Redeemed: A Memoir of a Stolen Childhood

For readers of Tara Westover's Educated, Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, and Tia Levings's A Well-Trained Wife, a fierce memoir of religious trauma, immigrant survival, and the long road home.

Winner of the 2025 Independent Press Award in Memoir

She was four years old when a stranger kissed her face and called himself her father. By the time they reached California, the woman waiting at the door had already decided she didn't want Penny.

Redeemed is the true story of one woman's fifty-year fight to take back a life that was stolen before she could speak its name. Raised by a cruel stepmother and an alcoholic father who refuses to protect her, Penny learns young that survival means staying small. At sixteen she graduates and runs. At eighteen she falls in love with a man on the brink of being born again, and the controlling evangelical church that swallows her whole feels eerily familiar. For more than a decade she disappears into the oppressive role of the good Christian wife, until a baseless lie gets her excommunicated. Broke and contemplating suicide, she begins the slow, holy work of rebuilding herself--until finally, at fifty-three, she comes home through a conversion to Judaism.

An intimate portrait of the tradwife pipeline now reshaping American politics and a love letter to every woman who has been told to be quiet, be small, be good, Redeemed is the proof that the way home is forward.

"About trauma, lost love, and the determined push toward success, Redeemed is a powerful memoir." --Foreword Reviews