Rachel,
As a male I was encouraged to get married at 18 to a girl who I barely knew and to enter in the glorious business of cleaning carpets. This after scoring nearly perfect on my SATs and being accepted to Brown University.
People need to stop with this "You don't relate because you don't know what it's like" stuff, I was a Jehovah's Witness too. As I said earlier in the thread I grew up two towns over from her, I was in a gifted program, my parents had a bad marriage, in fact I was the child of divorce who was quite literally made to choose in the courtroom between his parents.
The reason I have a problem with the book is that I feel it confirms every single stereotype that JWs have about ex-JWs when they leave. What do they say about ex-JWs? They end up doing drugs, drinking alot, broke, destitute, unhappy, then they say that they never really were witnesses because if they were sincere witnesses they never would've left. All of which she confirms in her book, she does drugs, drinks alot, is unhappy when she leaves and confirms that she was sinning the entire time she was a Witness and wasn't sincere.
But the most damaging thing I keep coming back to, the one that really made me say "Look I can't say this book is a good example of what ex-JWs are like" is where she confirms she was making up an accusation of her father molesting her to look cool. Now JWs have in print a place they can point to in order to confirm why the two witness rule is something that is OK for cases of molestation because the kid could be making it up. Which I hopefully don't have to point out to you just how damaging this is.
As long as JWs keep having their stereotypes confirmed about ex-JWs they will continue to deter children from leaving out of fear. Given the retention rate is 37%, however if that fear simply went away because there were well-known stories of children leaving simply because they didn't believe then made something good out of their lives without all the pitfalls maybe the retention rate would be even lower.
I also genuinely didn't find the book that funny, once I got passed the enfatuation of places I've been and people I've met being described in novel form the manatee jokes fell flat and that left with an unfunny story with nothing positive to add to the ex-JW community.
Again though, we're talking on this thread and a few others about 10 of us who didn't like the book and 90 that did. I don't see why people care so much that I don't like the book and have to try to explain why I wouldn't like the book. I hated the movie Transformers as well, does anyone feel the need to tell me why it's important for me to like that film?
