I listened to the audiobook of Jen Hatmaker’s Awake yesterday and I was struck by how raw and honest it was. Mostly it seems to be about the systems she had to tear down that she now sees as harmful (mostly). Systems in the church. Systems against gay people. Systems of patriarchy. Systems in her marriage. All of it. And it seems like after about 2 years, she’d overcome this traumatic thing and rebuilt her life with a lovely, tidy little bow.
That’s how we all want it, isn’t it? We want the tidy little bow. We don’t want life to be messy and a memoir seems to, almost by definition, make things not messy. It can’t tell two different sides of a story. It can’t reach the end and truly say “I’m still struggling” – we as readers want to see the protagonist get to the other side of a problem. You can’t publish a book where you sit in it and never make it out. So it sounds neater and more put together than it ever was.
The thing that struck me the most was that she was absolutely never without massive, MASSIVE amounts of support. She had people with her constantly. She had (clearly) an enormous amount of money at her disposal (enough to send her child to Maine to a sleepaway camp for a month) and she had people willing to drop everything–EVERYTHING–to be with her and support her in her hour of need. I am sure she would do the same back. She seems like the kind of person who would want to be there for her friends. And she has the money, power and privilege to be able to do that. Most people reading this book would not have anywhere close to the support or resources she had to get through. Then again, most people reading this book wouldn’t have to get through a painful divorce somewhat publically.
On top of all of this, she portrays her ex-husband as someone she has compassion for, but who basically abandoned their family. Reading his account paints a different picture that still agrees with a lot of what she said and doesn’t invalidate it.
She spends most of her time around the divorce talking about what her husband did… she spends a very small amount of time and energy talking about her codependant nature and how she checked out of the marriage for years. Owning that would’ve changed a lot for me reading it.
Ultimately, Jen comes across as someone who is honest, passionate, fierce, privileged and biased (as she admits in the opening). I’m glad to read it and hear that there is a way forward on the other side of divorce, but I don’t think many people will have anything close to her experience.