The Last Days: A memoir of faith, desire and freedom

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I’d recommend this book to many to assist and support them in the healing process of leaving JW organisation if that is what they have decided to do. May Ali’s experiences resonate with others and assist in setting them free from a very unloving organisation. Written with such powerful emotion, you can feel the fear and bewildering thoughts of the young Ali. How it was drummed into her, how she felt helpless like her life was chosen for her, without having a chance of how she may have wanted her life direction to go. I found this memoir very brave for the author to write. For me personally reading this it gave me an insight into the life of a member of the Jehovah Witness Kingdom. Both my parents were convinced and lifelong Christian Scientists, another (let’s be kind) esoteric American religion. They didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, hospitals: all you had to do if you fell ill was to ‘know the truth’ – that because you were created in the image and likeness of God, and because God is perfect, you couldn’t possibly have cancer, a dodgy heart or whatever ailed you at the time. Every Wednesday evening, they held ‘testimony meetings’ which mainly consisted of members of the congregation standing up and recounting how they’d done just that. Most people know that Jehovah’s Witnesses are obliged to spend their free time handing out a magazine called the Watchtower, that they don’t celebrate Christmas and they believe the apocalypse to be imminent, even if the precise date of the second coming does have a tendency somewhat to slip and slide. From time to time, newspapers are also apt to remind us of the fact that even in a medical emergency, members are forbidden to accept a blood transfusion from doctors, a doctrine followed on the grounds that it is God’s job, and his alone, to sustain life. But all this stuff, it seems, is just the half of it. Thanks to Ali Millar and her first book, I now know there are many other arcane rules by which a Witness must live if he or she is not to be “disfellowshipped” (translation: shunned) by the elders down at the Kingdom Hall.

In this frightening, cloistered world, Ali grows older. As she does, she starts to question the ways of the Witnesses, and their control over the most intimate aspects of her life. As she marries and has a daughter within the religion, she finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into its dark undertow, her mind tormented by one question: is it possible to escape the life you are born into? I enjoyed how Millar structured her memoir. Because she took on the perspective of her younger self, I felt as if I was learning about the flaws and complications in her faith as she did. There were moments where I could see the real beauty of her childhood religious experiences while also coming to question the toxic and painful aspects of that culture. Little Ali Millar, sitting in the Kingdom Hall, listening to the Elders preach - Waiting for Armageddon. She is terrified about what she may see happen, it haunts her. She attends the Jehovah’s Witness meetings with her Mother and Sister. So much to learn, so much to get right. Ali Millar pulls you heart first through an extraordinary life, somehow making sense of an experience that should make no sense at all. A sublime talent' David Whitehouse, author of About A SonTheir whole belief system is strange, the way the elders have eyes like Big Brother, and how every other Witness is like an East German spy, ready to throw each other under the bus at the first sign of public sin. The kind of “loving” way they cut people off and then claim victimhood is truly something difficult to explain to outsiders. Yes it is patriarchal, yes it is controlling. but not quite to ex-members and their families as she says. Where our experiences diverge though is the author's experience of other Witnesses. There are most definitely those that live a dual life, with their 'meeting face' & what they are like away from the public ministry, & there were cliques, but I also met some genuinely lovely people. We certainly never covered the windows of the Kingdom Hall so we weren't distracted by the outside - that's extremely odd behaviour & I think it says more about that particular congregation than the JWs as a whole. A lyrical and powerful memoir of leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses, from an exciting new literary talent.

Additionally, as broadcast journalist she has interviewed numerous authors including Rachel Cusk, Amy Liptrot, Etgar Keret and Marina Warner. As event chair she has interviewed at Edinburgh International Book Festival, Camp Good Life and The Social. While my own religious upbringing was very different and less fire and brimstone, I identified with some of Ali’s story, especially the freedom found in music and the struggle to forge your own identity, exemplified in this powerful line: "One day I'll have a house full of books I want to read and music I want to listen to." I don’t think people who didn’t have an upbringing like ours would really quite understand how important that is.Unfortunately JW ORG has done a very good job of blinding millions with so many untruths that’s it’s hard to comprehend this is happening still today. That balance runs throughout the book. Later on, there are moments when the secular world seems about to take over: John Peel, Catcher in the Rye, the first fumblings of sex, parties with boys, Malibu and Newcastle Brown. But then, because a real, lived life is chaotic, messy and unpredictable, and rarely runs straight, those roads aren’t taken. Her student days – the time of maximum freedom for most people – lead to marriage to a would-be Witness elder and motherhood. There even are times when a future as a Watchtower-toting Stepford wife looks a distinct possibility. I remember being a young girl at middle school and there being a family of girls who could never join in assembly when we sang hymns and could never join in making cards at Easter or Christmas. We knew they were Jehovah Witnesses but we didn’t have a clue what that meant. Later I learnt they couldn’t have blood if they were in hospital and needed it. But how could we understand, we were 10 years old. As an ex-Witness I found this book about being a Jehovah’s Witness, and then leaving, incredibly moving. I sometimes think books like this can’t be fully appreciated by anyone else other than ex-Witnesses, seeing as it’s such a peculiarly cultural thing. The end of Millar’s faith comes in a truly appalling scene in which three elders (all men, naturally, as Jehovah seems to regard women as second-rate) quiz her about her premarital sex life. On a scale of one to five, she is asked, how much pleasure did she get from heavy petting and what did it consist of? Somehow the fact that this is in her own Edinburgh living room – or in the 21st century come to that – makes it seem even more grotesque. Believe me, it gets even worse. Yet still Millar wants to stay loyal to her faith and to make her marriage work. ‘[Actually,’ one of the elders says, ‘it’s up to your husband to decide what happens next. It’s not your decision to make.’

Anorexia became a form of penance. She mortified her flesh until it turned a translucent blue – she felt “angelic”. Starvation made wings of her shoulder blades. At 16, she was hospitalised, but recovered and eventually returned to the faith (marrying and attempting to serve as a submissive wife and mother), before her epiphany in that lavatory. I think Ali Millar comes very close in this memoir, identifying the emotions many of us go through at different times, the absolute inner-turmoil of conflict that only ever fades but never goes away after leaving. And there is no one really to blame except the faceless organisation itself, since Witness sincerity is actually a thing, their self-delusion another. The end felt a bit rushed. I would have liked more detail on how she left the Witnesses. The corruption of the Witnesses is touched upon but again not enough detail. A blog, by the author, is also mentioned, but never named. She is trying to protect others identities so maybe Ali Millar is a pen name.This is a lovely documentation of a woman discovering that the ideas she can grown up with could not and would not work for the life she longed to live while also contending with the loss of community and identity that would come with forging her own path. Millar's writing and rawness were a joy to read. This is a very important story to tell and I commend Ali Millar on doing so and hopefully giving courage to others who are still enmeshed in the Jehovah’s Witness network who would like to escape. No-one "shuns" me. No-one is required to. We all co-exist without any shunning, harrssment or mention of it. One of the main things I appreciate (however much I wish it wasn’t the truth) is how the denouement isn’t an easy ‘wrapped in a bow’ ending; Millar could have offered up easy platitudes, but she doesn’t turn away from the devastating loss that comes with her autonomy.