A Well-Trained Wife - Tia Levings

Written By Mona Angéline

Tia Levings’s story of survival as part of an ultra conservative Christian community in “A Well Trained Wife” left an impression on me - it was so hard for me to put her memoir down. The author describes her severely restricted life and how she eventually found the courage to leave her abusive marriage and community in search of a life of equality.

It is incredibly scary to me that these ideas exist, and it is even scarier that they're practiced in this country and era. That people, in this day and age, suffer terribly and needlessly at the hands of Christian patriarchy.

Over the course of the text, Levings lays out the many things she wasn't allowed to do, things that are taken for granted by most of us American women nowadays. There are so many of them that I'm worried I'm not conveying the full gamut of the abuse she endured here. Among the things inaccessible to her are the right to vote, contraception, a career. She lives with book bans, harsh discipline - in a stay at home life of control, shame, and then some. At a certain point, routine marital spanking was normalized by her husband, incited by their church, not even for the (unlawful) punishment of breaking one of the myriad patriarchal rules, but just because.

Sometimes with memoirs the story carries enough weight to blow the reader away in itself. But this book is not like that. It is beautifully and skillfully written and carries you along as you take in the magic of its words. The text reads as if it were fiction, like a thriller that's all too real. Maybe because it's so unbelievable that these things happen in our time? Maybe because we women never fully lose the fear of being suppressed, used, our souls, wants, and needs exterminated?

I am keeping this review free from quotes because the publisher would like to see them taken from the final version of the manuscript. It breaks my heart though because there are so many special passages that I can't seem to translate into my own words. I guess this just means that you'll have to go and read them for yourself!

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the Advance Reader's Copy!

Mona Angéline

Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable writer, reader, book reviewer, artist, athlete, and scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other". She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. She is a new writer, but her work was recently accepted in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grand Dame Literary, tiny wren lit, Down in the Dirt Magazine, The Viridian Door, The Machine, Whisky Blot Magazine, and The Academy of Mind and Heart. She loves to review books and has written them for the /tƐmz/ Review, the Ampersand Review, and the Beakful Litblog. Sooner or later she will have to condense this list… Mona is also a regular guest editor for scientific journals although she doesn't use a pen name when her engineering PhD degree is involved. She lives bicoastally in Santa Cruz, California, and in New York and savors life despite, or maybe because of, her significant struggles with chronic illness and mild disability. Learn about her musings at creativerunnings.com. Follow her on Instagram under @creativerunnings and on Twitter at @creativerunning.

https://creativerunnings.com
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