Riveting. Tragic. Convicting. Those three words describe the journey the reader takes with Tia Levings' story in A Well-Trained Wife. Levings is an excellent writer and her memoir is worthy of accolades and inclusion with titles like Educated and The Glass House. I was riveted by her story and the many confusing and destabilizing turns she took. I also felt such compassion and sympathy for the trauma she endured. Readers who are quick to say, "why didn't she just leave?" or "why didn't she tell someone?" will see first-hand the bind domestic violence survivors, especially mothers, are put in. And her story convicts the Church and other Christians--we cannot let this abuse continue to happen to innocent children and disempowered women. As Levings says, the Duggars is not some cute little show depicting the funny antics of a large family. It's a fundamentalist cult that strips women of autonomy, dignity, and rights, parentifies and manipulates children, and entitles men. I look forward to hearing more from Levings' now empowered voice in the future.

Many thanks to St. Martin's Press and Netgalley for this ARC. All opinions expressed are my own

"When your cup runneth over, sometimes it's not with blessing. Sometimes your cup's full of crap."

It's the mid-late nineties in Jacksonville Florida, and at the South Baptist Church, Tia Levings is one of the many Shiny Happy People discerning what it is to be a good Christian wife. Except Tia doesn't feel shiny and she definitely isn't happy.

Her beautiful, Christian, God-centered marriage is steeped in rape, abuse and gaslighting. When her pastors and church offer no help, Tia takes the advice of other godly Christian women and doubles down on smiling often, keeping her kitchen clean and serving her husband, while he continues to beat her and blame her for their poverty.

By the time their fourth child is born, Tia's husband isolates the family, moving them to the middle of nowhere to join an even more fundamentalist church, where he dabbles in God-sanctioned domestic violence. Tia continues to play the Jesus-approved wife, caring for her children, skipping out on prenatal appointments to save money and hide her bruises, and rely on the kindness of strangers to heat their home in the blistering mountain cold.

She prays to God to change their circumstances, but Tia realizes the hard way that the Savior doesn't always save, and waiting on God would be fatal to her and her children.

This harrowing story of Tia and her courageous escape from the Christian patriarchy is unfortunately, not an anomaly. Religious trauma is not just real, it's insidious in our society and its effects impact even the most well-meaning of those in our families and friend circles.

In the age of book bans and pussy-grabbing presidents, stories like Tia's aren't just important, they are essential to us as a society in deconstructing our harmful and problematic words, actions and beliefs.

A Well-Trained Wife release date: Aug 6, 2024

“Women of God don’t care about having a name for themselves…. She’s a utensil, useful to her husband and blessed by God. What could be better?”

“And like a slip of a hand beneath the waves, nobody saw me vanish as they focused on what I did instead of who I was.”

“Christians talked all the time about joy, but nothing we did brought me that feeling.”

W. O. W.

I am heartbroken, and overjoyed and fearful and validated after reading Tia Levings’s memior, A WELL-TRAINED WIFE. I grew up homeschooled for religious reasons, educated under the watchful eyes of Bob Jones, Rod and Staff Publishing and the like. This book hit home on a very personal note for me, bringing words to feelings and thoughts I suppressed for years.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book. Tia’s message is very strong, elegantly and bluntly worded. I was so happy that she included chapters about her experiences with trauma therapy, with EMDR and Brainspotting. Her experiences in healing were so encouraging to me, because I don’t feel like I’ll ever particularly be healed.
I love this book. 10/10 would recommend.

This was the book that Jill Duggar couldn't write. I was drawn in and eager to keep reading, absolutely devouring this book. I love a good escape-from-a-cult memoir.

I think the thing I find most valuable about this memoir is the way that it adds some much needed complexity to a field that doesn’t always deal in nuance. (And to be perfectly clear, not everything needs to have the nuance that I’m about to praise in Leving’s book. Polemics are fantastic, I just have really been craving the conversation that I think this book can start!)

Like, the way that Leving shows us all of the points where she could have made different choices is just SO valuable to me, because the fact of reminding folks that they do have agency even if they aren’t capable of exercising it was so gentle and well done. And god, that absolute MASTERCLASS in holding her first husband accountable while still portraying him as a complex person who was also broken by the unjust system they were both living in was just SO GOOD. Her explanation for why she describes herself as having five kids was just so destigmatizing towards folks who also lost their infants so young, and just made me cry so much. Gosh, everyone who isn’t triggered by the content should absolutely read it, it is just so valuable.

A WELL-TRAINED WIFE: MY ESCAPE FROM CHRISTIAN PATRIARCHY by Tia Levings (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, August 6, 2024) is a blunt and staggering account of a woman’s marriage, motherhood, escape, and recovery within the extreme (arguably now mainstream) religious right. You can call it dominionism, you can call it theonomy, you can call it Christian Nationalism: it often requires the sacrifice of women’s bodies to take over the land for Jesus. Levings decided waiting for a savior was a fool’s game: if anyone was going to save her and her children, Tia was that savior.

Thanks to Edelweiss Plus Above the Treeline and Macmillan for sending me this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Reading this memoir was like swimming through razorblades. It’s a book that should be on everyone’s radar right now, a first-person account of what a Duggar-esque life is like from the inside: having baby after baby until your health collapses, listening to radical misogynist teachers, and paying a fortune for their books and conferences when that money could be better used feeding your “full quiver.” Submitting to horrors which the church covers up when you go to them for help. Hearing that this slow, living death, is “God’s plan for your life,” and that if you just submit to your husband more, you’ll be blessed. Not that all of us lived. Some of us are dead.

Having come out of this movement myself in 2001, I recognized each teacher with pure horror as they made their way into this vulnerable young family. Mary Pride. The Pearls. The Ezzos. Doug Philips and Vision Forum, and Duggar guru and pervert Bill Gothard. And finally the “manly” patriarchy of Doug Wilson (Google “doug wilson patriarch,” but hold on to your lunch). Levings’s religious journey took her from Southern Baptist to Reformed Calvinist. It was a rocky road full of crazies.

Since Senator Katie Britt’s wackadoodle kitchen response to the State of the Union address (March 8, 2024) and Kelly Johnson1 (wife of Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House), appeared also speaking like a toddler on national television, Jess Piper of Blue Missouri popularized the term “fundie baby voice.” Levings explains that this baby voice comes from the book Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin (1920-2009). The FW website ought to have the tagline “infantilizing women since 1963.”

Levings explains a lot of other things as well about the Quiverfull movement and Christian patriarchy that dovetail perfectly with my experiences and that of many other ex-Quiverfull women. The mental state that gets women into this cult, and also the revelation that wakes women up, are described in a way that outsiders can grasp. The book’s weakness: it mentions way too many twists and turns of the family’s beliefs than Levings can follow up with an explanation of how they played out, and it would be better to just leave out “home church” and “white supremacy” than to mention them in passing.

I'm a sucker for non-fiction accounts of cults and subcultures and have a morbid fascination with the Duggars and other Gothardites, so I was excited to dive into this. The subject matter is so fascinating that good writing isn't necessarily a requirement for these types of books, but it's such a bonus when the writing is more than serviceable. Here it certainly is -- Tia Levings is a fantastic writer. She's shrewd, funny when she needs to be, reflective. The tone and earnest spiritual search in the midst of abuse and doctrinal noise reminded me a bit of Rachel Held Evans' Searching for Sunday, She's earned a reader for life!

Educated meets Shiny Happy People in this edge-of-your-seat memoir about surviving fundie culture. Tia tells a story in a way that leaves you breathless and this book is completely unputdownable. Reading it feels like you’re seeing it all unfold in real time as she goes through every single step of heartbreak and a never-ending cycle of abuse, and she describes every feeling so vividly you don’t have to imagine it— you’re feeling it right there with her.