So Far Gone

SO FAR GONE rating: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

I love the concept of SO FAR GONE by Jess Walter (HarperCollins, June 10, 2025). In 2016, former writer and journalist Rhys Kinnick pitches his smartphone out of his car window, drives to 40 acres in Northwest Washington State (where his grandfather left a cinderblock dwelling now inhabited by raccoons), and ekes out a sort-of-WALDEN-like existence off the grid–if Thoreau had Spokane neighbors who became good friends (they would have been Massachusett, in Thoreau’s case) and gone grocery shopping.1Actually, according to this New Yorker piece by Kathryn Shultz, “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau” (October 12, 2015), Walden Pond was an easy walk to Thoreau’s mother’s house, he dined regularly with friends, he played the host himself, and his sisters brought him food, so if there had been a grid to be on in 1845-47, Thoreau would have been on it, all the while moralizing against it.

Kinnick’s daughter Bethany is married to a Christian nationalist conspiracy theorist named Shane, whom Rhys punches in the face at Thanksgiving dinner. This rash decision, plus the 2016 election, are factors in Rhys’s decision to go and live as a near hermit. He has no friends, and his family, he supposes, do not need him. The world has no more use for him at all. If I had 40 acres I’d be tempted to throw my phone out the window and go live off the grid too, but could not because of my family, which is kind of the point. But the insanity of today’s ultra-connected and distracted world, and the alienation from the natural world, is also the point. People need each other, no matter how messed up the world we inhabit. Even if we are introverts, curmudgeons, iconoclasts, and fed up to the teeth with it all.

As our hero learns when, eight years after his disappearance, his two grandchildren show up on his doorstep in the company of a neighbor and report that his daughter Bethany has disappeared. Now what?

The author did his research on Christian Nationalism. Wacko men’s retreats,2here is a retreat light on the Bible study and heavy on shooting guns. betrothals of children to adults, forced conversion therapy of boys and men who don’t even think they are gay, demands for women to unconditionally submit to their husbands,3 I recommend the amazing memoir A WELL-TRAINED WIFE by Tia Levings about which I blogged on 3/11/2024 if you want to know where total submission can lead. completely unhinged conspiracy theories. . .as someone who came out of this deranged culture in 2001, all of this tracks.

I was a bit skeptical of the reason the author provides for Shane’s descent into madness. It’s possible that fear drives people into extremist right wing cults, but in my case, in 1990 I really wanted to make God happy and do religion “correctly”–get everything precisely right. Okay, so maybe it was my fear. I wanted a big family that God was extremely happy with, that would be absolutely safe from harm and evil. I wanted to WIN. Which is not the point of the Christian faith at all.4For more on this if you’re interested, check out NOT IN IT TO WIN IT by Andy Stanley which I just loaned to my priest.

This book would make a wonderful series. Great characters, zany road trip adventures, a hilarious detective, ecology. The rootedness of the novel in a specific place was charming; the author is based in Spokane. It reminded me of MOTHER-DAUGHTER MURDER NIGHT by Nina Simon in that way, set lovingly in the author’s stomping grounds.5 See my blog of August 2, 2023 on Simon’s novel. It’s deeply ironic too: any extreme form of escape from healthy interrelationships is “so far gone,” whether in a cabin all alone or in a compound full of zealots.

Reading in context:

Other books in which children end up with grownups other than their parents and mutual transformation occurs: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride (Penguin Random House, 2013) TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis (Simon & Schuster 1968), NEWS OF THE WORLD by Paulette Jiles (HarperCollins, 2016), and several children’s classics. The ability of the children to change their grandfather and vice versa in a natural setting was not given enough pages in my opinion, which is the only reason this is not a five-star book.

The only other book I’ve read by Jess Walter is BEAUTIFUL RUINS which my LibraryThing shelf says I finished on March 1, 2013. I ate it all up, gave it 4 stars, and have a copy in my home collection.

What I’m reading now:

I just finished F*CKED UP FAIRY TALES by Liz Gotauco (W. W. Norton & Company, October 2025) and there is a podcast! Good thing too, because I am sad that the book is over.

#SoFarGone #JessWalter #Thoreau #Walden #ChristianNationalism #TiaLevings #AWellTrainedWife #NotInItToWinIt #AndyStanley #Christianity #MotherDaughterMurderNight #NinaSimon #TheGoodLordBird #JamesMacBride #TrueGrit #CharlesPortis #NewsOfTheWorld #PauletteJiles #BeautifulRuins

#AndyStanley #AWellTrainedWife #BeautifulRuins #CharlesPortis #Christianity #ChristianNationalism #JamesMacBride #JessWalter #MotherDaughterMurderNight #NewsOfTheWorld #NinaSimon #NotInItToWinIt #PauletteJiles #SoFarGone #TheGoodLordBird #Thoreau #TiaLevings #TrueGrit #Walden

https://tialevings.com/

#memoir #TiaLevings #AWellTrainedWife

Escaping from #ChristianPatriarchy

A WELL-TRAINED WIFE rating: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

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 Johnson1her professional website presence was scrubbed when her husband got the speakership (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.

Reading in context:

A Christian critique of Christian nationalism by Tim Alberta, THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS IN AN AGE OF EXTREMISM (HarperCollins, December 5, 2023), makes for good reading and excellent listening, Alberta narrates his audiobook well, and conducted dozens of illuminating interviews for the book.

If you prefer flame-throwing by an avowed atheist who is preparing for the worst after the January 6 insurrection, pick up PREPARING FOR WAR: THE EXTREMIST HISTORY OF WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM by Bradley Onishi (1517 Media, January 3, 2023). The history is astonishing; Barry Goldwater was telling Republicans to go to war for religious values in 1963, and we’ve forgotten some of the more frightening pronouncements of affable old Ronnie Reagan in the ’80s. Religious anti-democratic sentiments coupled with crazy conspiracy theories go way back. Onishi addresses the Quiverfull movement too; his highly reliable source is Vyckie Garrison.

An excellent companion read to this book: QUIVERFULL: INSIDE THE CHRISTIAN PATRIARCHY MOVEMENT by Kathryn Joyce. You can find out about the scandals that have befallen many patriarchal Christian teachers mentioned in QUIVERFULL in the final chapter of A WELL-TRAINED WIFE.

What I’m reading right now:

THE HONEY WITCH by Sidney J. Shields (Hachette, May 14, 2024).

#TiaLevings #AWellTrainedWife #Quiverfull #ChristianNationalism #ChristianDominionism #Theonomy #cults #SouthernBaptist #ReformedCalvinist #abuse #DomesticViolence #FascinatingWomanhood #FundyBabyVoice #JessPiper #TimAlberta #TheKingdomThePowerAndTheGlory #BradleyOnishi #PreparingForWar #VyckieGarrison #KathrynJoyce

https://jillsreads.com/a-well-trained-wife/

#abuse #AWellTrainedWife #BradleyOnishi #ChristianDominionism #ChristianNationalism #cults #DomesticViolence #FascinatingWomanhood #FundyBabyVoice #JessPiper #KathrynJoyce #PreparingForWar #Quiverfull #ReformedCalvinist #SouthernBaptist #TheKingdomThePowerAndTheGlory #Theonomy #TiaLevings #TimAlberta #VyckieGarrison