HERETIC

In a memoir of discovery and unlearning, a Midwest girl finds religious freedom on the East Coast.

Veering from scholarly and self-assured to angry and doubtful, Kadlec chronicles her experiences being raised by evangelical Christians and her subsequent deconstruction and rebuilding of everything she thought she knew about herself. Opening with her trip to the county courthouse where she filed her divorce papers, the author doesn’t try to surprise us with shocking twists or turns. Instead, Kadlec tells us the story of her life so far in bits and pieces, interspersed with graduate-level research. This approach along with accounts of her childhood that never seem to go as deep as they could combines in a narrative technique that sometimes feels like it is meant to keep readers at arm’s length. The researched pieces—about the origins of evangelicalism, the 1990s explosion of purity culture, and the roots of misogyny and racism in the church—are fascinating, but more interesting is Kadlec’s personal journey. She grew up and out of evangelicalism but not before she was taught to hate her body, endured a disastrous marriage, and found her relationship with Jesus much more fraught than her younger self would have thought possible. Traveling from Iowa to Wisconsin as a child with her family, Kadlec was sure that college was her “ticket out…a guarantee I wouldn’t end up like my mom: stuck in a nowhere town, financially trapped in a no-good marriage with a man who provided for you but didn’t appreciate you.” However, the author discovered that higher education was “only another example of liberal America’s and academia’s own cruel optimism, where what is given financially, energetically, emotionally, and even physically, so overwhelmingly, and so often, exceeds the actuality of what is received.” Ultimately, Kadlec found peace in Brooklyn and acknowledgement of her true identity as a queer woman.

Both memoir and thesis, this book highlights a cultural, social, and spiritual journey that will resonate with many.