Where – and what – is home? That’s the question raised by this sensitive and gripping memoir of a Canadian woman on the run.
Emily Wierenga left home at 18, heading across the country with no intention of returning. She had survived a bout of anorexia during her teens, fighting for control and to be seen. Following this, she couldn’t wait to find her true self and her freedom.
Wierenga spent her early childhood in Nigeria and Congo, returned to Canada and then lived in Korea and the Middle East before finally coming home for good.
Home was not only geographical but spiritual, for in her journey she realised that the tight-fitting gospel she had grown up with was not actually the gospel of grace and truth.
But when she settled into Bible college, she realised she couldn’t leave herself behind. She had been right there all along, warts and all. What, or who, she needed to find, was God. Her journey of faith intensified during her 20s, when she was forced to put aside her own desires to care for her ailing mother in Canada.
This memoir brings depth, insight, suspense, good pacing and humour to the subjects of love and marriage, sacrifice, parenting, eating and control, and on receiving God’s love. The author certainly grows up in her faith, but she doesn’t reject or malign it.
With many people searching for truth in an age of story, the memoir genre is increasingly filling a gaping hole. (Amy Boucher Pye)
