Awake

Throughout Awake, Hatmaker weaves poetry into her memoir as both a motif and a mode of eloquent expression. Its recurring presence signals her evolution from being shaped by the rigid language of religious doctrine to embracing the open, interpretive language of feeling and metaphor.

Hatmaker highlights how poetry was a significant influence during her youth, recalling how her high school English teacher, Mrs. Palmer, “changed [her] life in under ten minutes” (175) by reading Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Hearing her teacher describe reciting the poem to her dying father, Hatmaker wept, struck by the power of words to hold both love and sorrow. Recognizing her pupil’s emotional response as a gift, Mrs. Palmer urged her to use her literary talents. This memory became an origin story for Hatmaker’s identity as a writer.

As the memoir unfolds, poetry punctuates the narrative like a chorus, expanding on the author’s themes. Hatmaker includes complete poems, such as Maggie Smith’s “Bride” and David Gates’s “I Am Not Your Cup of Tea.” These poems give voice to Hatmaker’s realization that she could be her own loyal wife and need not dilute herself for others. The inclusion of MAIA’s poem “Flowers” likewise underscores Hatmaker’s themes. This poem is from When the Waves Come, a poetry collection that explores the process of recovering from a failed relationship. MAIA’s imagery of “flowers lining the front porch” (290) as women return to full selfhood connects to two of the memoir’s other symbols: plants and flowers, and the porch. By embedding these texts within her own, Hatmaker aligns her story with a broader literary lineage of women celebrating autonomy and self-love.

In quoting songwriters such as Miranda Lambert and Ingrid Andress alongside contemporary poets like Maggie Smith, Hatmaker collapses the boundary between poetry and music. This conflation of the forms highlights the ability of both to express succinct yet intense truths.

In Awake, plants and flowers are recurring symbols of growth, survival, and renewal, echoing Hatmaker’s healing process. The memoir’s first significant floral image appears in an early flashback to Hatmaker’s adolescence, when a pastor at a True Love Waits ceremony used a rose to symbolize purity. As he plucked its petals one by one to represent sexual “defilement,” the rose became a metaphor for the shame embedded in evangelical teachings about female worth. This moment seared into the author’s psyche as a reminder that her worth was fragile and could be easily compromised. The stripped rose symbolized a system that taught girls to distrust their bodies and equated their value with perfection. Throughout Awake, Hatmaker works to reverse that symbolism, reclaiming flowers as expressions of life rather than emblems of loss.

Decades later, after her husband’s departure, Hatmaker’s home and garden became central spaces in her healing process. Despite her lack of experience in plant care, she adorned her newly rebuilt porch with two hanging plants. The author’s success in keeping the plants “alive and vibrant” (188) echoed her own gradual flourishing, as well as her potential to develop new skills and interests. Similarly, the excerpt from “Beautiful Day” by U2, describing a heart blooming in “stony ground,” highlights how Hatmaker succeeded in reclaiming her life from the depths of despair. By the memoir’s conclusion, flowers and plants have shifted from symbols of purity and decay to emblems of continuity and resilience.

Hatmaker’s porch is a recurring symbol representing both destruction and renewal. Its symbolism first emerges when the author describes her husband demolishing their front porch and failing to fulfill his promise to rebuild it. When he later left their marriage, the front of the house remained exposed and incomplete, and the front door was unusable. The broken threshold of the Hatmakers’ home became a physical manifestation of the state of the couple’s relationship. Having shattered the partnership with his infidelity, Brandon showed no desire to repair it.

Months later, Hatmaker’s friends Jenny and Shonna arrived to rebuild the porch. This act of labor and love transformed a symbol of abandonment into one of communal care and rebirth. When the author’s friends surprised her with the gift of a porch swing, signed with their names, the creation of a new space defined by friendship was complete. Hatmaker’s observation that her restyled porch was “100 percent more beautiful than before it was demolished” (74) emphasizes her discovery of a more fulfilling life beyond the traditional confines of marriage.