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

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One of the main things I appreciate (however much I wish it wasn’t the truth) is how the denouement isn’t an easy ‘wrapped in a bow’ ending; Millar could have offered up easy platitudes, but she doesn’t turn away from the devastating loss that comes with her autonomy. Most people know that Jehovah’s Witnesses are obliged to spend their free time handing out a magazine called the Watchtower, that they don’t celebrate Christmas and they believe the apocalypse to be imminent, even if the precise date of the second coming does have a tendency somewhat to slip and slide. From time to time, newspapers are also apt to remind us of the fact that even in a medical emergency, members are forbidden to accept a blood transfusion from doctors, a doctrine followed on the grounds that it is God’s job, and his alone, to sustain life. But all this stuff, it seems, is just the half of it. Thanks to Ali Millar and her first book, I now know there are many other arcane rules by which a Witness must live if he or she is not to be “disfellowshipped” (translation: shunned) by the elders down at the Kingdom Hall. Robyn Drury, commissioning editor at Ebury Press, acquired world all languages rights from Matthew Marland at RCW.

I couldn’t stop listening to Ali’s beautiful voice and her experiences of being exposed to JW Organisation from childhood to a young adult. So easy to listen to her story for a straight 8 or so hours. Yet when I read Millar’s memoir, I soon realised that the small similarities with my own childhood were drowned out by the howling differences. By the time I put it down, I was positively raging on her behalf at the way she was treated by the elders of her congregation, interrogated in her home about her sex life as if by seventeenth century witch hunters. Just as damnably, their religion has cut her off, perhaps forever, from her mother’s love – to which her book is a kind of memorial. There is a great deal of hard-won, valuable wisdom here for the more heathen among us. The particularity of Millar’s experience is important, as is the particularity of any book or life is, but The Last Days is by no means exclusive to the Jehovah Witnesses, Christianity, or even religions generally. Instead, it is a warning against departing from objective material reality into any form of ideology or orthodoxy. When she finally breaks away it is heartbreaking as she is forced to make the most unbearable of choices.

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Ali Millar pulls you heart first through an extraordinary life, somehow making sense of an experience that should make no sense at all. A sublime talent' David Whitehouse, author of About A Son

No-one "shuns" me. No-one is required to. We all co-exist without any shunning, harrssment or mention of it. And this is the problem for me. The narrative is told in the journaling style, with each period told in a voice authentic to our heroine's age at the time. This is an interesting choice, and works well as a device to show the change in our heroine from her childhood, through adolescence to adulthood, however (and it's a pretty big however), I found it quite hard to read such blinkered judgement and bigotry from a written-down six-year-old. Yes, she grows and changes, and her life is ripped apart when she chooses to live her own way, but I felt haunted by the careless cruelty that had been spoon-fed to the child. The end of Millar’s faith comes in a truly appalling scene in which three elders (all men, naturally, as Jehovah seems to regard women as second-rate) quiz her about her premarital sex life. On a scale of one to five, she is asked, how much pleasure did she get from heavy petting and what did it consist of? Somehow the fact that this is in her own Edinburgh living room – or in the 21st century come to that – makes it seem even more grotesque. Believe me, it gets even worse. Yet still Millar wants to stay loyal to her faith and to make her marriage work. ‘[Actually,’ one of the elders says, ‘it’s up to your husband to decide what happens next. It’s not your decision to make.’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. Ebury Press will publish Ali Millar's debut memoir The Last Days, which will recount the author’s experience growing up as part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.