Awake
by Jen HatmakerSetting: Texas
Genres: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Published on September 23, 2025
Pages: 320
Format: eBook
From Jen Hatmaker—beloved New York Times bestselling author and host of the For the Love podcast—a brutally honest, funny, and revealing memoir about the traumatic end of her twenty-six-year-long marriage, and the beginning of a different kind of love story.
At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering in his phone to another woman from their bed. It was the end of life as she knew it. In the months that followed, she went from being a shiny, funny, popular leader to a divorced wreck on antidepressants and antianxiety meds, parenting five kids alone with no clue about the functioning of her own bank accounts. Having led millions of women for over a decade—urging them to embrace authenticity, find radical agency, and create healthy relationship—she felt like a catastrophic failure.
In Awake, Jen shares for the first time what happened when she found herself completely lost at sea—and how she made it to shore. In candid, surprisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife—the implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies change you didn’t ask for. And, drawing on all resources—from without and within—Jen dares to question the systems beneath the whole house of cards, and to reckon with the myths, half-truths, and lies that brought her to this point.
More than one woman’s story, Awake is a critical analysis of the story given to all of us: the story of gender limitations, religious subservience, body shame, self-erasure. With refreshing candor, Jen explores a midlife renaissance—grieving what’s lost, cherishing possibility, and entering the second half of life wide awake.
I went into this memoir with absolutely no idea who Jen Hatmaker was. I still have no idea who Jen Hatmaker is. I honestly thought that at some point the book was going to tell me. I mean, I figured she was a famous person in some circle that I don’t travel in. I could have googled her but it just seemed like a major oversight in the book. There were context clues. She mentioned having followers. She said once that she was on morning television shows and had speaking engagements. But nowhere in this book is there any explanation of how she went from pastor’s wife who was not allowed any leadership role to a person with speaking engagements. Since I don’t really care enough to research, I will remain in the dark.
If you can live with the uncertainty (or have heard of this person) this is an interesting memoir after the first part. I’m on record as absolutely loathing childhood stories in memoirs. There is a lot of that here. She flashes back every other chapter in the beginning. She is setting her up life as an evangelical Christian. I get that but I hated those chapters. I wanted to get to the point. I wanted to see the story of how she rebuilt her life after divorce. That was what was interesting to me in her story.
I had a very similar type of story but I handled it very differently.
“No one knows what to do for me, but they don’t want me to be alone. So I’m not. Not for one second.”
People don’t leave her alone for weeks. I can’t even imagine. That would have been so suffocating for me. I mean she has five kids. She wasn’t going to be alone. I can’t imagine wanting family and friends around too when you have having a crisis. I want to work things out alone. But, to each their own.
A lot of her story is realizing that her evangelical community is going to turn on her when they realize that she is getting divorced.
“For the first time ever, I am considering why so many people don’t come to church when their lives unravel.”
Yep.
“The evangelical community does what it does when it comes to dissenters:
Terrorizes and expels.”
People tracked down and harassed her children and her extended family. They demanded all the details about her life that they didn’t have any need to know. People spread lies because it made a good story. There’s a reason that “There’s no hate like Christian love” is such a popular saying.
Then she doubled down and started laying out some truths for her remaining followers.
“Imagine my surprise when I began discussing white supremacy, and tons of my Christian followers lost their shit. I mean, lost it. My comment feed was a daily nightmare. I lost a thousand followers a day. Condemning racism threw white evangelical women into a rage. It was like I’d been leading a den of lions and they turned on me once I changed their preferred diet.”
Bless her heart. She thought they cared about other people.
“White supremacy, regardless of how documented, regardless of how personally explained, regardless of how true, challenged inherent bias and the white Christian obsession with appearing virtuous. It disabused the fantasy that opportunity is earned on merit in a color-blind culture that operates in equality.”
This is a good memoir about trying to rebuild your life when everything you think you knew turned out to be wrong. She’s still hanging on to Christianity but hasn’t returned to churches yet because of the hostility her family has faced.
