The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2005) is an autobiography by Karen Armstrong, an English religious scholar and founder of the Charter for Compassion.

[1][2] 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.

"[1] 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.

[3] 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.

[4] 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.