Rift

A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy

By: Cait West

Narrated by: Cait West

Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

A gripping memoir about coming of age in the stay-at-home daughter movement and the quest to piece together a future on your own terms.

Raised in the Christian patriarchy movement, Cait West was homeschooled and could only wear clothes her father deemed modest. She was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing, to go change. There would be no college in her future, no career. She was a stay-at-home daughter and would move out only when her father allowed her to become a wife. She was trained to serve men, and her life would never be her own.

Until she escaped.

In Rift, Cait West tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman's growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all shed ever known and choose a future of her own making.

Rift is a story of survival. Its also a story about what happens after you survive. With compassion and clarity, Cait explores the complex legacy of patriarchal religious trauma in her life, including the ways she has also been complicit in systems of oppression. A remarkable literary debut, Rift offers an essential personal perspective on the fraught legacy of purity culture and recent reckonings with abuse in Christian communities.

©2024 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (P)2024 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

A Truth-Teller Reads Her Own Memoir!

In her April 4th Eerdman’s interview, Cait West says, “I’ve been called an apostate, a heretic, and a witch. But I don’t take it personally. 🙂 I prefer ‘truth teller.’”

I can think of no better way to begin this review than to say, “Read my friend Cait’s book! She’s a truth teller!”

From the first to the final page, there is so much to love:

* Cait West’s skilled and beautifully crafted writing, like this from the opening page: “If I am alone enough or scared enough, I try to collect the memories, weave them together like lace, like snowflakes.”

* Cait’s honesty about “the complexity of past love and loss and damage” which threads through the book as a steady both/and of emotions and experiences that have shaped who she has become, who she is still becoming.

* Cait’s hope on the final page that, “I have room to love and be loved, to explore the Earth unafraid, to pray or be silent. I am open to the wonder of living.”

Readers on their own journeys—particularly those breaking free from fundamentalism and abusive structures of all sorts—can trust that through the rifting of their own lives, “we can survive, and in the separating, we become something new, always evolving.”

Finally, as an audiobook listener, I have the added advantage of hearing Cait's story read in her own voice--compelling, clear, and kind throughout. Highly recommend!