Elizabeth Esther – Girl at the End of the World [Review]

[easyazon_image add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”0307731871″ cloaking=”default” height=”160″ localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514iqc7VMnL._SL160_.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”104″]

Page 2: Elizabeth Esther – Girl at the End of the World

 
Esther’s story will have particular power and resonance for other Christians who grew up in restrictive fundamentalist churches and families. Her story makes clear why it is nearly impossible to make a “clean break” with forces that so intimately shaped one ‘s childhood. Leaving a damaging childhood faith behind is a lifelong, winding process, not a straightforward one. For readers like me, without similar experience, her book puts a complex human face on stories that are otherwise easy for us to dismiss. We wonder why someone would stay in an environment like this. Esther’s story shows us how deeply ingrained views about women, children, church, and the world become when the authority figures in one’s life claim to speak for God.

 

The strongest sections of Girl at the End of the World come in the first two-thirds of the book. Esther effectively uses dialogue and description to paint a compelling picture of her life as a child, teenager, and young married woman living under the Assembly’s authority. She does a fine job of rendering both her interior world and her external environment, which helps readers like me, with no firsthand experience of fundamentalism, understand how a smart, faithful child could fall so completely under the sway of abusive leadership.

 

The final chapters are intriguing, but I was left wishing for more—about how Catholicism is enabling her to reimagine God and find a renewed faith, and particularly how she is sustaining a relationship with her parents. Esther tells us only that, “My relationship with my parents has been rocky, but we always seem to find a way to work things out.” I remain perplexed about how one works things out”with a father who not only issued oppressive rules in God’s name, but also gave his pre-adolescent daughter “tittie twisters” and chided her for being chubby. A final scene featuring Esther’s mother as a doting grandparent convincingly reveals that much healing has occurred. But I still struggled to reconcile the authoritarian parents of Esther’s childhood with this more forgiving portrait of parents who are deeply flawed but capable of change. As a writer, I understand Esther’s reticence to delve into relationships that are a work in progress. As a reader, I was frustrated that some important parts of the story—scenes and reflections that could clarify the changing nature of Esther’s relationship with her parents—were left out.

 

A number of reader reviews of Girl at the End of the World express dismay that Esther has rejected one form of organized religion, only to take up with another. But for me, Esther’s landing in the Catholic Church is the most surprising and compelling facet of her story. It is remarkable that, in the face of such deep dysfunction and pain, Esther clings so fiercely to her conviction that God exists, God loves her, and God wants her to flourish. I hope that, in the future, she applies her considerable story-telling skills to telling us more about how her faith has continued to grow in Roman Catholicism. Girl at the End of the World naturally has a particular resonance among those with similar fundamentalist backgrounds. Elizabeth Esther’s tenacious clinging to God as she sheds the trappings of her childhood religion has the potential for a far wider captive audience—that is, all of us who continue to seek God in spite of how messed up God’s people can be.
 
______
Ellen Painter Dollar is author of No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction (Westminster John Knox, 2012) and co-founder of #ItIsEnough, an informal coalition of Christians using social media to keep issues around gun violence and the need for stronger gun laws on the national agenda.