When Jen Hatmaker’s marriage imploded on July 11, 2020, her world collapsed. That day, her pastor husband left and never spent another night in their Texas home. She was left to pick up the pieces of her life, recording it all in her memoir Awake (Avid Reader, Sept. 23).
This was not Hatmaker’s first brush with upheaval and loss. Once a nationally popular evangelical writer and speaker, Hatmaker had been dropped by “the majority of my traditional evangelical following in 2016 when I reversed my theology on LGBTQIA2S+,” she told PW. She didn’t know if she could or would rebuild her huge online community, reader base, and speaking career.
“To my surprise, a beautiful new community emerged,” said Hatmaker. “I had never lived outside my [evangelical church] bubble, but I now have a community that is so vibrant, so beautiful.” The author dedicates Awake to that community, which proved especially important amid the shock of her divorce.
“I wonder what would have happened if I’d heeded all the warning signs in my marriage, my own intuition,” said Hatmaker. “I knew something was dreadfully wrong, but I was so unwilling to believe myself, to trust my own sense of knowing.” In Awake, she talks honestly about those what-ifs as well as her hopes for her readers and her own future.
Honesty isn’t a problem for Hatmaker, who is the author of more than a dozen books chiefly aimed at Christian women, some of which were taken out of print back in 2016. This new memoir is a change of direction, addressing the dark side of purity culture, of male-dominated church hierarchy, of how women were taught to diminish themselves and not trust their instincts or their bodies.
Awake is also an emotional dive into her discovery of who she is as a single woman, mother of five, sister, daughter, friend, and follower of Jesus. Chapters can be several pages long or one paragraph, poetry is scattered throughout, and it ranges from hilarious to tearful.
In the end, Hatmaker feels her divorce led her to begin seeing herself honestly, trusting her intuition, and loving herself body and soul.
“I hope my readers feel very seen, very understood, very not alone in whatever is going on in their lives,” she said. “I hope they'll relate to the story of divorce and loss, that they'll understand upheaval and recalibrate for a strong second half.”
She sees her future as hopeful and exciting. She’s a new grandmother. She may—or may not ever—be part of an institutional church again. She's in a relationship she describes as “right and good, easy and uncomplicated.” And she hosts a weekly podcast about life and relationships, For the Love, with nearly 500,000 followers.
“Five years ago, I lost my marriage. If you had told me that in five years I would have rebuilt my life, be safe and secure in my own story, secured autonomy and independence, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Hatmaker said. “Now I’m not afraid of my future. Never again will I outsource my life to someone else.”
