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

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Where our experiences diverge though is the author's experience of other Witnesses. There are most definitely those that live a dual life, with their 'meeting face' & what they are like away from the public ministry, & there were cliques, but I also met some genuinely lovely people. We certainly never covered the windows of the Kingdom Hall so we weren't distracted by the outside - that's extremely odd behaviour & I think it says more about that particular congregation than the JWs as a whole. Millar was just nine months old when her mother (a former teacher) became one of the church’s 8.7 million members. She had been abandoned by the father of her five-year-old daughter, Zoe, and then by Ali’s dad (who turned out to have a wife and child elsewhere). The seductive lies of unreliable men had left her flailing and the church promised support, forgiveness and routine. The rug would never be pulled out from under her again because the business of the church was preparing believers for God’s ultimate, imminent rug pull. Jehovah’s Witnesses “don’t believe in heavenly hope”, explains Millar. Instead they believe that “Jehovah has anointed 144,000 humans to serve at His side for all eternity. Every­one who survives His ­coming judgment will live forever on earth.”

They are wrong about that. Because by now Millar has found within herself some talent they can’t take away. Something she can use to explain why she has broken away from the faith that sustained her mother through her own hard adult life bringing up two daughters on supplementary benefit, even though the cost of doing so is being disfellowshipped – ignored, cut off, shunned – by her mother as well as by all other Witnesses. She can come through the looking glass of organised religion and write a memoir as good, and as consistently gripping, as this. Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and leaving the community when I was 14, I have struggled to find memoirs, if any, that portray the inside of the community as it really is. Most people view Witnesses as quiet but strange with their stances on refusing blood transfusions and not celebrating birthdays and Christmas, but not many people understand the abuse and trauma you can go through when you are a member as well as when you leave. Robyn Drury, commissioning editor at Ebury Press, acquired world all languages rights from Matthew Marland at RCW. I remember being a young girl at middle school and there being a family of girls who could never join in assembly when we sang hymns and could never join in making cards at Easter or Christmas. We knew they were Jehovah Witnesses but we didn’t have a clue what that meant. Later I learnt they couldn’t have blood if they were in hospital and needed it. But how could we understand, we were 10 years old. Ali is also deeply self-sabotaging. As a teen, she begins counting calories and restricts her eating as a means to exert some control over her own life - leading to anorexia. She drinks to excess, often finding it leads to oblivion or questionable behaviour, but regardless, she quaffs the alcohol down. Finally, although she scoffs at almost everything related to the religion, she takes the step of baptism into the faith which seems completely illogical.

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I could have carried on reading it for days and am a little cross that it was so good I raced through 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.

Their whole belief system is strange, the way the elders have eyes like Big Brother, and how every other Witness is like an East German spy, ready to throw each other under the bus at the first sign of public sin. The kind of “loving” way they cut people off and then claim victimhood is truly something difficult to explain to outsiders. 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.’ Some people like religion, and an awful lot of ex members of whatever religion, stay religious, they just find a new one. Both my parents were convinced and lifelong Christian Scientists, another (let’s be kind) esoteric American religion. They didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, hospitals: all you had to do if you fell ill was to ‘know the truth’ – that because you were created in the image and likeness of God, and because God is perfect, you couldn’t possibly have cancer, a dodgy heart or whatever ailed you at the time. Every Wednesday evening, they held ‘testimony meetings’ which mainly consisted of members of the congregation standing up and recounting how they’d done just that.

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A nearly impossible new start … Vanessa Redgrave in the National Theatre adaptation of The Year Of Magical Thinking. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian 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.’ A true tale with names changed of girl Ali now a Lady who grew up with a Mum a sister and the JW's, I'm guessing not many of them will read this but we'll I will let you make your mind up. There is a truth with an honesty rarely seen in these sort of accounts our Heroine Ali makes no secret of her faults or are they her human nature. When searching for something you look everywhere if your honest and this feels very honest. I'm a Christian not a JW I hate religion and the way it destroyed lives. To love is divin

Millar is also talented as respecting individuals. With few exceptions, she insists on understanding where other people are coming from. Yes it is patriarchal, yes it is controlling. but not quite to ex-members and their families as she says. 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? 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.

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This is a very important story to tell and I commend Ali Millar on doing so and hopefully giving courage to others who are still enmeshed in the Jehovah’s Witness network who would like to escape. 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.