A blistering, if somewhat rambling, memoir that depicts the Jehovah’s Witnesses as desperate to maintain a united front,...
A harrowing memoir of one woman’s struggle to cope with sexual abuse and depression while living in—and eventually leaving—the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Born in England, Hayworth’s mother became a Jehovah’s Witness to cope with her own mother’s death as well as the upheaval of moving her young family to Australia. When first-time author Hayworth arrived in Australia, she and her brother were sexually abused by their paternal grandfather. Then, when the family moved to New Zealand, Hayworth was raped by a stranger on a tennis court and later molested by a much older man. Hayworth was split apart trying to cope with this trauma within the repressive environment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, where reporting problems to the outside world was forbidden. Not only did she engage in self-harm, she created and began to rely on an internal reality with an “Inside Mum” who unconditionally loved and protected Hayworth’s “inside me.” She was thrilled to get married, even though her husband was 14 years her senior and she had only known him for a matter of weeks. Hayworth’s husband kept secrets—sexual, familial and financial—from her, and their first son had serious mental health and developmental issues. After two of Hayworth’s children were abused, Hayworth’s husband “opposed my taking the children to the police and counseling and [was] totally unsupportive.” Hayworth eventually disassociated herself from her faith, which cut her off from her entire way of life, including her mother. She struggled to provide for her children and work through custody issues with her now-ex-husband while going to school. More broadly, she mourned the “measure of security that disappeared” from her life when she was disassociated (aka “disfellowshipped”). With time, hard work and therapy, Hayworth eventually forgave herself for the past and turned to face her future. Her intimate look at life as a Jehovah’s Witness will be illuminating for those unfamiliar with the faith, and she expertly uses examples from her life to illustrate the danger posed by a religion that preaches “[t]he only place to stay safe was within Jehovah God’s organisation, and the only way to stay safe was to adhere strictly to its laws.” Hayworth occasionally goes into too much depth when discussing particular episodes in her life, and she devotes an entire chapter to discussing the plight of an asylum-seeker from Africa—a chapter only tenuously linked to Hayworth’s struggle with her faith. Cutting it, along with other tangential or overly detailed material, would make Hayworth’s story more powerful.
A blistering, if somewhat rambling, memoir that depicts the Jehovah’s Witnesses as desperate to maintain a united front, even at the expense of the faith’s women and children.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492994701
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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