Books like Leaving the Witness — picked by fans

T.W. Neal grows up with parents who opt to live on a sparsely populated Hawaiian island, not wearing clothes, surfing, smoking Marijuana, and eating magic mushrooms. The family lives in a van or in housing with few modern amenities and the author attends school on the island only sporadically. Due to her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcohol abuse, she at times, has to run the household. With difficulty she connects with relatives and a few teachers and begins to reach for a lifeline to break free from the life her parents chose. She wants to go to college and eventually is able to leave the island and pursue a mainstream life. It is astounding that a person growing up in such circumstances would have the desire and determination to forge a different life.

This is an amazing memoir of a woman who was raised by a fundamentalist Morman family who lived in a polygamist compound in Mexico. She was her father’s thirty-ninth child and the daughter of a union between him and her mother, who was his fifth wife. Her father died when she was only 3 months old, and she spent most of her childhood with her mother, four siblings, and an abusive stepfather. The community was a confusing combination of rigid religious beliefs, sister wives, and poverty. At age 15 she takes three of her siblings and escapes to California to build a new life. I am amazed that a child could have the understanding, foresight, and courage to do what she did. The book is very well written and thoroughly captivating. 

Shulem Deen grew up in the culture of Hassidic Judaism in New York City. With limited education and awkward English, he decides to explore the world beyond the insular community in which he has lived his entire life. Despite warnings from his wife and recriminations from his community, he eventually decides to leave and seek a new life for which his previous existence has left him completely unprepared. I’m intrigued that a person has the courage to push the boundaries of his existence even though no one in his family or community supports him.

The author had been to college for one year when she decides to commit herself to become a nun and joins the Missionaries Charity, led by the famous Mother Theresa of Calcutta. For more than twenty years she serves faithfully in the sacrificial community of nuns, her emotions constantly swinging between devotion and desire for something different—longing to continue the learning she started in college and also dreaming of connectedness through romance. Even though she rises to positions of authority in the organization, she decides to leave the order for a different life. This story intrigues me cause of Johnson’s genuine devotion to the cause and to its leader, but also her honesty about her human longings.

This is the handbook I wished I’d had when I left my religion and was shunned 25 years ago. The author is a skilled therapist who also left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She brings a lot of empathy to her step-by-step guidance on how to cope with the tyranny of being cast out by friends and family.

Kit and I share some life similarities, she’s a working-class girl with a Birmingham background, published later in life, and I was keen to read her story. Written as scenes from childhood with sharp observation and wit, her book illustrates an unpredictable childhood. The daughter of an Irish mother and Caribbean father in a large and sometimes chaotic family, where there is love in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not always at home. There are the familiar places, the family dynamics observed with the clarity of a child, and the tit-for-tat games her parents play - dad buys a new car, the next week, mum a harmonica and Davy Crockett hat. All quirks observed and challenging situations related with a lightness of touch and wit, a genuine pleasure to read.

It was a brilliant decision on Natalie's part to create a graphic novel that lays out the many facets and layers that make up the dynamics of cults. It has been a pleasure for me to get to know Natalie. A former member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she is now a dynamic and independent individual. This graphic novel explores a wide variety of aspects of the tactics used by Jehovah's Witnesses, including shunning, the reasons why cult family members will disavow non-cult family members, and a great deal more. This seemed to me to be an excellent option for storytelling geared for minds that have a tendency to gravitate toward visuals.

A. J. Jacobs, a journalist, decides to read the Bible and try to follow it literally for a whole year, to the point of eating locusts, throwing small pebbles at couples he suspects of adultery, slaying idolatry, and speaking the naked truth… Struggling to follow archaic rules, he lives a disconcerting experience under the perplexed eyes of his family and becomes quickly out of step with the present time. The Year of Living Biblically depicts a clash of worlds with a caustic humor and I’ve burst out laughing a couple of times. I recommend it to believers and non-believers, both will be amused by this witty book that gives us food for thought.

At the center of the novel Night in Shanghai is Black American musician Thomas Greene, who arrives in Shanghai from segregated Baltimore to find wealth, position, and love—only to have his life changed forever by the outbreak of World War II. Author Nicole Mones was a businesswoman in China in the 1970s; her China experience, coupled with meticulous research, makes this a pitch-perfect portrait of the city and its denizens. A talented storyteller, she describes the little-known Black American experience of Shanghai, taking the reader from go-go Shanghai to wartime, weaving in actual events, characters, and depictions of the nightspots and jazz clubs of my parents’ Shanghai.

Written in the 1940s, this book takes readers to Hong Kong as the Japanese occupation replaced the British colony. It’s mostly a love story in which the intensity of war reflects the passion of emotions and the restraint on actions. 

But like all of Eileen Chang’s works, it’s also beautifully written. Though the fall of Hong Kong is at the heart of the novella, I’ve always found the city less important in the story than the domestic settings. When the Bai family talks, I’m in the room, sitting in a wingback chair, sipping green tea, and listening.