Awake

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 awoke to her husband of twenty-six years, Brandon, carrying on a whispered phone conversation with 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 anti-anxiety medication, parenting five kids alone with no clue about her own bank accounts. Having led millions of women for over a decade—urging them to embrace authenticity, find radical agency, and create healthy relationships—this seemed nothing less than total failure.

In Awake, Hatmaker shares what happened when she found herself lost at sea—and how she made it to shore. In candid, surprisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, she lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife—the implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies unasked-for change. Drawing on all her resources, from without and from within, Hatmaker 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.