Awake

“Alas, the memoirist’s dilemma. I can only tell my version. It is what I know. It is what I remember. It is what I felt. Trying to include everyone’s disparate versions would fragment this story beyond usefulness and, for me, truth. So I am left with the uncomfortable task of calling it like I saw it, knowing no two people in this story would tell it the exact same way.”

In the “Author’s Note,” Hatmaker reflects on the inherent subjectivity of memoirs, acknowledging the tension between personal truth and collective memory. Her admission that “no two people in this story would tell it the exact same way” highlights the fragmented nature of truth and the limits of narrative authority. By foregrounding this “memoirist’s dilemma,” Hatmaker positions her work as both self-aware and ethically conscious, reminding readers that individual experience and perception shape “truth.”

“The kids are upstairs asleep, unaware that their story has just split in half. They went to bed in the hazy, lazy days of summer polluted by a four-month-old COVID outbreak but otherwise sleeping the comfortable sleep of kids whose parents will always be just downstairs; family disruption might come from outside but never from within. Not ours anyway. I keep thinking: ‘They don’t know. I don’t want to know. I want to go upstairs with them and not know.’”

Hatmaker thematically highlights The Chaotic Process of Navigating Emotional Devastation as she expresses her desire to protect herself and her children from the emotional pain of separation and divorce. The author uses foreshadowing, conveying how the emotional violence of family rupture would soon disrupt her children’s innocent oblivion. The increasing repetition of the idea of being peacefully unaware underscores a futile urge to return to the safe space of ignorance.

“We are frozen in our metal folding chairs. I have barely even kissed a boy. I feel wildly embarrassed but can’t figure out why. All of a sudden, I am hyperaware of my body and burning with shame; did that first kiss with Gary Whipple in seventh grade cost me a petal?? I glance nervously at the other girls, wondering if they knew we were such a problem. This was news to me. I can’t look at the boys. I think maybe my Forenza shirt is too tight? It felt fine ten minutes ago. My cheeks are flushed with humiliation.”

In this scene, Hatmaker captures the moment that the purity culture of the conservative Baptist Church was seared into her consciousness as a girl. Her sudden self-consciousness as she worried that her shirt was “too tight” and avoided eye contact with the boys illustrates the internalization of shame about her body and sexuality.