A Well-Trained Wife
My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
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The instant New York Times bestseller:
“Today it hit me when he hit me, blood shaking in my brain. Maybe there wasn’t a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.”
Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles––a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.”
Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn't risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.” So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.
Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levings debuts with a searing account of how she fled her abusive marriage and the fundamentalist theology in which it was rooted. Raised in a Southern Baptist church to believe she was destined to become a Christian wife and mother, the author met her future husband at 18 and married him a year later. She worked to accustom herself to his fits of rage, which worsened as he became interested in a strict Calvinist theology and began to physically abuse her. As the grim realities of their fundamentalist life set in ("No consent. No contraception. No choice"), she found solace in her children and the blog she began in the early aughts. Realizing that "I liked writer-Tia way more than church-Tia," Levings sought to take control of her life, eventually leaving with her children in the middle of the night in 2007 and devoting herself to exposing the dangers of Christian fundamentalism. Levings's visceral prose holds nothing back, and her efforts to let go of the patriarchal beliefs of her youth fascinate (after learning in therapy about the "fight-flight-freeze-fawn" response to trauma, she realized that fawning characterized her "entire childhood": "It was in the tone of voice we were taught to use... our servant hearts"). This stands out among the rising tide of memoirs from those who've left the evangelical church.
