Off The Shelf

About Good Testaments

Good Testaments is both for and about memoir — central to which is an interest in the experience of recovering from religious identity.

I want to evoke and reimagine the word testament, which is so often understood in the religious context. Still like a true believer, I hold that a testament is a sacred object, a memorial, a stone, which, when witnessed and believed, holds the power to transform.

And good because I want to reimagine and live out what goodness means to me, beyond the dichotomies, ideologies, mythologies, and histories of the church. Good because I still want to experience something like the divine, but I want to define what that relationship looks like on my own terms.

I think that all writers, but especially those who tackle memoir, show up to the page because they want to brush up against the divine: they are trying and hopefully able to understand, reclaim, and take back some power in their story.

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