Tamara Jong’s powerful debut memoir is a moving portrait of trauma, addiction, grief, and forgiveness.

In sparse yet searing prose, Jong documents the tragic history of her fractured family and her fraught relationship with her strict Jehovah’s Witness religion. In doing so, she shines a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty, Jong collects the fragments of her unstable and unconventional childhood with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her indoctrination into and later rejection of her faith, 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 religion she long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—alcoholism, estrangement, grief, depression, infertility—the ultimate message becomes one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

Detailing the slow unravelling of one woman’s connection to her faith, Worldly Girls is a brave journey into the truth and will offer solace to anyone who has wrestled with the ghosts of the past.