Rift
A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
Author Cait West ISBN 9780802883582 Binding Trade Cloth Publisher WM B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Publication Date April 30, 2024 Size 140 x 216 mmA gripping memoir about coming of age in the stay-at-home daughter movement and the quest to piece together a future on your own terms.
Raised in the Christian patriarchy movement, Cait West was homeschooled and could only wear clothes her father deemed modest. She was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing, to go change. There would be no college in her future, no career. She was a stay-at-home daughter and would move out only when her father allowed her to become a wife. She was trained to serve men, and her life would never be her own.
Until she escaped.
In Rift, Cait West tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.
Rift is a story of survival. It’s also a story about what happens after you survive. With compassion and clarity, Cait explores the complex legacy of patriarchal religious trauma in her life, including the ways she has also been complicit in systems of oppression. A remarkable literary debut, Rift offers an essential personal perspective on the fraught legacy of purity culture and recent reckonings with abuse in Christian communities.
“Cait West’s rift is all of our rifts as we break away from the old and find hope and healing in the new. This is a story we must all come to understand, as West did: ‘In the rifting of my life, I learned who I really am.’”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A powerful meditation on what it means to be trapped and what it means to break free.”
“In this beautifully crafted memoir, Cait West offers readers an intimate glimpse into growing up and coming of age in a world defined by Christian patriarchy. Written with unusual sensitivity and unflinching honesty, hers is a story of aching loss and gritty resilience, of brokenness, beauty, and hope.”
—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times–bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne
“Cait West writes a remarkable coming-of-age memoir that offers an inside view of the Christian patriarchy movement—a world that few know about, but in which many girls and women increasingly find themselves trapped. Amazingly, West manages to hang onto her own soul, stand up to her father, and leave the misogyny behind. Riveting and compelling. I can’t wait to see what West will accomplish next.”
—Kate Carroll de Gutes, award-winning author of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
“Beautiful, tragic, hopeful, and real. Rift is a heartbreaking story told with breathtaking words. Cait West gives you a glimpse into her life and reveals how manipulative control can masquerade as Christian love. As I read, I shed tears with her and cheered for her. And when I reached the end, I felt freer having journeyed alongside her.”
—Jenai Auman, author of Othered
“Rift is a gorgeously written, intimate portrait of a girl raised in Christian patriarchy. This close, inside view shows the reader what it is like to be stuck under male authority and feel oneself vanishing away. The inability to choose one’s own path in education, romance, and faith, even as an adult woman, leaves a wrenching void. Rift becomes a story of overcoming. Here you’ll meet a woman finding herself and the hard, brave steps it takes to break free, to heal a broken space inside.”
—Sarah Stankorb, bestselling author of Disobedient Women
“In Rift, Cait West has given us a rare gift: a chance to see behind the curtain of the Christian patriarchy movement’s smiling faces and witness the personal devastation the movement has wrought in the lives of so many young people, especially girls. This is a harrowing yet deeply necessary book about a family’s descent into radicalization—and West is a skilled narrator and courageous guide.”
—Ryan Stollar, author of The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology
“Wow, this book is beautiful. Rift is captivating and compelling, and though her story takes center stage, West’s writing—so graceful and elegant—is what truly shines in this book. In my work as a writer, editor, and professor, I read dozens of books in a year. This story, along with the craft behind it, is one of the best I’ve read in recent memory. I have no doubt that West’s work is sure to make waves.”
—Kelly Sundberg, author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl
Cait West is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse.