Worldly Girls [TRADE PAPER ]

Tamara Jongs powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovahs Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mothers tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themesincluding addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgivenessthe ultimate message ofWorldly Girlsis one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

TAMARA JONG is a Tiohtià :ke (Montré al) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’ s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book.Everyone loves a good cult story, but this one is also coupled with sincere humour and approaches a variety of real topics like grief, addiction, infertility, and self-discovery and belonging.1.ló)