Review of Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Christian, History, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Jesus and John Wayne

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Liveright Publishing, 2020. 356 pages.
Review written September 25, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

I don’t remember which of many recommendations prompted me to order my own copy of Jesus and John Wayne right around the time it first came out, but I know there were many, and I was happy to order it. Once I had it, I’m afraid it competed with the library books I had checked out, but didn’t have a due date. (This is something I often have to contend with.) This is also a history book, and a little dense. Yes, it’s a history of what Christians were doing, but it didn’t seem right for devotional reading, which often jumps to the top of my queue.

But then after my proposal was accepted and I got to be a co-creator at Wild Goose Festival, I saw that Kristin Du Mez was going to be there, too! And her new book, Live Laugh Love sounded similar, but talking more about “Christian femininity” than the focus on masculinity in Jesus and John Wayne. So I preordered the new book, and decided I really should get the old one read before the festival.

Well, I was halfway through Jesus and John Wayne when I went to Wild Goose Festival and got to hear the author speak twice. She talked about both books, and now I’m all the more eager to read the next one, which arrived on the publication date this week.

This is a history book about white evangelicalism in America, and how the movement got carried away with the idea of rugged masculinity epitomized by John Wayne.

The book starts with the early twentieth century and looks at people like Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and John Wayne. It finishes in 2020 and Donald Trump – who got support from 80% of white evangelicals.

Along the way, we see a turn toward rugged masculinity as the way God designed men and complementarianism as God’s plan for marriage, and overall structures of authoritarianism as God’s design for society.

I grew up pretty deep in evangelical circles. I attended Christian schools through college (I was a little disappointed that my alma mater, Biola University, wasn’t mentioned.), and went to Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts seminars before I was even a teen.

However, I got more and more progressive in my politics after college, and from 1996 to 2006, lived in Germany with my husband in the military – and thus completely missed the rise of Fox News and some of these other developments. Reading this book was fascinating to me, because so much was familiar, yet a lot I hadn’t noticed at all.

Another interesting thing to me was that while I was physically reading this book, a chapter at a time, I was listening to the audiobook version of Ibram X. Kendi’s latest book, Chain of Ideas, about right-wing political parties all over the globe. There were times when I was listening that I thought, “Yeah, they just mentioned that” – and I realized, no, I’d read about it in the other book (or vice versa).

This book also dovetails well with Sheila Wray Gregoire’s writings on marriage and Marissa Franks Burt’s writings on parenting, because both marriage and parenting are affected by the developing teaching that men are to be authority figures in the church and in the home.

It’s also interesting reading for me as someone coming out of evangelicalism, having my eyes opened to some trends I went along with and didn’t see. Sheila Wray Gregoire had already opened my eyes about books like Love and Respect, but this book helped me notice the militaristic background to John Eldredge’s writings that had blown right past me.

Back in 2016, I was incredulous that the same folks who told me that Bill Clinton should not be president because of his immorality were now supporting Donald Trump, who bragged about “not even asking” women before he sexually assaulted them. This book helped me understand the way the culture of evangelicalism and all its trends slowly changed so that Donald Trump epitomized exactly what people were looking for.

At Wild Goose Festival, the author explained that her editor told her she had to end on a hopeful note, but she had trouble coming up with anything. Here’s how the book finishes:

Although the evangelical cult of masculinity stretches back decades, its emergence was never inevitable. Over the years it has been embraced, amplified, challenged, and resisted. Evangelical men themselves have promoted alternative models, elevating gentleness and self-control, a commitment to peace, and a divestment of power as expressions of authentic Christian manhood. Yet, understanding the catalyzing role militant Christian masculinity has played over the past half century is critical to understanding American evangelicalism today, and the nation’s fractured political landscape. Appreciating how this ideology developed over time is also essential for those who wish to dismantle it. What was once done might also be undone.

You’ll find detailed, well-researched history here, supported with 32 pages of small-print citations at the back. As someone who grew up in that world, I gained wider understanding of how it morphed to what it is today. I can’t wait to read her next book, focusing on women!

kristindumez.com

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Review of Work in Progress, by James Martin, SJ

Biography, Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Work in Progress

Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest

by James Martin, SJ

HarperOne, 2026. 352 pages.
Review written June 11, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

I just finished reading a book by the same author about the life of Jesus – in the context of the author’s trip to the Holy Land. It was packed full of spiritual insights and meaningful applications from the Bible and blessed me on every page. This book was completely different.

Don’t get me wrong – Fr. Martin is a great writer, and I enjoyed this book thoroughly. But it’s a memoir about growing up in Philadelphia – and all the different jobs he tried and what he learned from them. Yes, there’s some wisdom along the way (mostly what he didn’t learn as a kid) – but this is a just plain fun story.

The subtitle gives you a hint at the variety of jobs he covers. And he tells about them with a full dose of humor at the kid he was, doing good work, but mainly wanting to have a good time.

I enjoyed the stories – beginning with when the Bicentennial Wagon Train went by the Ice Cream Inn where he was working, he cleared all the tables while the customers were out watching it, not realizing what was going on. Fr. Martin is apparently only a few years older than me, so I remembered being young during those same years.

Honestly, there were few hints that this kid – who he freely admits was partying, drinking, and smoking pot – would end up becoming a priest. He covers that calling in the last chapter, and yes, we get some spiritual insights to go with the fun there.

But mainly this is a story of student jobs in the America of the 70s and 80s – in the hands of a skilled and personable writer. A lot of fun to relive the escapades with him.

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Review of Unclobber, by Colby Martin

Christian, Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Unclobber

Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality

by Colby Martin

Westminster John Knox Press, 2022. 218 pages.
Review written August 6, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

I’ve owned this book for quite some time, and since I am attending Wild Goose Festival this coming September, and the author will be there – I wanted to make sure I finally got it read.

This book would have been helpful to me several years ago when I was thinking through the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality. As it is, I am so glad this resource exists.

My background is similar to Colby Martin’s – I grew up a conservative evangelical, and my life was about my faith. I did not become a pastor – because I was a woman, so of course not. He was a pastor at a large evangelical church, so when he started questioning his church’s blanket condemnation of gay people, he got fired.

This book tells about his journey. And in alternating chapters, he talks about the six “Clobber” passages in the Bible that are used to condemn homosexual people. And he makes a strong case that modern day readers are taking them out of context and not interpreting them in a legitimate way.

He didn’t come to this because of anybody in his life who was gay. He began researching the topic because it seemed like a discrimination issue to not allow same-sex couples to get married, whether or not you think it’s sinful.

I appreciate his approach, because I, too, felt in my heart that it wasn’t right to condemn same-sex couples, but wasn’t sure how to square that with the Bible. I like the way he looks at each passage and lays out the case that they are being misused.

I am at least twenty years older than Colby Martin, and this wasn’t as big an issue (or rather one I could ignore) in the churches I attended when I was young. As an adult, I gradually changed my way of thinking with the help of books like God Believes in Love, by Gene Robinson, and Paul Among the People, by Sarah Ruden.

I didn’t think it affected me, but when Caitlin Jenner came out as transgender, I thought it through and realized that I didn’t believe for a second that’s contrary to Scripture. I was glad I thought it through, because it wasn’t long after that when my own adult child came out as transgender. And a few years later, my home church decided to make it part of their church constitution that LGBTQ people are sinning. I wrote a whole blog series about why I think churches should welcome LGBTQ people, especially transgender people. I called it Transcending. I used some ideas from Austen Hartke’s, a transgender pastor’s, wonderful book, Transforming. My emphasis is similar to Colby Martin’s here. What does the Bible have to say about transgender people?

All of this ties in with a book I recently reviewed, Better Ways to Read the Bible, by Zack Lambert. If you are interpreting the Bible so it can be used as a weapon to clobber people, rather than to build people up with love, joy, peace, and the other fruit of the Spirit – then something is wrong with your interpretation. Colby Martin shows us how we can rightly divide the word of truth and also be more loving people.

colbymartinonline.com

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Review of The Yahoo Boys, by Carlos Barragán

Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

The Yahoo Boys

Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers

by Carlos Barragán

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. 287 pages.
Review written August 3, 2026, from a library book.

Carlos Barragán traveled to Nigeria to see if he could find his mother’s scammer. He didn’t find that particular person, but he did get to know several “Yahoo boys” – called that because emailing with Yahoo accounts was the main way they made money. This is the story of these young men, and how and why they do what they do.

Full disclosure: While I have never sent money to someone I met online (though I have fallen for a fake online store at least once), twice I emailed for a few weeks with a person from a dating site who turned out to be a scammer. And I do know of people who have lost money this way. So I don’t have much sympathy for people who do this.

This book, though, helped me understand a little better how young men could fall into this. The economy in Nigeria is terrible. Legit jobs are hard to come by and don’t pay well. But with romance scams, they can score big. And then they have a tendency to splurge each windfall and need more.

One of the boys the author interviewed got out of the scamming life for the sake of his grandmother – but his prospects are bleak, and his family doesn’t have enough money for him to attend secondary school or continue with his apprenticeship.

The author also interviewed one American woman whom one of these scammers strung along for years – until she finally faked her own death to make him stop contacting her. This was after she’d lost thousands of dollars and even her home. The author went on a sleuthing expedition and finally tracked her down, with the promise that he would not tell the scammer that she is alive.

An interesting note is that scams go in waves. People are getting wise to the ways of romance scammers, and the Yahoo boys give each other tips of new things to try. The author interviewed one woman who was running adoption scams for tens of thousands of dollars, for example.

By the end of the book, while I still think that romance scams are a horrible thing to do, I feel a little more understanding of why people do them. And all the more careful about anyone I “meet” online. This book is fascinating like a train wreck, but also sad. Not only are lonely folks in the United States and Europe having their lives ruined, ultimately so are the people in Nigeria pulling off the scams.

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Review of Homeschooled, by Stefan Merrill Block

Audiobooks, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Homeschooled

by Stefan Merrill Block
read by the Author

Harlequin Audio, 2026. 7 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written July 6, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.

Ouch. This true story had me doing lots of cringing for the author’s past self – as well as for some of my younger siblings who were homeschooled.

To be fair, he puts a detailed note at the end that every homeschool is different, as every family is different. He doesn’t at all advocate for abolishing home schooling, though he does think that for the sake of the kids, there should be more regulation and supervision to make sure kids aren’t sitting alone in their rooms reading comic books and not seeing other people – like he did.

This is his story of being homeschooled, from fourth grade through eighth grade. He went back to school in ninth grade, and after extremely difficult adjustment learning to take tests and write papers, he did well in high school.

His homeschooling happened in Texas when laws had recently been changed to pave the way for home schooling. His mother essentially wanted to keep him her little boy and have him with her at all times. She took him out of school ostensibly because school was crushing his genius. It wasn’t religious homeschooling, but the “unschooling” movement. The idea was that he would “follow his passions” and “learn to learn,” but in practice, the only curriculum he followed was math and Brain Quest cards.

To be fair, he did end up as an author – writing in his room, just as he had done in homeschool. But still, the picture he paints isn’t what you’d want for a child, and included long stretches of loneliness.

But the story itself is absorbing and compelling. It’s a story not only of being homeschooled, but also about his relationship with the complex person who was his mother. And trying to find out who he was apart from her – when him being apart from her was the last thing she ever wanted.

stefanmerrillblock.com

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Review of A Hymn to Life, by Gisèle Pelicot

Audiobooks, Starred Review, True Stories 0

A Hymn to Life

Shame Has to Change Sides

by Gisèle Pelicot
read by Emma Thompson
translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver

Books on Tape, 2026. 7 hours, 23 minutes.
Review written May 19, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This book mentions some horrific events – and I’m so glad I read it. I came away encouraged and emboldened and so full of admiration for Gisèle Pelicot.

Gisèle Pelicot is the famous case of a woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and offered up to other men over a period of ten years. When it came time for the trial in 2024, she made the decision not to have a closed court, as most women did. Because, as she’d heard in a slogan before, “Shame has to change sides.” Besides, she didn’t want to be shut in a room with fifty-two men who had raped her and their lawyers. Let public outcry help them begin to face up to what they had done.

The book opens in 2020 when Madame Pelicot and her husband were asked to come to the police station. From here on out, I’ll do as she did and call him Dominique, since he is not her husband any longer. Gisèle knew that he had recently been arrested for taking video up women’s skirts in a grocery store – and the police had seized his phone and computer.

After they arrived at the station, they were taken to different rooms. Gisèle didn’t realize that Dominique was being arrested. But in the room where she was taken, a compassionate police officer showed her pictures of a woman who looked like she was dead being sexually abused by Dominique and many other men. They confirmed that the woman in the pictures was Gisèle, and no, she had not consented to any of this and had no knowledge of any of this.

Of course she was in complete shock that first day. The news brought devastation to her whole family.

She also tells the story of her childhood and how they met. They both had tough childhoods – his with a sexually abusive father – and she’d always thought they’d rescued each other. Looking back, there were some red flags, but she’d thought they were just regular bumps in a marriage.

Something I appreciate about her story is that she refuses to give up all her good memories of Dominique. They had decades of what she thought was a good marriage, three children, and plenty of love and laughter between them.

I appreciated this because my own ex-husband had an affair and left me – not anywhere near as big an offense – but I, too, refuse to give up my good memories of him or deny that I was happy in those many years of our marriage. Like Gisèle, I was told plenty of lies – though, again, certainly not nearly as many – but enough to relate to her experience of having to figure out her past and what was real and what was lies.

And she was dealing with at least ten years of deception. Her mother died of a brain tumor when Gisèle was nine years old, so when she started having blackouts, she assumed she was going to die like her mother. She also had strange vaginal discharges. She saw multiple doctors and had tests run, with Dominique solicitously accompanying her – and they didn’t find any problems. But she even stopped driving because she’d had an incident in a car when she couldn’t stay on the road. And when the detectives checked her hair, they discovered traces of the poisons Dominique had been giving her. All her symptoms cleared up when he was in prison.

I was chilled by a story when, early on, she’d teased him, “You aren’t drugging me, are you?” – and he started crying that she would accuse him of such a thing, even in jest! I’ve learned that’s a common self-defense mechanism of liars. My own ex would say “How dare you accuse me of… ” such and so – and I’d always find out later that’s exactly what he’d done. As they say about Donald Trump, “Every accusation is a confession” – but at the time, when it’s your beloved husband making the accusation, it is amazingly effective at making a wife feel guilty for even a fleeting thought that he could have done anything bad.

Another thing that struck me was the compassion and dedication of the police officers who investigated and uncovered the truth of what Dominique had done. They had to go through graphic videos to compile the evidence. Would American authorities have shown the same diligence and care for sexually assaulted women or girls? The way they’re handling the Epstein files makes me not at all sure. So I appreciate that it was law enforcement who got this man – and his many recruits – put behind bars.

There were many stages in Gisèle’s healing journey, and of course she will always have work to do. But I was happy to see her spirit lighten when she found a home of her own on an island (instead of living with her kids, who were also traumatized) and made new friends in the neighborhood. And then she found a loving and compassionate man to be her new partner in life. (Or rather those new friends set them up.)

And then the biggest turning point was when she decided not to have a closed court case after all. She decided not to be ashamed of what they had done to her. Let the world know, so that these men would be ashamed. Shame has to change sides.

She knew she’d made the right choice when she started getting a flood of letters from other women. And women showed up in throngs around the courthouse to show her their love and support. Women across the world felt that she was standing up for us.

And I appreciate the title of the book. Gisèle Pelicot is a woman who celebrates life. She has not let the bullies win. Despite what was done to her, she refuses to be ashamed, and she refuses to let that ruin the rest of her life. The book ends with a joyful relishing of life – not a life without difficulties, but still a happy life.

Oh, and I love that they chose Emma Thompson to read the audiobook. I know her British accent is not a French one, but her cultivated voice gives Gisèle the elegance and grace she deserves as she tells her story of standing up for the truth.

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Review of Good Soil, by Jeff Chu

Christian, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Good Soil

The Education of an Accidental Farmhand

by Jeff Chu

Convergent, 2025. 317 pages.
Review written March 24, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com

Good Soil is a memoir about Jeff Chu’s time as a student and worker at the Farminary – a farm owned by Princeton Theological Seminary that hosted classes.

The book is meditative about spiritual things and about issues he was dealing with in his life. His parents didn’t accept his husband, but he tried to maintain a relationship with them. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life and was looking for direction, and toward the end of his time there, his good friend Rachel Held Evans passed away, and then the friendly Farminary dog did, too.

I read this slowly, absorbing the lessons as a daily devotional reading. It helped me look at the natural world with fresh eyes. I newly appreciate how compost reminds us that even in death, there is life and nourishment.

I think most of all, I appreciate this story. It’s a story of how when Jeff Chu was at a loss, God showed up and helped him find what he needed and new friends to be with him along the path. I appreciate how working with his hands in the dirt enhanced the work and study he was doing with his mind.

byjeffchu.com
convergentbooks.com

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Review of Strangers, by Belle Burden

Audiobooks, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 2

Strangers

A Memoir of Marriage

by Belle Burden
read by the Author

Books on Tape, 2026. 7 hours, 3 minutes.
Review written March 31, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I recently read a fictional tale of a divorce that did not ring true for me. Maybe it was just because of different circumstances? But this memoir of divorce (Yes, it’s about the marriage – but revisiting it in light of the divorce) rang so true, it made me feel like the author is my soul sister. Yes, the circumstances had lots of differences, but the underlying emotions made me remember how it had been.

Let me also say, right up front, that she ends the book in a good place, getting on with her life, happy about who she is as an individual – and I related to that, too. I think she got there more quickly than I did – but that’s where the difference in circumstances made a difference in pace. I ended the book happy for her, but with all my sympathy to her for that tough road.

The story begins on Martha’s Vineyard during the pandemic, where Belle and her husband had decided to bring their family from New York City and sit out the danger, which of course everyone thought wouldn’t last too long.

Then one day, Belle got a text from an unknown number saying that her husband was having an affair with his wife.

When she confronted her husband (Of course it wasn’t true!), he didn’t deny it. And the next day, he left the family and went back to New York City. The other woman had attempted suicide, and he wanted to make sure she was okay. He never did come back, except to tell the kids.

After telling about the day that broke her life apart, Belle goes back and tells about their whirlwind romance that led to their marriage of twenty years and three children. When did he stop loving her? Did he ever love her? (Yes, of course he did! That’s when she pulls out all the evidence over the years – and her friends saw it clearly.) What did she do wrong? How can he leave everything he built up for their family behind?

I related to every one of those questions. Probably silly, but it made me wish I had been there to help her through them. To tell her that’s normal and no, she didn’t do anything wrong. (Even if she wasn’t perfect. A man having an affair is about the man having an affair.) I would have shown her the book The Script that helped me finally believe it wasn’t all my fault (despite what my husband said) and the book Runaway Husbands about sudden abandonment, so she’d know she wasn’t alone.

I related to the weight loss, even to doing puzzles at bedtime. My puzzles of choice were killer sudokus, and hers were jigsaw puzzles – but yes, you have to, somehow, shut off your mind. I related to the dreams of him, and the way her heart leapt when she saw him – even when her mind knew better. As she pointed out, it takes some time for your heart to get the message not to love this person anymore.

Now, there were some big differences. She was a stay-at-home mom who did some pro bono legal work before the divorce – and she got to continue to do that after the divorce. (I had to go from working part-time to working full-time, which turned out to be a wonderful thing – I love my job.) I think because her husband left right away, there was less venom between them. That’s hard in its own way, but when I found out about my husband’s affair, he told me it wasn’t an affair – he just needed a friend so went to her house at midnight to watch a movie after a work trip. (And I believed him.) Then he proceeded to continue the affair behind my back for another year and a half. I would get my hopes up that we were working things out – and then I’d find out again that he’d been with her. And then he started being as unkind to me as he possibly could so that I would not get my hopes up. All that is to say that a quick departure must be awful, but so is a long drawn-out one. And I related to her story.

And yes, I fully and completely support Belle Burden telling her story. Yes, it’s healing and positive to tell the truth. There’s enough hiding and protecting out there. Yes, this is how lives fall apart when a husband breaks his wedding vows. But also – I loved reading about how she got her feet back under her and put her life back together, found new pursuits and new work, and continued on as a strong individual.

I listened to this audiobook obsessively. Her storytelling is superb (A blight upon the student who once told her she couldn’t write!), and I felt so much kinship with the situation.

Well done, sister! May you and your children continue to thrive!

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Review of Revisionaries, by Kristopher Jansma

Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories, Writing 0

Revisionaries

What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, & Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers

by Kristopher Jansma

Quirk Books, 2024. 320 pages.
Review written from an Advance Reading Copy I picked up at work.
Starred Review

Revisionaries is both fascinating and inspiring. It’s fascinating because it tells you about the lives of many great writers and gives you a look at their unfinished work. It’s inspiring because it takes you behind the scenes and shows you how very fallible those geniuses were. In fact, they were human just like us.

The author based this book on his long obsession with unfinished manuscripts – and his blog “Unfinished Business.”

An unfinished manuscript becomes a parting gift and a glimpse at what might have been. The discoveries I’ve made in reading them have shaped the way I write and the way I teach writing ever since. I’ve reconsidered my entire idea of literary merit – genius is not something bestowed upon a select few through gifts or talents, but something built up, over much time and effort, by those resilient enough to never stop testing new ways of creating.

What I’ve found, time and time again, is that these works show that every genius is also merely human, and subject to the same stumbles, flaws, blocks, and total failures as any first-time writer. To read these incomplete novels and to understand the stories behind them is to expose creativity as something far more interesting and accessible, even if in doing so we must dismantle the very notion of genius.

Each of the twenty-one chapters covers a different writer. They have titles suggesting a failing of that writer: “Geniuses Write Bad Drafts” covers F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Geniuses Get Off to a Bad Start” is for Louisa May Alcott. “Geniuses Often Quit” covers Jane Austen. “Geniuses Bite Off More than They Can Chew” is about Ralph Ellison. And “Geniuses Still Have to Do the Dishes” is for Sylvia Plath.

The chapters themselves are informative and interesting and give you the inside scoop on the lives of great writers. But I especially loved the page or two at the end of each chapter called “Fail Like a Genius.” It gave you something from each writer’s life that you could apply to your own writing. He suggests that, like Kafka, you change your environment if you’re getting stuck; like Louisa May Alcott, imitate the writing of others to learn the craft; like Virginia Woolf, try writing a book just for fun alongside the book you’re “seriously” writing, and like Shirley Jackson, try writing about something you hate.

I read this book slowly, because each chapter was self-contained and gave me something to think about. Since my advance reading copy is paperback, it made a good book to bring on trips and read a chapter or so in the evening to wind down – and then I didn’t always remember to unpack it. But I did love reading it (and got more consistent when I reached the final third.) It gave me both wonderful stories about the lives of great writers and the encouragement that all those great writers were human like me.

When I finished the book, I got to thinking how encouraged I was when I learned that the first novel L. M. Montgomery wrote was not the first one she published, Anne of Green Gables. No, the first one she wrote was Kilmeny of the Orchard – a book which, honestly, isn’t nearly as good. It’s a fabulous first effort, but it’s not the masterpiece of what was actually her later work. Somehow it’s good to know that even L. M. Montgomery had to learn and grow as a writer.

And that’s the effect of this book. We learn the ways that each of these literary geniuses was fully flawed and human. And therefore maybe it’s worth it to keep making an effort to make our own mark.

kristopherjansma.com

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Review of I Hardly Knew Me, by Nia Chiaramonte

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

I Hardly Knew Me

Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening

by Nia Chiaramonte

Lake Drive Books, 2025. 212 pages.
Review written January 27, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

I Hardly Knew Me tells the coming-out journey of a Christian transgender woman. She tells her story with warmth and humor.

This isn’t a theological treatise defending her decision to come out, but it is a story explaining and showing how much her life is better, how much more authentically she presents herself, how much deeper her relationships, because she did come out.

We also see how difficult that path was. Her parents refused to acknowledge her as female, and she tells us the way different people responded, often in hurtful ways.

The book is presented as one person’s story, and it’s a story with heart.

I do think a strength of the book is giving insights on what is the most helpful way to respond when someone comes out to you.

Once I got to a point where I needed to come out to everyone, and I started coming out to more people who were emotionally unsafe, one thing was very clear to me: they didn’t know they were emotionally unsafe. Because felt safety is in the eye of the beholder – in this case, me. I told a couple of family members that they didn’t make me feel safe emotionally, and where I was able to, I told them why. It typically didn’t go over well. They thought they were creating a safe environment from their perspective.

The problem is that felt emotional safety has a very hard time existing in the presence of judgmental behavior, which you see when people start talking about religious or cultural or social rules instead of just listening. It’s judgment of someone for a life that is perceived as wrong, living a life as a trans woman in my case, and it is judgment of someone’s being. That creates an environment where emotional safety cannot exist. Thinking I know what’s best and having a judgmental attitude toward someone decimates any hope of emotional safety as it demolishes trust.

People I have come out to who have responded well and created safety for me have responded by first listening, then trusting. They trust in who I am and they trust that I know myself better than they know me. They create expanding spaces for us to find ourselves together. People who have hurt me emotionally haven’t trusted me and my own story, and in fact have projected their own insecurities about their story onto me, further destroying the possibility of building a safe space where both of us can be ourselves.

I also appreciated her insights on healthy and unhealthy boundaries:

For those who refuse to respect my boundaries, such as calling me by my actual name, they’ve in turn accused me of not respecting their boundaries. I say I can only be in a relationship if they respect and honor me by using my name and pronouns; they say they can only be in a relationship if they’re able to call me by whatever name and pronouns they choose.

This gets tricky because while these two things sound the same, there are major differences. My boundary says, “This is who I am in relationship to you, and I get to define me in that relationship. I will determine how I exist and behave in the world, and this is what I need from you.” The boundary from the one refusing to use my name says, “This is who you are in relationship to me; I get to define you and how you exist and behave in the world, and this is what I need you to be for me.” The unhealthy boundary essentially says, “My belief about you is more important than your belief about yourself, and I get to define your story so it fits with mine.” Whereas the healthy boundary says, “My belief about me and your belief about you are both important, and we each get to define our own stories.”

So you’ve got a warm coming-out story, insights into what it feels like to be transgender in today’s society, wisdom about how you can relate to transgender people in your own life – and a story that will give you a hankering for freeze-dried Skittles. (Well, it did me – I’d eaten them just before I read this book.)

Oh, and Skittles? She makes a good point: Freeze-dried Skittles and regular Skittles are both wonderful in their own way. But if you have one, expecting it to be the other, you’re going to be disappointed.

loveintheface.com
lakedrivebooks.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/i_hardly_knew_me.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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