BookBrowse Reviews A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings

This harrowing and beautifully written memoir explores the author's journey into—and eventual escape from—fundamentalist Christianity. It recounts how extreme patriarchal theology enabled her abusive husband's violence against her, and how changing her beliefs empowered her to leave her marriage. The vivid narration immerses the reader into her headspace at each point in time. We see her anxieties and why she felt she had to embrace such a strict form of religion…but also the secret doubts and questions that always plagued her.

Levings' story begins with growing up in a fairly mainstream evangelical household during the 1980s. In her teen years, her family attends a popular Florida megachurch. The messages she describes hearing there will leave many readers appalled while sounding painfully familiar to others: that premarital sex makes a woman dirty and damaged, ...