It's memoir time, baby!
All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore (TW: sexual abuse)
Moore is a very well known Christian speaker and author who landed in hot water a few years ago for criticizing Donald Trump, which started a chain reaction that led to her leaving her home denomination of the Southern Baptist Church. Despite her popularity, I didn't know much about her, but this memoir was gorgeously-told, full of warmth and humor and candor. She is a Southerner and has the knack for storytelling that's part of that culture, weaving word images that are delightful one moment, hard-hitting the next. (It's honestly one of the best-written books, in terms of writing style, that I've read in ages.)
She talks about growing up with a sexually-abusive father and a mentally ill mother— and the complexity of loving both of them not only when she was a child but also as an adult, through their long marriage and to their deaths. In the second half of the book she focuses on her career— her call to ministry and how she tried to carry that out in the face of immense misogyny, both internal and external. Her story resists the neat endings and clean breaks that we want to have, and near the end of it we begin to see that she has thematically linked the Southern Baptist Church to her father, and all the heartbreaking complexity of loving someone who has abused you.
It was a powerful, engaging read, and I highly recommend it.
Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essay by Marcie Alvis-Walker
I'm subscribed to Alvis-Walker's newsletter Black Eyed Stories, but had somehow missed that she'd written a book until I saw this at my local library! This is a memoir told in cycles and circles, punctuated by interludes of poetry, monologues, character profiles, and other creative ways of helping us patch together the story of not just her life but the life of her mother and her child and all her family.
Alvis-Walker grew up strung between two worlds: the intense, joyful, and unapologetically Black world of her mother, and the tense atmosphere of her grandparents whom she lived with in an all-white neighborhood as she attended an all-white school. Her observations about race, class, and gender are woven together through both her experiences as a child and as a mother, facing the same problems in different ways, striving to harmonize her two worlds into something that made sense. The story is beautifully-written, rich and detailed, heartbreaking and hopeful in turn. Definitely recommended.
The Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future by Elizabeth Esther
My friend Lena, learning that I have a thing for escaping-from-a-cult memoirs, gave me this book, and I read most of it in a single day— it tells the story of a woman who grew up in a fundamentalist cult who were waiting for the Rapture to happen. Some of the events were extreme as she talks about living in a commune, being trained to obey her grandfather and father implicitly, and suffering physical abuse cloaked under the guise of "discipline", but others would be familiar to anyone who grew up in fundamentalist Christian culture, such as purity culture, patriarchal ideas of romance, and the various challenges that come from a "literal" reading of the Bible. Her writing is simple and honest, often reflecting from the present on the struggles of the past as she slowly started to piece together the life and the faith that she wanted. It was a gripping read.
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
All What I've Been Reading posts
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