The Reading Jackalope

I kind of feel like I've been ripped open and my secrets laid bare by this book. The story she told, the details might have been different, but the emotions were mine. The loneliness and hurt of being single in a church that doesn't know what to do with its singles at all. Of being an unmarried woman in a church where the only paradigm it knows for women is 'wife and mother', and the pain that brings. The waiting sensation that I sometimes felt, like I was waiting for my adult life to start, because I wasn't an adult by church standards. And here I am at 35 only just realizing what bullshit that is. There are some differences. I WANTED, and in some ways still do, that paradigm. I wanted to be a wife and mother, Hardy emphatically does not. And yet, the pain of being single, of not having or fitting into that small little box still resonates strongly with me.

I'm not sure it's the best written memoir. There are parts that feel over wrought, and over prosed. But the emotions, the honesty, the way it resonates in my soul and lays me bare that makes it a four star book for me.