Hooley describes coming up in the Baptist church in the revolutionary 1960s in this debut memoir.

The author grew up in northern Indiana, the eldest of six children born to the alcoholic Ernie Holland and his harried wife, Nina—both are working-class transplants originally from West Virginia. When Hooley was 12, her closest brother, Sam, died mysteriously during a swimming accident at the local YMCA. Hooley was the only member of her family present, though she didn’t witness the death and wasn’t informed of it until she happened the ask the name of the dead boy. In the aftermath of the loss, which no one in the family seemed to understand, the Hollands became more involved with their Baptist church. Ernie, who thought he was being punished by God for his behavior, became particularly devout and temporarily quit drinking. The author also embraced a new religiosity, though the limits of her Baptist worldview quickly revealed themselves. She struck up a new friendship with her neighbor Judy only to have Judy’s mother’s live-in boyfriend, Lenny, expose himself to the girls. When Hooley told her own mother about it, Nina responded, “We have to pray about this…Ask the Lord to help Judy. I can protect you from Lenny, but I can’t do anything for her.” The author wanted to go to college and took a night job in a drapery factory to save money and joined her high school debate team to sharpen her intellect. She continued to find contradictions between the religious beliefs of her family and the larger unknowns related to the quickly evolving society of the late 1960s. Her humanities teacher Mr. Campagnoli encouraged Hooley to ask questions, introducing her to new books and new ways of looking at the world. These perspectives would come in handy during her time at Bible college in Philadelphia, and then later when working as a missionary among the Navajo of Arizona.

Hooley’s memoir has the scope of a coming-of-age novel, with incidents and threads accumulating slowly to form a portrait of the author’s self-creation. Her conversational prose captures her many moments of epiphany, most of which arrive quite painfully. Here she describes her feelings upon seeing the film Inherit the Wind, whose themes ran against her creationist beliefs: “I felt off balance like I needed to hold on to the refrigerator door handle, to stabilize myself. Things had been going so well for me up until then. I had great friends at church and with Jesus in my heart, I felt peaceful and secure. Darwin’s theory was right about one thing, though. People evolved, they changed, I was changing.” The narrative is slow in places, and Hooley has a tendency to treat her characters sentimentally, particularly those who helped her. Even so, she manages to offer a complex portrait of belief as it functions in the modern world, one in which every occurrence seems to muddy rather than confirm any particular ideology. Readers of all stripes and levels of faith will likely find something of themselves here.

A heartfelt memoir about transitioning from one worldview to another.