Awake

The memoir’s title, Awake, signals its central motif: the transition from sleep to waking. Throughout the narrative, sleep represents self-deception and blindly following a script dictated by others, while waking signifies the painful but liberating clarity that accompanies self-awareness.

As the story opens, Hatmaker describes waking at 2:30 am to discover her husband’s betrayal as he tells another woman, “I just can’t quit you” (30). In one night, the life she had known as a wife, mother, and ministry partner was shattered. However, the rupture also initiated the process of awakening to the truth. Hatmaker later recognized that she had been “sleepwalking through [her] own story” (223), avoiding the discomfort of self-examination. Her husband’s infidelity, while devastating, became the alarm that ended this long slumber.

The motif of waking recurs as Hatmaker details beginning to understand how deeply she had internalized religious doctrines that encouraged her to stay “asleep.” Shaped by conservative evangelicalism, she was taught to distrust her own instincts, repress anger, and interpret submission as virtue. Staying “asleep,” in this sense, meant living according to scripts written by patriarchal church leaders. Her awakening involved dismantling those inherited narratives and learning to trust her own body, intuition, and