TORMENT OF A LAPSED JEHOVAH’S WITNESS
The Last Days Ali Millar Ebury Press £16.99 ★★★★★
In the Frequently Asked Questions section of their website, the Jehovah’s Witnesses emphatically deny that they are a cult. Instead they describe themselves as ‘Christians who do our best to follow the example set by Jesus Christ and to live by his teachings’.
Those teachings, outlined by Ali Millar in this memoir, include the belief that, when Armageddon comes, only faithful servants of Jehovah will be spared, free to live for ever in paradise on Earth. Or, as the seven-year-old Millar understands it, ‘We will be able to pat lions and all the bad people will be gone for good.’ To uphold the purity of the faith, unrepentant wrongdoers must be ‘disfellowshipped’, expelled not only from the congregation but from their families: ‘This is an act of love.’
Millar was two when her mother was baptised as a Jehovah’s Witness. She broke with the church when she was in her 30s. The first pages of The Last Days are addressed to her mother, with whom she remains unreconciled. ‘I want to consume you,’ Millar writes, ‘in the hope I can make sense of you.’
The figure of her mother (not named) dominates the early chapters. Even from a child’s accepting perspective, she comes across as self-absorbed, unpredictable and insecure, defined by her relationships with men who ‘tell her what to do and what to think and what to believe’. As a Jehovah’s Witness, she bags the ultimate Him, ‘omnipresent and eternal’, and an abundance of new rules: no Christmas (false worship), no birthdays (pagan custom), no charity shops or records or television.
And yet she remains close to her own parents, Millar’s grandparents, who are unapologetically secular. Millar grows up in the Scottish Borders, divided, tormented on the one hand by the looming spectre of Armageddon and the terror that, as a bad girl, she will die horribly, and charmed on the other by the comfortable life and easy-going affection of her granny and grandpa.
The conflict is obvious and, as Millar gets older, the questions begin to mount. But instead of a close examination of Millar’s relationship with her mother and with the patriarchal church that demands their submission, the book drifts away from the family towards a series of indeterminate boyfriends. Millar drinks and takes drugs, goes clubbing, has casual sex. Like her mother (a comparison she doesn’t draw), she obsesses about one boy after another. She suffers with anorexia.
Her pain is obvious but, without the rigour of analysis and with no structure beyond the chronological, her account is less memoir than the diary of an anguished teenager, engrossing for the writer herself but too shapeless and solipsistic to have much meaning for anyone else.
There are powerful scenes – Millar endures an excruciating interrogation by two elders who demand to know exactly what pleasure she derived from sexual contact with her husband before they married – but she never properly explains why the faith exerted such power over her for so long.
I put down this book as the author began it, still struggling to make sense of Millar’s mother’s abandonment of her daughter and the absolutely-nota-cult that demanded it.