You Lied to Me About God By: Jamie Marich

Author: Jamie Marich

A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home—and is exalted as God’s will. For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land, You Lied to Me About God explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faithAt nine years old, Jamie Marich asked God to end it all.Doing it herself would be an irrevocable an affront to the church and her father’s God. She prayed instead for the rapture, an accident, a passive death—anything to stop the turmoil of feeling wrong in her body; wrong in her desires; wrong in her faith in a merciful God that could love her wholly as she was.You Lied to Me About God explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing tyhat tells no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you’re probably damned.With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes readers through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.Hitting a breaking point, Marich embarks on from shrines in Croatia to ashrams in Florida, she reckons with what it means to come home to a faith that heals and accepts her wholly as she in her queerness, in her body, and in her deep relationship to an expansive and loving God.