Awake by Jen Hatmaker

I picked this up because it is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books from 2025. It is a memoir about the author's public break up of her marriage in 2020 after she discovered that her spouse of 20 years was having an affair. There are some things that made this a bit different. The first is that Meanwhile, both Jen and Brandon Hatmaker were Christian celebrities. Brandon Hatmaker was a pastor, and Jen Hatmaker was a frequent speaker at the church they planted together. They starred in an HGTV show about their home renovation, and spoke publicly about international adoption (two of their five children were adopted from Ethiopia). Jen Hatmaker became a popular speaker and writer in her own right, as well as her podcast, For the Love. She wrote about the Bible, marriage, and parenting in a breezy, humorous voice. Her books attracted a following among Christian women seeking a faith that was honest and authentic rather than rigid and rules-focused. Jen Hatmaker had a loss of confidence in her faith after a marriage that was very much rooted in the church blew up in a spectacular and unexpected way, but it wasn't her first public struggle. She suffered from backlash within the evangelical world in 2016 when she began publicly questioning the policies of the first Trump administration and speaking out about racism among white American Christians like herself. Her reputation took a further hit when she talked about fully affirming LGBTQ people and relationships. But in return for cancelled speaking engagements and books pulled from the shelves of religious bookstores, she attracted a new audience of people open to a broader, more inclusive vision of Christianity. In this memoir she acknowledges she is no longer engaged in formal religion but chronicles all the way she has grown and recovered from what her husband did. It is an interesting and well written read.