Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

I started doing Beth Moore studies and saw Beth Moore (I think at the end of her going to churches days) in Odessa, Texas about 24 years ago. I was newly married and would do her studies with a church group when each one came out. It was a yearly thing. I traveled to Oklahoma and back to see her every chance I got and loved that there was a woman who taught the Bible and made it interesting and fun. I wanted to fall in love with Bible study as she had.

In her studies and books, she mentioned generally difficulties she and her husband had overcome and how “junk attacks junk.” You might have different junk but the same amount. She never wanted to go into specifics about it, but I knew something was there. I also remember her mentioning the difficulty of marriage in a marriage seminar (and was grateful for her honesty). I didn’t know if she would ever talk about these things, but when her new book came out and I saw how much other people had loved it, I wondered if this was the time she would tell her story.

And it is. It is her memoir of growing up, those things that caused her and her husband pain, her young married life, and how she began writing Bible studies. I remember her stories of starting out teaching aerobics and enjoyed this look at more of how it all became. She doesn’t hold back from discussing the fallout between between her and the Baptist church, and I especially loved the tender story of how she found a new church home (I cried for her).

She mentions in the foreword she wanted to wait until enough time had gone by and people had died to tell some of her truth. This is also a story of forgiveness and deep love for family. I am grateful to see how people have responded to her book, since she has dealt with so much hate the last few years and I hope it was healing to her to write her truth of it all.

She reads the audio narration, which I listened to on Hoopla.

“We want to be known but not memorized as if we cannot change. Family has a way of freezing its constituents in time, for better or for worse, confident that what was true twenty years ago is true now and will be true in twenty more. Unchecked, we lose sight of one another’s otherness. We’re amoebas, constantly swallowing one another or splitting off, simultaneously demanding singularity and intimacy.” Ch 1

“There are some things sitting in someone else’s seat can’t tell you. You’d have to sit in the same skin.” Ch 3

“We have laughed hard. We have cried hard. We have fought hard. Some of us have prayed hard. And wondered why on earth everything always had to be hard.” Ch 12

“I’ve learned that walking by faith is 50 percent hanging in there until you’re far enough down the road to develop hindsight. Ch 13

“Though every cover bore the same author’s name, I was not the same woman. Despite the title of the Bible study closest to my life message, I didn’t break free from the bondage built into my past. I was broken free.” Ch 15

“My own brothers in the faith, who’d be easily scandalized by others, had developed a sudden and protracted case of uncharacteristic tolerance.” Ch 20

Content Warnings

readwithmesarah's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

debimorton's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Memoir

Content Warnings

auberella's review

Go to review page

emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted relaxing sad medium-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

carizwerg's review

Go to review page

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

mrswhiteinthelibrary's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

Beth Moore: once the Evangelical church's only real woman darling, now a sort of delightful auntie of exvangelival kids everywhere. This is her story. And it's a ride. Written with her trademark, folksy southern warmth, she weaves the story of her troubled childhood, a story of abuse, mental illness, and tragedy, with the story of what Jesus did for her, his presence always felt but always seemingly behind the curtain, behind the scenes. As she grows older, marries, starts her ministry, builds her family, and grapples with her past, Moore never loses sight of who has carried her, even as trauma dogs her every step, from birthing her children, adopting a small boy from a cousin (who later chose to return to his birth family), she and her own husband's PTSD, and her ejection from and rejection of evangelicalism in the wake of Trump. This is not a preachy book. In many ways it reminded me of works like Educated or The Glass Castle. It is Beth Moore's life, and while her faith is intrinsic to that, she writes in an accessible manner, acknowledging often only in past tense what she sees as the invisible threads holding it all together, only seen from the distance of time. She stands in awe of making it through it all, never praising herself (her tone is, in fact, often one of self depreciation). It reminds me of how readers of Charlotte's Web are less wont to praise Wilber as "some pig," and instead remark, "what an amazing spider."

Content Warnings

More...