Mini-reviews: Lessons in Belonging and Love Warrior

Erin Lane is probably the poster girl for going to church. Her husband is a pastor and she recently graduated from seminary. But she finds it surprisingly difficult to fit in at a church. Her knowledge of theology makes her bristle in the face of ignorance about church practices, and she is decidedly uncomfortable with platitudes and superficial social interactions.  In Lessons In Belonging, Lane tries to find out if there is a place in the church for a smart feminist troublemaker with a penchant for asking lots of questions.

There are an abundance of spiritual memoirs from people in their 20s and 30s who feel that it is difficult to belong in the churches of their childhood. It's so much easier to just leave when someone lets you down or hurts you. But Lane discovers that disillusionment is the first step in belonging. Just like any other relationship, being a part of a church means being vulnerable, truthful, and willing to pick your battles and love in spite of your differences. Lane doesn't pretend to have all of the answers, but her questions will seem very familiar to many people who both love the church and feel like they sometimes don't belong there.

Lessons in Belonging From A Church-Going Commitment Phobe
By Erin Lane
IVP Books December 2014
208 pages
Read via Netgalley

Glennon Doyle Melton was feeling good about her life. She loved her family, and had a much beloved blog and a NYT bestselling book. But then she found out that her husband had been cheating on her for years. Everything she thought she knew about herself, her life, and her family seemed to explode around her and she found herself at rock bottom. But Glennon remembered that she had been here before, as a young woman who was an alcoholic and bulimic and held a positive pregnancy test in her hand. In this memoir, we follow a woman as she starts over again to learn who she is, what she believes, and what she will do to fight for love.

This book has been overshadowed by the reality that writing about your life always means writing about the past. As Love Warrior comes to its end, the author has learned a lot about herself and has hope for the future of her marriage. But this manuscript was completed several years ago. As Glennon currently promotes this book, she has separated from her husband and is currently dating Abby Wombach. In spite of the changes to her life since finishing this book, the story itself holds up as raw and beautiful. She writes about the ways that we compromise who we are to fit into perceptions of who we should be and the truth that we must know and love ourselves before we can truly love and know others. If you are in the midst of heartbreak, this is your book. If you have read and loved Glennon's writing before, this is her best work yet.

Love Warrior
By Glennon Doyle Melton
St. Martin's Press September 2016
272 pages
From my shelves

Review: Carry on, Warrior

Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

By Glennon Doyle Melton

Scribner April 2013

266 pages 

From my shelves 

Glennon Melton is a woman with a difficult past. She struggled with alcoholism and bulimia and was arrested several times. After she became a wife and a mother, she felt that she had to hide her true feelings about life and the secrets of her past. One day she realized that if she was always hiding, everyone else was hiding too. She decided to start being honest and discovered that everyone is living a life that is brutiful - half beautiful and half brutal. Glennon founded a website called Momastery and began writing about the wild joy and terrifying sorrow of this life we all share. Carry On, Warrior is a collection of some of these essays.

Glennon is not afraid to delve into the difficult parts of life. She writes candidly about her time in a mental hospital, her diagnosis of Lyme disease, and the difficulties she has faced in her marriage. She writes to free herself and to allow others the freedom to share their stories because she believes that sharing the real stuff of life brings us closer together. When she shares about her dark places, the reader feels less alone in their own struggles.

That's not to say that this book is a downer. This was one of the few books that actually made me laugh out loud - and often. The woman who wrote this book is heartfelt and committed, but she is also intensely clumsy and extremely hopeless at almost anything considered domestic. She confesses that she often sets her kitchen on fire, sent her husband to work with a PB and J sandwich and goldfish for lunch, and used to have her daughter run her doll carriage over the rug so that it looked like she had vacuumed. I got a good chuckle out of her confessions about laundry:

"I learned two very important things that day, and I'd like to share them with you, just in case you are in the Laundry and Wife Remedial Classes, like I am.

#1 This is, apparently, how laundry works: say your laundry day is Wednesday. You cannot put the laundry in the washer on one Wednesday and then wait to put it in the dryer until the following Wednesday. You must finish it all on the SAME Wednesday. It's unfair but true. If you don't, your family will smell like dead mice.

#2 You must be sweeter to your husband so he is not afraid to tell you that your entire family reeks. 

Housekeeping and marriage are complicated." 

I tore through this book in one day, promising myself that I would read just one more essay before I finally accomplished a few things. Needless to say, not much work got accomplished that day. This is a book I will go back to time and again, to fly through in awe of Glennon's candor and effortless writing and then to savor each essay one by one and ruminate on what she says about marriage, motherhood, and living a brave life in a scary world.