Awake : A Memoir

From Jen Hatmakerbeloved New York Times bestselling author and host of the For the Love podcasta brutally honest, funny, and revealing memoir about the traumatic end of her twenty-six-year-long marriage, and the beginning of a different kind of love story.

At 2:30 a.m. on July 11th, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering in his phone to another woman from their bed. It was the end of life as she knew it. In the months that followed, she went from being a shiny, funny, popular leader, to a divorced wreck on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds parenting five kids alone with no clue about her own bank accounts. Having led millions of women for over a decadeurging them to embrace authenticity, find radical agency, and create healthy relationshipsthis seemed nothing less than total failure.

In Awake, Jen shares for the first time what happened when she found herself completely lost at seaand how she made it to shore. In candid, surprisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlifethe implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies change you didn't ask for. And, drawing on all her resourcesfrom without and from withinJen dares to question the systems beneath the whole house of cards, and to reckon with the myths, half-truths, and lies that brought her to this point.

More than one woman's story, Awake is a critical analysis of the story given to all of us: the story of gender limitations, religious subservience, body shame, self-erasure. With refreshing candor, Jen explores a Midlife Renaissancegrieving what's lost, cherishing possibility, and entering the second half of life wide awake.