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

Product Information

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 loved many of my JW friends as most are very nice people. However, they are so caught up in this hypocritical organisation that I’m well aware I could not say anything negative about JW ORG to them. As she does, she starts to question the ways of the Witnesses, and their control over the most intimate aspects of her life. But I do what I want, and no-one interferes. I care for mum, and brother...and it's his choice. He's not as "good" as they think...but he's been too long in it for me to convince him it's rubbish even so. I don't tell on his minor transgressions though. Cult-like entrapment and myopia isn’t unique to religious faith, and indeed some of the most perilous contemporary forms of groupthink appear to come in secular forms. ‘To keep the congregation clean, we disfellowship unrepentant wrongdoers,’ Millar writes ‘taking care not to associate with them afterwards. This is an act of love.’ It is a form of punitive benevolence that is all too recognisable in our age. These echoes make The Last Days a chilling read at times, particularly when Millar touches on how the road to hell may be paved by good intentions. ‘These are the beliefs you said would save my life and neither of us knew, not then, what they would do to us.’

The Last Days will tell the story of Millar’s coming-of-age in the religious sect, exploring her journey through the faith and the complex relationships it createdwith her mother and, later, her husband and children. I found it hard, too, fully to sympathise with her inability, as an adult, to leave the sect. In her family, only her mother and sister are Witnesses – her mother, who bounces from one bad relationship to another, uses the church to salve her emotional disappointments and has a tendency to “sin” herself when the mood takes her – and Millar has friends and allies in her grandparents. She also wins a place at university in Edinburgh, in itself an escape of sorts. What is it that keeps her in the faith? What does she think is going to happen? 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.The idea of a fresh start, of a new beginning, has a beguiling appeal that has made it an enduring trope in literature. As well as a temporary escape into reading, books suggest the possibility that life outside the story might also be lived differently. All these narratives embody a utopian ideal: somewhere out there, there’s something better worth beginning again for. But utopia literally means no place. There is a warning in this; set out in search of a new beginning and you may get nowhere.

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. 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.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.

But my experiences aren’t relevant here, Ali Millars’s are and she writes them so beautifully. It is incredible how she manages to capture the spirit of whatever age she is and imbue that into those chapters so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was copying from a childhood log book. Her growing maturity matches the maturity of the storytelling until by the end it is elegiac and fully grown.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.