A memoir of the profound destabilization that comes from losing one's faith--and a young woman's journey to reconcile her lack of belief with her love for her deeply religious family.
Jessica Wilbanks is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as creative nonfiction awards from Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Redivider, and Ruminate magazine. In 2014, she was selected as a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Journalism. Jessica received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Houston, where she served as nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son.
“Wilbanks’s slow deconstruction of her family-given religiosity is
an evocative inversion of the average spiritual journey.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This debut memoir conveys a down-home feel with a literary
voice.”
—Library Journal
“An earnest account of an adult maintaining ties with her family of
origin.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Wilbanks writes with a journalist’s keen eye, capturing the loving
chaos of her family’s house and the fervent, bombastic clamor of
revival meetings in both the US and Nigeria. . . . Her narrative
provides a fascinating glimpse into a faith subculture whose
popular image is often reduced to arm-waving televangelists. But
even more compelling is Wilbanks’s honest rendering of the profound
uncertainty that comes after leaving behind a place that hasn’t
changed, but is no longer home.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Wilbanks has a fascinating story to tell, and she tells it well.
Especially interesting is her report of her time in Nigeria, where
Pentecostalism is hugely popular and potent. But is it viable?
Wilbanks wonders, and so will readers like her who may be
interested in learning about the roots of faith.”
—Booklist
“This compelling debut is shaped like a search for a long-lost
friend, or an examination of a love affair that left the author
forever changed. . . . Wilbanks weaves a fiercely candid account of
reconciling with a faith whose tenets seem set in stone.”
—Bust
“It’s rare to come across individuals who can so precisely capture
what it means to leave a unique and profound (religious) meaning
system. Moreover, the ability to unravel the emotionally wrenching
and often complex social psychological process of rebuilding a new
life, after leaving a fundamentalist religion, is quite the
undertaking. Jessica Wilbanks’s new memoir, When I Spoke in
Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss, highlights her own process
of leaving the Pentecostal faith and how it not only impacted her
family relations, as it commonly does, but how she ultimately made
sense of her exiting experience.”
—Religion Dispatches
“I have plenty of bright, well-educated friends who nevertheless
can’t imagine any scenario in which they could genuinely believe in
God, let alone get fully caught up in some kind of religious
ecstasy. For such folks, and for us prodigals still haunted by
preachers long left behind, and really for anyone who grew up
feeling different from those they loved most—which means most of
us—Jessica Wilbanks’s vivid memoir is a great and generous gift.
This is what fiery faith really feels like on the inside, both
coming and going, and this is how we use it to comfort and hurt
each other, and this is what happens when it dies but you don’t,
all in language stirring enough to earn Wilbanks a place beside
Mary Karr and Anne Lamott on my top shelf. When I Spoke in Tongues
is the book I will offer from now on, when my cradle-atheist
friends wonder what it’s like to come of age truly fearing the
Lord.”
—Bart Campolo, coauthor of Why I Left, Why I Stayed
“Jessica Wilbanks’s memoir of faith’s loss and her efforts to
comprehend its significance is no less than an illuminating
exploration of how to live meaningfully. Beautifully written, When
I Spoke in Tongues is compelling, honest, and memorable.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“Fever dream—this is how Jessica Wilbanks describes the first time
she spoke in tongues (as an eleven-year-old Pentecostal), which is
as good a phrase as any to describe the experience of reading this
lucid and hallucinatory memoir. The questions that float through
these pages—What is belief? What is faith?—spoke to me in ways I
hadn’t expected, or even knew to ask, and revealed a world running
alongside our own, which we mock or ignore at our peril.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“In When I Spoke in Tongues, Jessica Wilbanks returns to the
Pentecostal faith of her youth to search for the source of power
and mystery that worship once awakened in her. Along the way, she
gives us a moving and clear-eyed account of what happens when a
person leaves behind her deeply-held religious beliefs, and what we
find when we look within ourselves for redemption and grace.”
—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings
“When I Spoke in Tongues is the perfect antidote to the divisions
of our day. As Jessica Wilbanks travels back into her impoverished
Pentecostal past and through the Nigeria of the present, seeking a
lost world of meaning and beauty and belonging, she becomes our
guide—but not just through new realms that may be foreign to us.
She shows us how to move with deep empathy into sometimes hostile
terrain, how to seek the humanity in others, especially those with
whom we fundamentally disagree. Even in writing a story about faith
and its loss, then, Wilbanks ends up constructing a new home for
herself—and maybe for us if we follow her lead—that is grounded in
love.”
—Kimberly Meyer, author of The Book of Wanderings
“At the heart of When I Spoke in Tongues is the narrator’s fervent
desire to do good and speak truth. That ideal, refracted through
evangelical dogma or family loyalty, sets the course for this
utterly absorbing journey of self-realization. One reaches the end
feeling that it is possible to maintain personal integrity, as well
as to be roundly committed to family, curiosity, world, and
eternity.”
—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once
“Faith is complicated. This is a story about loss of faith and
yearning for that lost faith, by a woman raised as a deeply
conservative Christian. Her story of a Pentecostal childhood will
intrigue Christians and non-Christians alike.”
—T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back
“Jessica Wilbanks invites us to see the subtle ways that faith can
thickly weave together lives, families, and places. When I Spoke in
Tongues vividly and delicately describes the loss of faith, but it
is perhaps just as much about the uncertain longing that
accompanies that loss. It is a testimony to the ways faith
continues, even in its absence.”
—Jason Bruner, author of Living Salvation in the East African
Revival in Uganda
“This riveting personal account looks at the human freedom to
assent to or move away from a faith tradition. It is a must-read
for all who want to understand the pull and push of
Pentecostalism.”
—Elias Kifon Bongmba, editor of The Routledge Companion to
Christianity in Africa
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