Category: memoir

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

Stephanie1 Comment

My horrified fascination with cults and high-control religious groups began early in my adult life and continues to this day. Name a memoir written by a survivor of religious trauma and/or abuse and the odds are good that I’ve read it. So when I learned that Tia Levings, an incredibly brave woman whose story featured heavily throughout the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, was coming out with a book, I smashed that want-to-read button on Goodreads so quickly and so hard, I’m surprised my phone screen didn’t shatter. And when that book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St Martin’s Press, 2024), was offered up for review on NetGalley, I went running. I knew this book was going to be incredible.

And I was not disappointed.

But I was shaken. Deeply. It’s that kind of book.

Several times, I had to put my kindle down and take a few deep breaths. Several more times, I had to pull out the tissues, and during one moment, I needed to stop and hug my daughter (still crying, of course). 

Before I get into the meat of this review, please know that while this is an utterly amazing memoir that deserves to be read far and wide, it’s intense. It’s a LOT. It’s probably the heaviest escape memoir I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly, because survivor stories are always heavy with the pain and trauma they’ve suffered at the hands of their cult. That said, Tia Levings’ writing is raw; she doesn’t hold back on walking her readers through her trauma and letting them know that this isn’t just her story. This is the story of a lot of women who have gotten pulled into fundamentalism.

This memoir revolves around themes of abuse (spiritual and religious, physical, emotional, and sexual), Christian fundamentalism, domestic violence, misogyny, Christian patriarchy, fear, shame, fear of hell and loss of salvation, female submission, control, isolation, Christian Dominionism, Christian nationalism, Christian domestic discipline, quiverfull theology, ATI and Bill Gothard, Reform and Calvinist theology, repeat pregnancies, rape, painful sexual encounters, severe medical events, death of an infant, grief, diminishment and loss of self, dissociation, and mental illness. Take care of yourself when you read this book. It’s incredible the entire way through, but even if you’re not a survivor of religious abuse and trauma like Ms. Levings, there are potentially triggering topics on every page. Survivors will see a reflection of the nightmares they lived through; non-survivors will be shocked and appalled at the devastation wreaked upon women and children in the name of God. 

It was a family move to Florida, followed by her family’s eventual involvement with a Baptist megachurch, that set Tia Levings down a twisted path of Christian fundamentalism, patriarchy, and female submission. Due to a combination of heavy church influence and lack of family finances, Tia walked away from the idea of college (too worldly for Christian girls like her, anyway) and instead waited for God to send her a husband. And a husband was indeed sent – though by whom, I’m not sure – in the form of Allan, a Christian Air Force veteran who began abusing Tia even before they became engaged. But with the ideas of female submission and forgiveness firmly planted in Tia’s mind, she went along with what she’d been taught and married Allan anyway. It’s what a good Christian girl does.

Her long-anticipated wedding night was terrible, sounding like something straight out of Debi Pearl’s account of her own honeymoon (if you’re not familiar with the story, you can Google it, but I’m warning you, it’s horrific, and beware, because she and her awful husband are still some of the louder voices in this harmful patriarchal movement), and life only spiraled downward from there. “It’s my job to teach you what we believe,” Tia’s husband informed her. Another friend shamed her by telling her, “If you’re feeling personal ambition, Tia, you need to repent and ask Jesus to help you die to yourself.” It’s no wonder that she slowly began to feel like she was vanishing from her own life, using dissociation as a coping mechanism and losing large chunks of time as baby after baby joined their family.

Fundamentalist Christianity uses severe control tactics in order to keep women cowering and keep the men in charge, and this is evident in every sentence of this book. I scrawled down horrifying quote after horrifying quote in my notebook as I paged furiously through my kindle copy: “You disgust me with your opinions and individualism.” “The elders feel that women getting together is dangerous, because of our propensity to stray from spiritual topics into gossip when unattended by a head of household.” And, most chilling and stomach-turning of all, this quote, uttered by the husband of the woman in question: “Well, it’s time we should be getting home. Mommy’s getting a spanking.” And for context, the mother being referred to here was both pregnant and nursing at the time. And this wasn’t said in jest. This adult woman was going to be forcefully spanked like a child, as punishment, by her husband, upon returning to their house. This is an aspect of fundamentalism that Ms. Levings experienced as well. I nearly lost my lunch while reading the scenes that dealt with Christian domestic discipline.

Tia and her children eventually do make it out, but only barely, and the long-term effects ripple on today. Her story is told in such a way that you can feel her isolation, the mind-numbing boringness of it all, her desperation to give her kids the best life possible in the midst of all of this, her desire for more. And yet, her survival tactics of denial and downplaying make complete sense in the context of her religious indoctrination; this memoir is the best I’ve ever read at explaining the hows and whys of indoctrination and its effect on decision-making and survival. 

This book is going to make some waves. Not just among survivor communities, but also among the general public. Because at the heart of it, this book, along with Tia Levings’ vibrant social media presence, serves as a warning: THIS is how Christian fundamentalists and nationalists want us all to live. All the abuse, the pain, the isolation that she suffered, this is the reality that people on the far right are trying to craft for everyone in the country. Learn it, recognize it, and join the fight against it. 

If I could give this book more than five stars, I would. This is one of those books that I think no amount of words could ever do justice to in a review. It’s powerful, it’s masterful, it will shake you to your very core. Read this, but take care of yourself while you do. It’s not an easy read. Read it, then tell everyone you know about it so that they read it too, and are aware of how devastating patriarchal fundamentalist Christianity can be.

If you’re a survivor of religious trauma and/or spiritual abuse and are in need of support, please visit The Vashti Initiative. We’re here for you.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Tia Levings, and St Martin’s Press for providing me with an early copy for review.

A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy will be available on August 6th, 2024. Support your local bookstores!

Visit Tia Levings’ website here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward

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Little fascinates me more than religion and its intersection with human behavior. Why do people turn to a particular religion? What keeps them there? What does their involvement look like, and what leads them to leave it behind? It’s these perpetual questions that had me clicking that ‘want to read’ button on Goodreads when I learned about Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward (Brazos Press, 2023). And this book did not disappoint.  

Jon Ward grew up mired in evangelical Christianity. If you’re familiar with this world, you’ll recognize some of the names of the pastors and preachers who surrounded him. He was fully in, sold out, and adhered to all the principles he learned from his pastor father and the church during his childhood and adolescence. But as he grew older, Jon had questions that couldn’t be answered to his satisfaction, he began to realize that the teachings he’d absorbed so fully weren’t serving him well as an adult, and the hard right turn the evangelical church took to becoming a more political institution didn’t sit well with him at all. Working as a journalist opened his eyes to the hypocrisies and contradictions the evangelical church was making, and Jon began to move further and further away from what he’d grown up believing was the only way to live.

This is a deeply thoughtful, well-written memoir that delves into the tangled mess of the modern day evangelical church. It’s an excellent follow-up to Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, which I just finished, describing what happened to evangelical churches in the Trump era and picking up where that book left off. It’s eminently more readable and less academic (and less exhausting!) than The Evangelicals, though, which I highly appreciated. Jon Ward hasn’t been immune to the familial fractures caused by adherence to right-wing values amongst the evangelical community; he recounts many instances of how his family’s dedication to the Republican party overrode the teachings of Christianity, how much their conversations hurt him, and how this led to family members not speaking to him for years. I appreciate his honesty here, and I’m thinking an awful lot of folks are going to be able to see themselves in this memoir and identify with the pain he felt.

There are a lot of explanations of church history and functions, but not in a way that bogs the memoir down with information; rather, these brief asides only clarify what Mr. Ward experienced and illuminate the bigger picture. This is a well-thought-out, deeply honest memoir (boy, did I appreciate how Mr. Ward admitted his absorption of evangelical ideas about men and women affected his marriage. I wish more men were this introspective about the damage thata adherence to strict gender roles amongst the evangelical community damages not only women, but whole families. The whole idea of ‘If Mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy!’ is true. You can’t raise kids to be adults who understand they deserve to feel fulfilled by demanding their primary parent – because let’s face it, in families that subscribe to this mindset, mothers do the bulk of the hands-on parenting – derive fulfillment from only one role), and I imagine it can’t have been easy to write. I truly hope this book explodes and is read by all those who need it.

(Side note: I was getting in my car to drive home from an outdoor meeting with a local permaculture/sustainability group when I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR. It was deep enough into the interview that no names were mentioned, but as the interviewer and interviewee spoke, my brain started whirring, and I went, “Wait, is that Jon Ward???” And sure enough, it was! If you’d like to listen to the interview, you can find it here.)

Visit Jon Ward’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning

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Between watching the increasingly disturbing news, seeing the evidence myself on Twitter, and recently reading a few books about the subject, the fact that white nationalism and hate groups are growing isn’t a surprise. It’s all horrifying, but if you pay even a little attention out there, you’ll see evidence of it all over. So when I was browsing NetGalley and came across The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning (Sourcebooks, 2023), I immediately requested it. It’s a difficult subject to read about, but I think it’s necessary to be informed. I was grateful when NetGalley approved me, and with more than a little trepidation, I downloaded the book and began reading.

For over twenty years, Matson Browning worked undercover with white and Christian nationalist and other sovereign citizen groups, including groups who took it upon themselves to patrol the border (under zero authority other than the one they assigned themselves due to the color of their skin or the place of their birth). He got to know white supremacists, KKK members, churchgoers who interpreted their scriptures in such a way that they were confident Jesus agreed with their hateful and xenophobic opinions, criminals of all sorts (including murderers), people who would later get murdered, and people he never would’ve assumed would be part of these groups, including pastors, teachers, members of the military/veterans, and police officers, including some newer recruits in Mr. Browning’s own unit.

The attitudes of the people Mr. Browning, posing as a white nationalist named Packy, works with are disturbing, hateful, and frightening…but what might be even more disturbing is how little anyone in the US seems to care about the existence of these groups. Mr. Matson’s fellow police officers weren’t much interested; the higher-ups whom he worked for seemed to roll their eyes and sigh every time he infiltrated a new group. Murders – even murders of multiple people at once – were brushed off, simply because these weren’t the regular Black or Mexican street gangs. How bad could a bunch of white guys be?

Very bad, in fact. The Hate Next Door and Matson Browning’s career is a testament to that.

Matson Browning, along with his wife Tawni, who also went undercover with him, shows over and over again how deeply dangerous these groups are, and how they’re everywhere in the US. In this disturbing account of a career spent investigating one of America’s many dirty little secrets, the authors provide story after story that will have every reader taking a closer look at everyone they know. 

The Hate Next Door isn’t an easy, relaxing read. It’s the kind of read that will have you sucking in a quick breath as you realize the danger Matson Browning put himself in in order to infiltrate these groups. It’ll have you side-eyeing the people you work with, your neighbors, the person in front of you at the grocery store. It will change the way you look at everyone around you…but it also gives a little bit of hope. There *are* people who leave these movements behind, and Mr. Browning provides a basic list of things you can do in order to maybe steer a friend or colleague away from this path (a long game, for sure, but worth it). 

This is a disturbing book, but a tragically necessary one. Read it to understand better what’s hiding in plain sight everywhere across the US and, sadly, also around the world. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Matson and Tawni Browning, and Sourcebooks for providing me a copy of this excellent book to read and review. The Hate Next Door is available on July 4, 2023. Support your local bookstores!

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

Stephanie1 Comment

I’ve been appalled by the Troubled Teen Industry in the US ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Kids, and when I recently learned about the existence of Stolen: A Memoir by Elizabeth Gilpin (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) in The Elissas, about her experiences as a teenager forced into this industry, it immediately went onto my list. And then into my stack of books it went on one of my last library trips.

As a teenager, Elizabeth Gilpin was stolen from her bed in the middle of the night by two dark-clothed strangers and hustled off to an outdoor camp for troubled teens, where she spent the next three months hiking, living outdoors full-time, and starving, subsisting on things like raw oatmeal and uncooked raw beans. This was her parents’ first solution to her teenage behaviors such as being argumentative, dating, going to parties, drinking, and being angry. After completing this program, she was shipped off to a ‘therapeutic’ boarding school whose techniques for healing these teens (whose problems ranged from anorexia to heroin addiction to depression to attending parties and drinking to being gay) were modeled on the Synanon cult. Healthy!

Instead of helping these teenagers to develop a healthy sense of identity and deal with their feelings, this ‘school’ responded by shaming the students in its care and abusing them physically and emotionally, making them repeat on a daily basis how worthless they all were. Is it any wonder that one by one, far too many of Elizabeth’s classmates began dying as soon as they left the school? The trauma these schools impart lives on long past graduation, and Elizabeth Gilpin’s memoir is proof positive of that.

Anyone even considering sending your child to one of these places needs to read this book (and Maia Szalavitz’s as well). These schools and camps are entirely unregulated; it’s like sending your sick grandpa into an abandoned building with a sheet spray-painted with ‘HAWSPITTLE’ flapping outside. DON’T DO IT. Elizabeth lost weight; she was injured; the adults were physically and emotionally abusive and manipulative, and not a damn thing was done to actually help her or her classmates grow into confident, capable adults able to cope with their problems and the stress of the real world. These camps do nothing but damage kids who are already hurting. They’re not the solution.

I’d love to see another memoir by Ms. Gilpin, if she’s up to it, about her relationship with her family and what that’s been like. I *think* she said she’s worked through a lot in therapy over the years, which, to me is amazing; I’m not sure I’d have it in me to still be able to have a relationship with my family after they sent me to one of these places. That’s some *serious* work, and I deeply hope her family has done the work as well in order to understand what she went through. My heart breaks for her and others who have suffered because of this unregulated, unsafe, bullshit industry.

If you enjoy the memoir genre, this is one you don’t want to miss.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach

Stephanie1 Comment

Browsing through NetGalley, I came across a title that intrigued me: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach (Legacy Lit, 2023). A brief glance at the blurb had me hitting the REQUEST button: this was a tale about the nightmarish Troubled Teen Industry, something that’s interested me ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s damning exposé on the topic, Help at Any Cost, years ago. I was so thrilled when I saw that I’d been approved, and I took a deep breath, settled in with my kindle, and began to read.

Author Samantha Leach grew up with one of the titular Elissas, a born-to-be-wild child who absorbed far too many of the cultural messages that surrounded her, growing up in the early-to-mid 2000’s in a cultural landscape laced with Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, about what a woman’s role and place in this world should be. Proudly proclaiming at the beginning of her teenage years that she wanted to be a slut, Elissa’s path into adolescence is fraught with risky sexual behavior, drinking, and drug use. At fifteen, her parents ship her off to a school in Nebraska that promises to reform her behavior, part of the unregulated Troubled Teen Industry that’s allowed to function with little-to-no oversight in the US and has been responsible for a truly horrifying number of child deaths. 

Using Elissa’s story, along with the stories of two friends she became close to at this school, Alyssa and Alissa, Ms. Leach illustrates one of the least-discussed problems of the Troubled Teen Industry: these schools serve as holding pens at best, mirrors of the US prison system at worst, for struggling teenagers, teaching them how to do little more than survive in a strict, closed system, and giving them none of the tools to navigate the outside world and the behaviors and issues that so concerned their parents in the first place. One by one, in the brief years after graduation, each Elissa dies, likely due to behavior related to the problems that got them sent to this Nebraska school, leaving behind a trail of pain, anguish, grief, devastation, and so, so many questions.

While the author’s writing style wasn’t always my personal cup of tea, I do think she achieved her goals of memorializing her friend and exposing what’s likely the least talked-about problem of the Troubled Teen Industry. Much has been made, and rightfully so, of its lack of oversight and the harsh punishments doled out to the students in their care, but there’s so little follow-up and no real statistics to tell what their programs actually do in the long-term, and thus it seems that they’re not preparing students for the outside world and to return to their former addiction, the temptations waiting for them, the challenges and struggles they’ll face when they return to the same environment they were living in before entering these “schools.”

There are those, Ms. Leach notes, who are helped by the Troubled Teen Industry, teens who take what they need from the incredibly expensive schools their parents ship them off to and end up the better for it. The Three Elissas is not a story that documents anything close to that. It’s not Maia Szalavitz, but it’s a cautionary tale all the same. These schools, Ms. Leach shows, are not places to send your children if you’re hoping for a long-term solution, and the tragedy of the three young women – Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa – are proof enough. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Legacy Lit, and Samantha Leach for allowing me to read an early copy of The Three Elissas.

The Three Elissas is available for purchase on June 6, 2023. Support your local bookstores!


Follow Samantha Leach on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen

Stephanie1 Comment

Another 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge: a book by a first time author! I dug through my TBR and came up with something I’d been wanting to read for a while: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen (Penguin Books, 2020). My older child is super into amusement park history and has told me about Action Park before, so I was really curious about this book (plus I’d heard great things about it). It was, however, at a different library, and I just hadn’t made it over there yet. But for this challenge, my hand was forced, and this ended up being a very good thing.

Action Park in New Jersey was known for sending its park-goers home with injuries, some of them serious. Guests could expect bruises, bumps, abrasions, broken bones, concussions, all the way up to drownings and death. No, really. But to Andy Mulvihill, the park was his childhood and his young adulthood. Created by his father, Gene, the park put the guests in control of the action…but, as we know, people often don’t behave as they should.

Go-cart-style cars were crashed and flipped. Scooters that raced down a mountainside at top speed led to scars and broken bones. The wave pool, with its murky water, had the lifeguards on high alert at all times, and with good reason: the number of people they had to rescue each shift was appallingly high. Fights broke out in the park often, sanitation was nearly impossible to keep up with, and the whole thing seemed to be uncontrollable chaos. But this place was beloved, and Andy Mulvihill’s love for both the park and his dreamer father are evident on every page.

This is a fun, FUN book. The way Mr. Mulvihill and Mr. Rossen describe the many horrifying incidents at the park had me laughing out loud multiple times (and then questioning if I should be laughing at that at all!). A few times, I burst into my older kid’s room to relay something that they inevitably already knew, but I was just so shocked by. Gene Mulvihill made so many choices for his park that would never, ever fly today (and Andy Mulvihill acknowledges this), but somehow, the park’s attendance just kept growing, year after year. Product of its time and place, I suppose.

Seriously, this is a SUPER fun book, both a memoir and a history of the wildest amusement park I’ve ever heard of, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. What an absolute delight it was to spend a few days lost in its pages.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Original Sins: An Extraordinary Memoir of Faith, Family, Shame, and Addiction by Matt Rowland Hill

Stephanie1 Comment

I love a good leaving-religion-behind memoir, so that’s how Original Sins: An Extraordinary Memoir of Faith, Family, Shame, and Addiction by Matt Rowland Hill (Vintage Digital, 2022) ended up on my TBR, and I grabbed it on my last run to the library before it closed to move to its new home. And whew, friends. This isn’t your typical “This religion wasn’t for me so I left and it was difficult” memoir. Original Sins is a raw, searing collection of pain that will devastate you, then leave you full of hope.

Welsh-born Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of an evangelical pastor, in a family with three other siblings and parents who fought constantly. Their family dynamic was fraught with conflict, and Matt delved deeply into his religion, desperate to have all the answers. But this wasn’t to be, and later on in life, he turned to drinking, then to drugs to fill in the gaps left behind by a religion he could no longer feel at home in. Falling deeper and deeper into a hole dug by crack and heroin, Matt gets clean and relapses several times while trying to come to terms with the way the world was always explained to him versus the reality of how things are.

This is an astonishingly honest memoir. There were things Mr. Hill wrote about that, as I read, I thought, “You could not torture this out of me!” but that ended up being important to the story later (which really made me admire his courage). His struggles are immense; his descriptions of drug use, cravings, withdrawal, and the many unethical things he did to score his next hit made me ache for him, so great was his pain and the mental anguish he was running from. Addiction is an utter monster, and Mr. Hill never holds back in letting the reader know the realities of living with such a condition. My heart broke over and over as I turned the pages.

This is such a fascinating look at the consequences of…life, really. Mr. Hill’s parents were extremely flawed; they were raising their children in the way they considered right, but obviously, religion of all sorts is never, ever a one-size-fits-all thing. The damage it can do can be massive, as can not dealing with that damage – and if we’re not given the tools to deal, or we’re told it’s wrong to confront our feelings or even to HAVE those feelings…we end up with stories like Mr. Hill’s, full of pain, suffering, and a long, long road back, one that not everyone is able to travel.

Original Sins is vibrating with pain, but it’s raw and brutally honest, and it’s an incredible piece of writing. I wish Mr. Hill all the best in the world for his continued recovery and journey towards finding peace with and in himself, and with the world. 

Follow Matt Rowland Hill on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin

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The 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge directed me to read a book from a celebrity book club list, and I was like a deer in the headlights for a moment. I’m not much of a celebrity watcher at all, and honestly, the only time I hear about celebrity book clubs are when other people bring them up, so I had to go digging. I’ve read some of Oprah’s selections in the past, and I’ve heard people talking about Reese Witherspoon’s book club, but that’s still really all I know. The lists I looked at, nothing really jumped out at me, until… I spotted The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). This was an Oprah selection, and I immediately knew that this was something I had to read. This is one of the most incredible, painful books I’ve ever read about the American “justice” system.

Anthony Ray Hinton was a Black man in Alabama who signed in at work in a warehouse, plenty of people around him. That mattered nothing to the police, who accused him of three murders (one of which was committed during this time Mr. Hinton was at work, the others just tacked on because they were similar), and a jury, who convicted him. Failed over and over again by his court-appointed lawyer and the experts who weren’t as expert as they should’ve been, Ray, as he’s known, is sentenced to death by electric chair. 

Appeal after appeal falls through, and at first, Ray’s anger nearly eats him alive. But then he begins to apply the life lessons his beloved mother taught him to living in such terrible isolation on Death Row, and this change in attitude helps him survive. And then his case was taken up by Bryan Stevenson, of Just Mercy, himself…

Despite Mr. Stevenson, whom I’m convinced has been sent here to do God’s work on earth, finding experts (actual ones, three of them!) to prove that the gun the police pulled out of Ray’s mother’s house couldn’t possibly have been used in the murders Ray was convicted of, it still takes twelve years for Ray to be set free. In all, he spends nearly THIRTY YEARS waiting to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit, listening to his friends make their final walk down the hallway to be murdered by the guards in charge of the men’s everyday lives, smelling their burning flesh wafting on the air for hours after they’re put to death. If that doesn’t enrage you, I’m not sure what will.

This is an absolutely incredible, deeply enraging book. What the state of Alabama did to Mr. Hinton, how it destroyed his life and his family, with what seems like zero remorse, disgusts me to the very depths of my soul. That this is how poor Black men are treated in this country, even when their innocence is able to be proven, PROVEN, is utterly horrifying. Mr. Hinton’s experiences are shocking, but they’re not uncommon: one in every ten people sentenced to death in the United States is innocent. 

I’ll say that again.

One-tenth of the people murdered by the United States government are innocent of the crimes they were accused of.

That is a shocking statistic. If I weren’t already vehemently opposed to the death penalty before reading this, I would definitely be now. The fact that the state of Alabama stole thirty years of Mr. Hinton’s life without so much as an, “Oops, my bad,” and only doubled down, desperate to murder him even when stronger evidence from more qualified experts was presented that he couldn’t possibly have committed these murders, fills me with such rage that I desperately wish I were intelligent enough to become a lawyer and join Bryan Stevenson’s team. They deserve all the help they can get to do the noble work of saving lives from government-sanctioned murder.

This is an utterly incredible book, and I don’t think there was a single page I read that I didn’t want to scream or rage-vomit. I read books to learn about the world, to experience it through other people’s eyes, to feel. This book checks all three categories in spades. Five stars, and I truly hope Mr. Hinton is able to live a calm, quiet life of peace in the wake of such trauma.

Read more about Anthony Ray Hinton’s case at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative.

Visit Lara Love Hardin’s website here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult by Michelle Dowd

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Browsing through NetGalley a while back, I found a book that basically had my name on it in flashing neon signs. It combined multiple interests of mine, and though it took a while, I was finally approved, and I was thrilled. Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult by Michelle Dowd (Algonquin Books, 2023) called my name from the moment I read the title, and I was correct: this book was a deeply engaging read, mining into a childhood filled with chaos, dystopian theology, and a love of nature that has remained with its author through her escape from the cult that created her.

Michelle Dowd was raised in California in her grandfather’s group known as The Field (which still exists today, but, under different leadership, is drastically different from the group in which Ms. Dowd grew up). The end of the world was nigh; group members would need to learn how to survive in the coming apocalypse, so Michelle, who received only three years of education at a public school, learned early on how to live off of what the earth could provide. Pine nuts, roots, berries, leaves, needles, bark, Michelle learned how to use them all. This education was the only form of affection her mother gave her; The Field taught that any kind of affection was wrong and unnecessary, and thus Michelle grows up starved for love, attention, food, and education, though her obvious intelligence is never in question.

An autoimmune disorder hospitalizes Michelle for months at a time; The Field states it’s because she’s an unfaithful Jezebel, her father never visits, and her mother blames her, with helpful statements such as, “Why are you doing this to me?” Throughout all of the chaos of her childhood – the physical and sexual abuse, the educational neglect, the lack of affection, the malnutrition, the illness, the anorexia and self-harm, the poverty, the persistent terror of eschatological theology preached by all the adults in her life – nature is her one constant, and it carries Michelle through to her eventual escape into the world she’d been made to fear her entire life.

Forager is a beautifully written memoir, and turning such suffering and fear into beauty is no easy task. It’s Educated-meets-I Want to Be Left Behind, and it’s utterly stunning in not just the depths of depravity in which Ms. Dowd was raised, but the constant unfolding knowledge of how far she had to climb to escape, a process not fully detailed (dare I hope for a second memoir from Ms. Dowd?), but one alluded to have taken years. Deconstruction and rebuilding is a difficult process and one that must’ve been especially challenging for a person raised in The Field. This book left me stunned, grateful for Ms. Dowd’s survival, and deeply concerned for other members – current and former – of this group.  

Interspersed between the chapters are field notes on different plants that provide a little insight into the knowledge of the nature around her that Ms. Dowd absorbed as a child. The pictures she paints of the plants and trees that helped her survive and the way she describes the comfort she finds in nature and her ability to navigate it temper the intense descriptions of abuse, neglect, and apathy she grew up with. Like most memoirs that deal with heavy abuse, Forager can be tough to read at times, but ultimately, it’s well-balanced and will leave readers in awe of the strength it takes to survive a childhood like this one. 

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Algonquin Books, and Michelle Dowd for allowing me to read and review an early copy. Forager is available for purchase March 7, 2023. 

Visit Michelle Dowd’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from The Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden

Stephanie2 Comments

A book based on a popular movie??? That was a prompt I needed to fill for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge, and…I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that at first. I’m not really about novelizations, so it seemed as though this would be a tough one to fill. But then a list of suggestions featured As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden (Atria Books, 2014). Who DOESN’T love that movie??? I’d heard of the book and had always wanted to read it, but hadn’t gotten around to it, so this was the perfect opportunity. And it turned out to be an excellent book! 

The Princess Bride didn’t actually do all that well at the box office, but once it came out on video, its popularity exploded, turning it into the cult classic that people still quote from constantly. In this book, actor Cary Elwes, who played Westley, spills the secrets of the making of the film, from the nerves of the actors who auditioned for it, the mishaps on set (including Elwes’s own broken toe!), to the improbability of the movie ever having gotten made in the first place – I had no idea that others had attempted to make this film before, but that it had always fallen apart before filming started. No one was quite sure how to film such a beloved, yet complex story.

From the very first moments of director Rob Reiner putting together a cast, to the 30th reunion party, Cary Elwes describes all the ups and downs on set. Wallace Shawn’s nerves about his inability to play Vizzini, Andre the Giant’s gentle personality, health struggles, and awareness that he likely wouldn’t live a long life, the laughter Billy Crystal brought to the set as Miracle Max, it’s all here on these pages, and you’ll experience it all with this outstanding cast.

What a fun, fun read. I felt like I was there on the set, wearing Robin Wright’s fireproof dress, going through hours upon hours of fencing training with Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin, sweating in an ROUS costume in the hot summer sun. It seemed that the actors knew – despite what the box office numbers originally told them – that they were creating something really special, and the joy they experienced while making this movie is evident in Elwes’s writing. This is an absolute gem of a book, and if you’ve ever enjoyed watching The Princess Bride, you’ll love this book. 

Follow Cary Elwes on Twitter here.