A former Jehovah’s Witness tells her story

A handful of spiritual story lines inevitably get repeated in life and literature. There’s the classic conversion story, in which one once was lost but now is found. And then there’s the deconversion story, in which the one who was presumably found finds herself outside her former faith. The current literary landscape is littered with deconversion stories. Disaffected evangelicals in particular seem to pick up the pen, compelled to bear witness to unbelief just as passionately as they once bore witness to belief.

I love a good deconversion story. They are, of course, often conversion stories in their own right: men and women seeing the light and finding the strength to re­move themselves from religious communities that traumatized and subjugated them. Amber Scorah tells one such story. Her memoir, written in quick and spare prose, has an almost breathless quality to it, as if the narrator is so compelled to share her story she can scarcely be bothered to breathe between sentences. This makes for a compulsively readable book—and that’s even before considering the notable plot twists that set the author apart from her peers in the genre.

Scorah’s religion of origin is a bit more consequential than your run-of-the-mill evangelical variety of Christian faith. Many would argue that Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a cult. Scorah certainly comes to see it this way (al­though, at one point in the narrative, she equivocates: “I’m not 100% sure it’s a bad cult though”).