I Felt the End Before It Came

Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah's Witness

De: Daniel Allen Cox

Narrado por: Daniel Allen Cox

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRAND PRIX DU LIVRE DE MONTREAL*

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2023

“I spent eighteen years in a group that taught me to hate myself. You cannot be queer and a Jehovah’s Witness—it’s one or the other.”

Daniel Allen Cox grew up with firm lines around what his religion considered unacceptable: celebrating birthdays and holidays, voting in elections, pursuing higher education, and other forays into independent thought. Their opposition to blood transfusions would have consequences for his mother, just as their stance on homosexuality would for him.

But even years after whispers of his sexual orientation reached his congregation’s presiding elder, catalyzing his disassociation, the distinction between “in” and “out” isn’t always clear. Still in the midst of a lifelong disentanglement, Cox grapples with the group’s cultish tactics—from gaslighting to shunning—and their resulting harms—from simmering anger to substance abuse—all while redefining its concepts through a queer lens. Can Paradise be a bathhouse, a concert hall, or a room full of books?

With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes listeners on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he’s swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It Came reckons with memory and language just as it provides a blueprint to surviving a litany of Armageddons.

©2023 Daniel Allen Cox (P)2023 Viking

Reseñas de la Crítica

“This is ultimately a story about the struggle to build a life out of ashes with little to no support—about unlearning familial inheritances and forgiving ourselves for our own trespasses. Most of all, it is about learning how to carry on after leaving a community obsessed with finality.”—The Washington Post

“Elegant . . . [Cox] approaches his subject with emotional nuance, and writes with a mix of self-aware humor and deep insight that sets his project apart from other former believer memoirs.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Brilliant

Brilliant. Painful. Joyful. Insightful. Informative. Complicated. Raw. An exploration of layers and layers of otherness. I loved it.