OUT OF THE DARK

Gospel and contemporary Christian musician Hundley, with co-author Gosselin, chronicles her struggles with food addiction and depression in this debut inspirational remembrance.

The year 2014 should have been a happy one for the author. She’d just won a Grammy Award for best contemporary Christian music album, and the album’s title track and lead single, “Overcomer,” had become a hit. The song was inspired by Hundley’s longtime friend and former backup singer Lakisha Mitchell, who was fighting breast cancer. “None of us imagined how the anthem would strike a chord with listeners,” writes Hundley, adding that the song provided fans with “hope that with God’s help they could prevail over hard circumstances in their lives.” Hundley was sure that Mitchell would be saved by a miracle, but when her friend died in 2014, the singer’s faith was shaken to the core. Her grief was so profound that she relapsed into food addiction, a condition that had plagued her for much of her life. Over the next 18 months, the author gained 200 pounds and descended into a deep depression. In this second memoir, which shares a title with Hundley’s most recent album and follows Idoleyes (2007), she tells the story of a traumatic adolescence, her embrace of Baptist Christianity, and her rise to music stardom as well as her long struggles with addiction and mental illness. Hundley’s prose effectively marries emotional candor with attestations of faith, switching easily from the language of mental health to that of Scripture: “Turning to food when difficult emotions hit has continued to be a struggle for me. In fact, emotional eating may be something like the ‘thorn in the flesh’ Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12:7, and something I always struggle with.” She centers her faith in her story while also discussing the professional help she received from therapists. Her perspectives on diversity and intolerance in the world of contemporary Christian music are also engaging. Fans of that musical genre will likely get the most from Hundley’s story, but it also ably sheds light on the immense difficulties of food addiction.

A concise and earnest memoir about music, grief, and faith.