Awake

In the Author’s Note, Hatmaker addresses both the limitations and advantages of memoir as a genre: “I am deeply aware that this is my story, my version, my experience. I am deciding what to include and exclude” (2). With these words, she acknowledges the inevitable partiality of telling one’s own story. She highlights how different perspectives on the same events will vary, while emphasizing that the narrative expresses her individual “truth.” Hatmaker’s intimate and self-aware tone positions Awake within the literary context of confessional memoir.

The first chapters establish the book’s structure, in which short, episodic chapters alternate between the present and the past. The title of the first chapter, “The End,” signals the book’s reverse orientation, reflecting the end of the author’s marriage. The fragmented form conveys Hatmaker’s emotional disorientation as she struggles to make sense of her life following the end of her marriage. The author’s juxtaposition of her devastation at that time with memories of her childhood and adolescence connects her adult unravelling to formative experiences. Feelings of shame characterized her humiliation at the county fair and at Mrs. Landerson’s proclamation that she was “domineering.” These episodes communicated to the author as a youth that she was both not enough and “too much,” damaging her self-esteem. In addition, the author recounts how evangelical conditioning trained her to distrust her intuition and submit to external authority, introducing The Systemic Shaping of Identity as a theme. She conveys how the accumulation of belief systems, gender roles, and inherited narratives molded her over time.

Even in these early chapters, Hatmaker begins to thematically explore The Chaotic Process of Navigating Emotional Devastation, as she describes her distress, grief, and intense sense of loss at the abrupt ending of a 26-year marriage. The memoir charts how her husband’s infidelity impacted not just her but also her five children, whose sense of security as part of a stable family unit dissolved overnight.

Hatmaker’s assertion that “[i]t [was] the end of my life as I know it” (3) introduces another theme: The Deconstruction and Rebuilding of Autonomy. At this point, the memoir describes how her sense of identity was shattered because her roles of wife, mother, and spiritual leader were all inextricably bound up with her marriage.

From the first scene, in which she woke at 2:30 am and discovered her husband’s infidelity, Hatmaker introduces the motif of sleep and waking. This imagery is both literal and symbolic, as the author’s rude awakening jolts her into a wider consciousness of the many ways that she was “sleepwalking” through her life. The symbolism of plants and flowers emerges through the story of her childhood pastor destroying a perfect rose during a True Love Waits purity lesson. He used the “barren, dead stick plucked of its petals” (5) to symbolize how sexual activity before marriage ruined young women. At the time of the sermon, Hatmaker had no sexual experience, yet the visual metaphor seared the lesson into her consciousness, embedding the belief that her worth was conditional and fragile. In the memoir, the stripped rose symbolizes indoctrinated shame and bodily repression and their long-term effects on identity.