies—after being rejected by 26 publishers—and even be a guiding light on death row. “That is the biggest change in all of this,” says Young, who is expecting his 10th grandchild. “It’s given me the incredible honour of invitation into the holy ground of other people’s stories.”