AN IMPERFECT RAPTURE

A writer chronicles a youth troubled by violence, poverty, and religious extremism.

While debut author Beard was a toddler growing up in Palm Springs, California, her parents “transformed from devout but reasonable Christians into strict fundamentalists.” She was raised in the Desert Chapel church, where she grew accustomed to demonic possessions, speaking in tongues, and grand prophesies. According to the author, her father, despite an “ineffable charisma” that often charmed women, was mercurially violent, and Beard experienced both “humiliation and the pain of betrayal” in the aftermath. They were poor—one reliable characteristic of her parents was their “unerring financial ineptitude”—and as a result, she learned to manage hunger and chronic scarcity as well as the shame that came with it. The author hid her rapidly failing eyesight until a sixth grade teacher, to his astonishment, discovered how poor it was and a doctor pronounced her legally blind. Beard was mortified that her spirituality was not strong enough to improve her eyesight through faith healing. The author affectingly details a transient childhood addled by insecurity, and the consoling retreat she found in drugs, running away, and, most potently, in reveries disconnected from reality: “The combination of poverty’s opacity, Dad’s itinerant tendencies, and our family’s religious and intellectual isolation fed grandiose fantasies of fairy-tale outcomes.” Beard writes with poetical elegance, poignantly capturing the degradations heaped upon her by well-meaning parents and the escape she found in college, especially in music and creative writing, even though she lived in a “camper trailer smaller than most prison cells.” She doggedly pursues answers to unsolvable mysteries—how precisely had her mother been drawn into such religious extremism? The story itself is as remarkable as it is inspiring, and the author thoughtfully and candidly depicts her life on the fringes of society, distanced from the world by her parents’ choices.

A powerful meditation on life in a bubble and the attempts to escape it.