A gripping memoir about coming of age in the stay-at-home daughter movement and the quest to piece together a future on your own terms.
Raised in the Christian patriarchy movement, Cait West was homeschooled and could only wear clothes her father deemed modest. She was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing, to go change. There would be no college in her future, no career. She was a stay-at-home daughter and would move out only when her father allowed her to become a wife. She was trained to serve men, and her life would never be her own.
Until she escaped.
In Rift, Cait West tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.
Rift is a story of survival. It’s also a story about what happens after you survive. With compassion and clarity, Cait explores the complex legacy of patriarchal religious trauma in her life, including the ways she has also been complicit in systems of oppression. A remarkable literary debut, Rift offers an essential personal perspective on the fraught legacy of purity culture and recent reckonings with abuse in Christian communities.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 30, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781467467254
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781467467254
- File size: 1239 KB
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Open EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781467467254
- File size: 1253 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from February 19, 2024
Survivors Discuss podcaster West debuts with a searing account of her restrictive, patriarchal Christian upbringing and how she charted her own path as an adult. Born to “conservative Presbyterian parents” in Delaware, the author grew up under an authoritarian father who frequently reminded his children that humanity is “depraved and deserving of hell.” Desperate to follow his rules or risk “eternal damnation,” West recounts learning to cook, clean, and sew to prepare for life as a homemaker; following a set of rigid and unspoken rules (“be good,” “cover up”); remaining a “stay-at-home daughter” after she turned 18; spiraling into depression following a failed romance; and beginning to question it all after beginning to research spiritual abuse in her early 20s. A few years later, she left her parents’ home to start a new life with a partner of whom they disapproved. West imbues her narrative with optimism while soberly acknowledging how deeply she internalized the repressive ideology in which she was raised (she recalls blaming herself for infertility in her 30s partly because she’d used contraception—“I defied God’s plan for my body, which was to have as many children as possible, and because of that, I don’t deserve to be a mother”). It’s a powerful meditation on what it means to be trapped and what it takes to break free.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
- Open EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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