Desperate for her happily-ever-after to begin, Tia marries young and against the advice of several people, including the minister who does their pre-marital counseling. Her husband was an abusive boyfriend and is an abusive husband, using the strictures of fundamentalist Christianity to keep Tia in line. As she begins to have children and realizes that she is becoming more and more stuck in an untenable situation, she wonders how it would be possible for her to leave.

I nearly put this book down a few times in the early chapters because the writing style irked me. Levings has a tendency toward purple prose, and it can obscure the facts with flowery phrasing. There were some small contradictions, and an extended metaphor about toppling dominoes that doesn't serve the book well. However, when she describes her courtship and marriage, the writing gets tighter. Her experiences of spousal abuse were truly agonizing, especially considering the many points at which she could have gotten help. Her husband's apparent religious mania meant that she experienced a variety of very restrictive rules, far beyond what is believed and practiced by most Christians. (Many of the writers/preachers/etc. whom she mentions him following have since been disgraced or debunked.) The verse that came to my mind was Luke 11:46: "Jesus replied, 'And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.'" Though Levings does escape, as the subtitle of the book suggests, I found this a very heavy read. The end of the book reverts to vagueness and flowery language again, and I think she could have said less and been more clear. I've been reading a few different books on this topic lately, and this one is certainly valuable for the experiences it describes. ( )

CA: religious trauma, grooming for cults, sexual assault, rape, kink with dubious consent, homophobia, spousal abuse, intimate partner violence, infant illness, infant death, mental illness treated as satanic, suicidal ideation, animal death, pet death, PTSD

A truly excellent memoir about living in and then escaping from fundamentalist, evangelical, patriarchal Christianity. A tough hang, but important and well worth it. Important, I think, not just for its value as a personal story of healing but also because so much of what is happening to the Republican party has its roots in the culture and cults Levings was part of. ( )