Review: Tired as F*ck

Title: Tired as F*ck: Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture

Author: Caroline Dooner

Genre: Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Dieting, fatphobia, medical content, eating disorder, medical trauma, body shaming, alcoholism (mentions), chronic illness

Back Cover:

Blending memoir and blistering social observations, the author of The F*ck It Diet looks back at her desperate attempts to heal her hunger, anxiety, and imperfections through extreme diets, culty self-help methods, and melodramatic bargains with the universe.

Offering a frank and funny critique of the cultural forces that are driving us mad, Caroline Dooner examines how treating ourselves like never ending self-improvement projects is a recipe for burnout. We have become unknowingly complicit in perpetuating our own exhaustion because we are treating ourselves like machines. But even phones need to f*cking recharge.

Caroline takes a good hard look at the dark side of self-help, and explains how she eventually used a radical period of rest to push back against cultural expectations and reclaim some peace.

Tired As F*ck empowers us to say no to the things that exhaust us. It inspires us to carve out time to slow down, feel okay about doing less, and honor our humanity.

This is not a self-help book, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture and revels in the healing power of rest and letting shit go.

Review:

I picked this up because, like How to Keep House While Drowning, the title called to me. I am, indeed, tired as f*ck. I also was very intrigued by the “radical period of rest” mentioned on the back cover. I wanted to do something like that, and I hoped this book would tell me how to go about that. My enthusiasm was only increased as the book started out by saying that Caroline set aside two whole years for a radical period of rest. I was very excited, because that is exactly what I need. Just tell me how to do it, Caroline!

My library categorized Tired as F*ck as self-improvement and psychology, which I think is how I got the idea that there was going to be some how-to in this book. This book is, in essence, mostly memoir. There are some parts at the end where Caroline talks about her two years of rest experiment, but most of it is how she ended up at that point. It covers her medical problems, the medical fatphobia that led her to believe all her problems were from not losing enough weight, her attempt to obtain perfect health through diet and weight loss, her struggles with food, her undiagnosed eating disorder, and her career stress as an aspiring actress. A good 80% of the book is just covering all the stressors that led up to her needing those two years of rest.

And I completely get it. Extreme diets are stressful and make life harder at the best of times. Caroline somehow managed to go raw vegan for something like six months, which sounds like absolute hell the way she describes it. There is quite a bit on the stresses of becoming an actress and her attempts to force herself to become one despite disliking a lot of the process, but most of the story focuses on her weight and diet struggles. At some points it started to feel like a whole book advertising her first book, The F*ck-It Diet. (And it comes with a VERY severe trigger warning for eating disorders and dieting.) The self-help and hustle culture that the subtitle hints at takes a back seat to her struggles with diet culture.

It was an inspiring book, overall. Though most of it was just about her eating disorder struggles and did sometimes feel like it belonged in The F*ck-It Diet instead, towards the end when she actually started talking about her rest was good. I think if I’d gone in expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more. It was still very good, but I had expected (and wanted) a little more how-to. Because I also am tired as fuck and need to take some extended rest.

Review: The Cloister Walk

Title: The Cloister Walk

Author: Kathleen Norris

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), sexual assault (mentions), mental illness (mentions), murder (mentions)

Back Cover:

Why would a married woman with a thoroughly Protestant background and often more doubt than faith be drawn to the ancient practice of monasticism, to a community of celibate men whose days are centered on a rigid schedule of prayer, work, and scripture? This is the question that poet Kathleen Norris asks us as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.

Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world– its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community– can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. In this stirring and lyrical work, the monastery, often considered archaic or otherworldly, becomes immediate, accessible, and relevant to us, no matter what our faith may be.

Review:

This is another recommendation from my mother-in-law. It sounded somewhat interesting, but wasn’t high on my priority list until she actually gave me a copy. I haven’t read a physical book in a long time, but I am trying to work through my unread shelf, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

This is not at all what I was expecting. I was expecting something solidly memoir about the author’s experience of being a Protestant-raised nonreligious person spending time in Catholic monastery. I expected a series of events presented in chronological order, along with what she learned about religion and monasticism and some reflections on monastic life. I was not expecting … whatever this is.

Kathleen is a poet, and this book reads like a poem in prose form. I know that’s an oxymoron, but I don’t have a better way to describe it. It reads like poetry – reflective and metaphorical and not limited to a particular place, time, or sequence of events – but it’s written in proper sentences and paragraphs and such like prose. It was an interesting and unique reading experience, and I rather enjoyed the slow, reflective pace.

I also found a lot to relate to in Kathleen. She was raised Protestant but rejected the religion of her youth. Although when the book opened she considered herself generally nonreligious, she still was a sort of spiritual seeker, looking for some kind of religious or spiritual transcendence. The main difference between us in this regard is that she is willing to go back to Christianity to search for it.

I’m glad she did, though, because the result was this book, which is fascinating. I have never been Catholic, so it was interesting learning about little details of Catholicism, and especially about monastic life and the Benedictine monks that she spent time with. She reflects on a lot of different topics in regards to religion and monasticism – everything from saints she particularly likes to the experience of singing psalms every day to more controversial aspects like mandatory celibacy. All of it was fascinating, and some of it was even inspiring.

Even though I have no intention of looking to Christianity for my spiritual seeking journey, I’m glad Kathleen could find positive things. And I’m very glad she decided to write about them in this book. It’s more an invitation to reflection than any sort of memoir, but I found it engaging, poetic, and surprisingly resonant in many places. It feels especially crafted for the spiritual seeker.

Review: The Complete Persepolis

Title: The Complete Persepolis

Author: Marjane Satrapi

Genre: Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, war, violence, government oppression, religious bigotry, misogyny, torture (mentions), imprisonment (brief, not to protagnoist), injuries, homophobia (brief), rape (mentions), drug use, divorce, suicide attempt, homelessness, xenophobia, slut-shaming (brief)

Back Cover:

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi’s best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir.

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming–both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom–Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

Review:

This is a memoir in graphic novel format, which is not something I’ve seen before. The art was very simplistic – not in a bad way, but it cut out a lot of visual detail to get to the heart of the story. I struggle with graphic novels usually, but this one was a little easier since it didn’t have a lot of visual complexity to distract from the words, and Marjane grew a beauty mark as a teenager which helped distinguish her from the other characters.

Being a memoir, there’s not so much a plot as themes. It’s a coming-of-age story, it’s a story of a fairly liberal country being crushed by a religious extremist government, it’s a story of a child struggling to understand the changes in her world as she grows up. It’s dark, sad, and heartbreaking by turns, but there’s also happy moments of joy and love and respite.

I vaguely remember learning about the Islamic Revolution in history – although being homeschooled by extremely Christian parents, it was more “Iran was just about to realize that all successful and advanced societies are Christian and convert, but the wreched Muslims didn’t want to see people following the true god so they took over and forced everyone to be Muslim again” than actual history. Marjane takes the names and dates of history and gives a face to a citizen. She is a single story out of millions, but her story brings to life what it was like to live in Iran during that era, and later what it was like to leave everything in Iran and study in Austria, a country far away from the Islamic Revolution.

Marjane tells her story well, and the accompanying art highlights what she tells. It is fascinating and compelling, and gives a voice to the ordinary people who lived under the Islamic Revolution regime. I think it is very worth reading.

Review: Pure

Title: Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

Author: Linda Kay Klein

Genre: Memoir/Sociology/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Sexual content, sexual assault, rape, pedophilia, child sexual abuse, incest, religious trauma, religious bigotry, homophobia, body shaming, medical content

Back Cover:

From a woman who has been there and back, the first inside look at the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s purity culture has had on a generation of young women—in a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir.

In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame.

This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.

Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question the purity-based sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.

Review:

I went into this book going, “I had no guilt or shame having premarital sex after I left Christianity, so it will be interesting to read about other people’s experiences but I’m not going to get swamped with feelings like I did with other similar books.” And if you want to take a moment to chuckle at the naïveté, go ahead, because somehow I had entirely forgotten that purity culture was about so much more than “premarital sex is bad.”

This book is a combination of sociology and memoir. Linda starts each section with an extended story from her own life, but continues with interviews she did with other people who grew up in purity culture (some of whom are still Christian, some of whom aren’t) and ties it all together with a narrative of the problems purity culture causes. If you’re familiar with autoethnography, it feels like one that’s just written for a general readership instead of an academic one.

For being as short as it is (the audiobook is only 9 hours), it packs a lot into its pages, and yet still feels like there is tons more to say on the topic. Which there probably is – purity culture is a broad topic that’s hurt a lot of people and there’s no way anyone could cover all the nuances in one book, even if that book was twice as long as Pure. Though an insider like me can point out all the nuances Linda missed, she did a really good job portraying the major factors and making the ideas accessible to people outside purity culture.

There are a lot of intense feelings and traumas in these pages, but also a lot of revelations for me as someone who grew up in purity culture. Linda’s example of her struggle with Crohn’s disease was especially revelatory in how her physical suffering redeemed her evil body (which had developed undeniable hips and breasts and therefore was unquestionably Sexual and therefore Evil) and made her good in the eyes of her church.

This book is a lot. It’s intense and full of trauma, body shaming, and little girls being sexualized so they can be shamed for that sexualization. But it is very well-written and the stories contained well-told, and it strikes a good balance between being relatable and helpful to the purity culture survivor and accessible to the purity culture outsider. This is a very worthwhile book.

Review: Educated (DNF)

Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover

Genre: Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Physical abuse, child abuse, childhood neglect, traumatic injury, fire/burn injury, car crashes, blood, gore, medical procedures (mentions), mental illness

Read To: 46%

Back Cover:

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.

Review:

I really thought this was going to be a topical memoir along the lines of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (a memoir about decluttering as a way of setting your affairs in order) or Autism in Heels (a memoir about how autism affects women differently than men). I thought it was going to be told through the story of Tara’s life, but focusing on how she got no education in childhood and so went on to educate herself and get college degrees and such.

And it’s really not. It’s the story of her life and her childhood – the full story, expanded on to the best of her memory and from talking to other family members. By the time I stopped, Tara had just taken the ACT and her score wasn’t good enough to get into a college so she was going to keep studying and take it again. The rest of it was her childhood with her family – their prepper-style anticipation of the apocalypse, her father’s hatred of the government and possible mental illness, her mother’s herbalism and more “woo-woo” healing and unexpressed disagreement with her father, her siblings living, working, and leaving (or not), and their complete and utter rejection of medical care and education.

There is a lot in this book. A lot of abuse, neglect, and horrible things a child shouldn’t have to go through. In many places, it was hard to read. But it’s not a bad book – I absolutely see how it became so popular. It’s told well and highly engaging.

So why did I stop reading? Mainly that it wasn’t a topical memoir like I expected. It was much longer than I bargained for and put much less emphasis on the education part of Tara’s childhood. I had gone in hoping to find someone like me who taught themselves much of their schooling (despite my homeschooling parents actually attempting to give me an education, by the time I was thirteen my mother was focused on my younger siblings and I taught myself high school). It isn’t at all bad, just not what I expected or wanted.

For a few days I was on the fence about finishing it, and then someone put a hold on it at the library and that made up my mind. I’m not discounting the possibility that I may come back and finish it someday, when I’m more in the mood for the story of a childhood among rural apocalyptic preppers. But for right now, I’m putting it down.

Review: Unorthodox

Title: Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Author: Deborah Feldman

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Religious trauma, childhood sexual assault, misogyny/sexism, heterosexual sex, reluctant marital sex, child physical abuse (mentions), Holocaust (mentions), emotional abuse, vomit (mentions)

Back Cover:

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape.

Review:

This is a story of living a strictly-regimented life in a strict religious sect, and the story of a girl growing up and realizing she didn’t have to accept other people deciding she was lesser because she was female.

Like Girl at the End of the World, the other leaving-a-strict-conservative-religion memoir I’ve read, I saw a lot of myself in this story. A large factor in me leaving religion I was raised in was also a slow realization that I deserved to be treated better than a baby-making bang mommy for my husband. There were enough differences between Deborah’s experience of Satmar Hasidic Judaism and my experience of fundamentalist Christianity that I didn’t relive my trauma with her, but I definitely related to many of her feelings and experiences.

Since I know very little about Judaism, I don’t know how many of the expectations, rules, and traditions Deborah details in this book are universal to Judaism, how many are Hasidic, and how many are specific to the Satmar sect, but I still found it all fascinating. Despite disagreeing with many of the rules and ultimately leaving the sect, this book doesn’t disparage the practices and traditions detailed. She makes it clear that she wanted more than what the Satmar rules would allow her to do and to be happy she and her son needed to leave, but she doesn’t claim that Judaism or even the Satmar sect is bad. She doesn’t pass judgement on them at all, simply states them as factual happenings without moral or ethical judgement. Her follow-up memoir talks about her struggle for a personal Jewish identity, so she obviously isn’t against being Jewish.

This is a very good memoir. Personal, raw, and real, with information about a particular Jewish sect and Deborah’s life within in. There’s religious trauma, the struggles of marital sex when you learned you had a vagina one week before your wedding, the effects of surviving the Holocaust on the generations that came after, and a really compelling personal story.

Deborah Feldman’s memoirs:

1. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
2. Exodus: A Memoir

Review: The Year of Less

Title: The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store

Author: Cait Flanders

Genre: Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Divorce, fatphobia, moralizing about food, alcoholism

Back Cover:

In her late twenties, Cait Flanders found herself stuck in the consumerism cycle that grips so many of us: earn more, buy more, want more, rinse, repeat. Even after she worked her way out of nearly $30,000 of consumer debt, her old habits took hold again. When she realized that nothing she was doing or buying was making her happy—only keeping her from meeting her goals—she decided to set herself a challenge: she would not shop for an entire year.

The Year of Less documents Cait’s life for twelve months during which she bought only consumables: groceries, toiletries, gas for her car. Along the way, she challenged herself to consume less of many other things besides shopping. She decluttered her apartment and got rid of 70 percent of her belongings; learned how to fix things rather than throw them away; researched the zero waste movement; and completed a television ban. At every stage, she learned that the less she consumed, the more fulfilled she felt.

The challenge became a lifeline when, in the course of the year, Cait found herself in situations that turned her life upside down. In the face of hardship, she realized why she had always turned to shopping, alcohol, and food—and what it had cost her. Unable to reach for any of her usual vices, she changed habits she’d spent years perfecting and discovered what truly mattered to her.

Blending Cait’s compelling story with inspiring insight and practical guidance, The Year of Less will leave you questioning what you’re holding on to in your own life—and, quite possibly, lead you to find your own path of less.

Review:

My library did categorize this book as both self-help and memoir, but I guess I didn’t realize exactly how much more memoir it was than self-help. Yeah, Cait did talk about the how and why, but it was more about her personal journey through that year than anything.

The no-buy experiment is apparently the fourth-ish such dramatic thing she’s done, previous ones involving quitting drinking (she was an alcoholic), losing 30 pounds, and paying off $30,000 in credit card debt. She establishes at the beginning that she did the no-buy challenge because after doing all of that, she still wasn’t saving as much money as she wanted to be and she still wasn’t feeling fulfilled.

If you’re just in it for the how and why, that’s all in the very beginning. Cait talks about why she decided to challenge herself to do the no-buy year, the rules she set for herself, her goals, and why she decided to declutter her apartment at the same time. From there, it’s mostly memoir, with Cait managing the ups and downs of life while not buying things that weren’t on her approved buying list.

In the end, it mostly boiled down to Cait realizing that she couldn’t buy meaning and happiness, much of the stuff she already owned was stuff she bought for the person she thought she should be and not for the person she actually was, and she used shopping like she used to use alcohol to make herself feel better when she didn’t want to deal with difficult emotions.

I think this type of experiment was a lot easier for her than it would be for a lot of people. Cait was single for almost the entirety of this year, living alone, working remotely for a financial startup, and making a TON of money (she doesn’t provide numbers, but she had a day job and did freelance work and partway through the book she realizes just the money she made from her freelance work would cover all of her basic living expenses). In order for me to do something similar, I’d have to get my husband on board with the no-buy idea and decluttering, either get our roommate on board with decluttering or get her to clarify what stuff in the apartment is hers and what isn’t, and do all of that while working an exhausting 40+ hours a week at a warehouse.

That’s not to say this book is worthless or that it wasn’t good, because there are some useful parts and I did enjoy reading it. It was just extremely personal and way more memoir than I expected.

Review: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

Title: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter

Author: Margareta Magnusson

Genre: Organization/Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Extended discussions of death and death of loved ones

Back Cover:

In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.

Review:

Margareta insists at the beginning of the book that death cleaning (and this book) is not morbid, and somehow she’s right. Despite being about “death cleaning,” or dealing with your stuff now to spare your loved ones the burden of dealing with it after you die, it’s actually a lighthearted and yes, gentle, book.

That said, this isn’t really an instruction manual. Margareta does add a few general “this is how I think you should do it” bits here and there, but it’s mostly about the author’s own thoughts about her own impending death and her experiences death cleaning for others and herself. The bulk of the book is stories about the things she’s accumulated through her life, the memories they contain for her, and how and why she decided to keep or get rid of them.

In some ways, it almost feels like this book itself is part of Margareta’s death cleaning – processing her journey and recording the stories of her things.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning is a quick read – I completed it in a single afternoon – and quite pleasant despite being about “death” cleaning and containing frequent (yet remarkably lighthearted) reflections on death. Personally, I think is best approached more as a topical memoir (Margareta’s life told through her process of cleaning out her possessions) than as any sort of advice or instruction manual.

Review: The Men with the Pink Triangle

Title: The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps

Author: Heinz Heger

Genre: Autobiography/History

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, torture, rape, coerced sex, homophobia

Back Cover:

It has only been since the mid-1970s that any attention has been paid to the persecution and interment of gay men by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Since that time, books such as Richard Plant’s The Pink Triangle (and Martin Sherman’s play Bent) have illuminated this nearly lost history. Heinz Heger’s first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was one of the first books on the topic and remains one of the most important.

In 1939, Heger, a Viennese university student, was arrested and sentenced to prison for being a “degenerate.” Within weeks he was transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality. He remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the war in 1945. The power of The Men with the Pink Triangle comes from Heger’s sparse prose and his ability to recall–and communicate–the smallest resonant details. The pain and squalor of everyday camp life–the constant filth, the continuous presence of death, and the unimaginable cruelty of those in command–are all here. But Heger’s story would be unbearable were it not for the simple courage he and others used to survive and, having survived, that he bore witness. This book is harrowing but necessary reading for everyone concerned about gay history, human rights, or social justice.

Review:

This is an absoutely horrifying book. It goes into detail about all the atrocities committed by the Nazis. In learning about concentration camps, you hear about what was done to Jewish people, but gloss over the fact that criminals, Romani people, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals were there, too. Homosexuals were especially singled out for hatred, harassment, and torture, although the German ones were treated slightly better than Jewish people by virtue of being German, even if they were “filthy degenerates.”

All the homosexuals in the camps were gay men, but the book actually explains why – lesbians were considered still useful because they could be bred regardless of how they felt about it. That’s its own kind of horrifying.

This book also goes into a lot of detail about how concentration camps were run, which is something I don’t remember hearing from other accounts – their power structures, the delegation of work and the kind of work they did, and the pecking order between the different “triangles” (inmates were color-coded by offense – yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, red for political prisoners, etc.). One thing that the narrator focused on was how prisoners with more power would take “lovers” – other men that they would have sex with in exchange for favors like easier work and more food – despite being straight, and they still viewed men who loved other men as degenerates. Several times, the narrator presents situations like that and then points out how sex with other men was fine if it was to satisfy your urges, but degenerate if you genuinely loved the other man.

This book is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. I learned a lot, but about the depths of Nazi cruelty and the realities of suffering in the death camps. But it’s really a story that needs to be told. Homosexuals were denied reparations after being freed because homosexuality was a crime and criminals were not considered innocents who deserved reparations. This is part of history I never learned about in history class, and it’s important to know – even if reading about it is heartwrenching.

Review: Girl at the End of the World

Title: Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future

Author: Elizabeth Esther

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, spiritual abuse, fundamentalist Christianty

Back Cover:

Elizabeth Esther grew up in love with Jesus but in fear of daily spankings (to “break her will”). Trained in her family-run church to confess sins real and imagined, she knew her parents loved her and God probably hated her. Not until she was grown and married did she find the courage to attempt the unthinkable. To leave.

In her memoir, readers will recognize questions every believer faces: When is spiritual zeal a gift, and when is it a trap? What happens when a pastor holds unchecked sway over his followers? And how can we leave behind the harm inflicted in the name of God without losing God in the process?

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Girl at the End of the World is a story of the lingering effects of spiritual abuse and the growing hope that God can still be good when His people fail.

Review:

This was so … traumatic to read.

I wanted to read this because I’ve also escaped fundamentalist Christianity. I’m not sure what I hoped for out of this book – a little more hope, maybe? – but it definitely wasn’t to viscerally relive all of my religious trauma along with watching Elizabeth experience hers.

Perhaps if I were a little further along in my dealing-with-religious-trauma journey I wouldn’t have had such a strong reaction to it, but I’m not and I did. It was painful, and yet I couldn’t look away because Elizabeth was describing familiar experiences – different names, slightly different situations, but the same feelings. Lots and lots of Trauma Feelings, which I was not particularly prepared for. (Also I read this at work. Mistakes were made.)

Uh, the book itself … it was solid. It had a coherent narrative of Elizabeth growing up indoctrinated, starting to think for herself a little, getting married, and eventually leaving the cult and finding peace with God through Catholicism. It’s interesting and well-done and Elizabeth tells her story well.

I was affected deeply by reading this because of my own background with fundamentalism. The description says “hilarious and heartbreaking,” but I saw none of the hilarious – it was all heartbreaking. It dug up traumas that I don’t think I’m quite ready to deal with yet.

But besides that, yeah. Good book. Definitely worth reading, as long as you’re prepared for it.