Let’s begin with a mea culpa. I’m embarrassed to admit that, prior to reading the pre-publication galleys of Jen Hatmaker’s new memoir Awake, I’d never heard of this author of more than a dozen books, four of which were New York Times bestsellers. Yes, I know, as an East Coast, liberal, Jewish, atheist divorcée, who was unapologetically sexually active in high school, I wasn’t exactly Hatmaker’s core audience of evangelical women who were given purity rings in adolescence by their fathers—a ring which, worn on the left wedding ring finger, publicly indicates a personal vow to save sex for marriage—but still. Never having read a single one of Hatmaker’s previous books felt not only like a massive oversight in my knowledge about my own industry, but also a missed opportunity to learn about one of the more mainstream subcultures in our country.
The next thing I want to tell you about Jen Hatmaker is how warm, personable, smart, and funny she is. Both on the page, where I first encountered her, and later over Zoom during our interview. Even amidst the pain of a divorce—no, especially amidst the pain of a divorce—she manages not only to see and mine the humor, pathos, and irony of her roller coaster, difficult years, but also to provide a path forward to any woman, no matter her upbringing or belief system, for surviving and thriving in the wake of infidelity, lies, community scorn, and/or marital rupture.
The most important thing I want to tell you about Jen Hatmaker, however, is how brave she is. When you have built your entire identity and career on dutifully serving as the pastor’s wife, the beloved teacher, the evangelical platonic ideal of the maternal goddess, the spiritual spokeswoman, and the author of more than a dozen books on these topics; and when all of that carefully constructed scaffolding comes tumbling down the minute hear your pastor husband whisper, “I just can’t quit you” to a woman who is not you, you might be forgiven for retreating from the world to lick your wounds for awhile, or quite possibly for the rest of your life.
Instead, Hatmaker embarked upon the deep work of midlife transformation and self-examination. Then she sliced opened her veins onto the page in such a way that—and I know this sounds cliché—I literally could not put her bloody book down. I also felt, despite our cultural differences and radically different upbringings, an incredible kinship both with this woman and with her story, particularly in some of the ways in which her narrative echoed mine.
One of the hardest parts of divorce, she and I will both tell you, is the loss of community: it’s not as if your married friends shun you, but invitations to dinners with other couples significantly decline. Hatmaker’s solution to that dissolution and isolation was to literally build a giant communal table in her backyard, replete with fairy lights and love. This transformative moment, when I read it, made me fist pump and cheer. I suddenly recalled the first dinner party I ever threw, after my own separation, with others going through the same struggles. Making and sharing food with friends, old and new, became my road to healing as well.
I think it’s also important to note that Hatmaker’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity was not the first breaking point in the unraveling of her belief system. That first blow came a few years prior, when she took a public stance against racism and for the rights of the LGBQT+ community. In response to her public statements, her evangelical publisher dropped her, and her books were removed from the various shelves that had previously supported both them and her. In other words, Awake marks not only a new chapter in Hatmaker’s personal story, it is also marks the beginning of what will surely be a massively successful new career writing books for a more mainstream audience.
I, for one, can’t wait for the next installment.
