Born Again (Again)
Taking another look at my 2024 memoir
I’d like to thank everyone who reached out with kind and supportive messages after last week’s post, Sideways in Switzerland. On Tuesday, I spent eight hours at Niguarda Hospital, where I underwent lithotripsy. (The procedure itself lasted less than an hour; the other seven were the waiting before and after.) While the ESWL was uneventful, it was not entirely successful, so I’ll be returning in early June for another round. -Michael
We live in interesting times. That is an exceedingly succinct and polite way of expressing my overall thoughts about the last three months of life as an American and a human. I know I’m not alone when I say I’ve often felt over the last 89 days that I was drowning, disoriented, and in danger of succumbing in despair to the deluge of each day’s nightmarish news.1
I’ll have more to say about that another time. I mention it now simply because I was thinking recently about the book I published in 2024, entitled Born Again, which was a mini-memoir about my fundamentalist religious upbringing.
I was specifically thinking about the very last page of the book, where I wrote:
“The state of the American evangelical church today is in many ways substantially more toxic than the environment I grew up in. Kids in today’s church are growing up in a cult that is deeply and inextricably intertwined with Donald Trump and an increasingly radicalized, authoritarian, paranoid, and conspiratorial Republican party. A decade or two from now, there will almost certainly be millions of young American adults who suffered far more severe damage in the church than I and my peers did.”
When I wrote that in 2023, I simply couldn’t have imagined the enormity of the mess in which we now find ourselves.
Early last year, I ran a series of excerpts from Born Again. (Links to all eight are at the end of this post.) As I was looking back at them recently, it occurred to me that the number of subscribers to this publication has doubled in the last year. And then I got a notice from the printer that the book is on sale for the next week! So I’ve decided to spotlight it again, for the new readers who’ve not yet heard about it, and also for those who always meant to read it but never got around to ordering a copy.
I’ll go into a bit more detail about the book below, but if you’d like to read the full thing, you can purchase it directly from Blurb by clicking the blue button below.
Or—for a limited time—I am offering a free PDF copy to all new Annual subscribers to this newsletter! This is a $9.99 value. (I will reach out to you directly after you subscribe with details of how to easily download the book.)
(Through Thursday, April 24, you’ll get 20% off if you use the code BOOKCLUB20 at checkout.)
Born Again was conceived and birthed as the final thesis project for my master’s program here in Milan. The book is an unflinching—and occasionally mortifying—look back at things I’d never really talked about, in ways I’d never really talked about them. It’s sad, and funny, and awkward, and bizarre.
I examine how I was impacted on a mental, emotional, and physical level by my fundamentalist religious upbringing. I look at how I’d been haunted all my life by fear, shame, and guilt, and I attempt to make peace with messy memories and traumatic teachings from my childhood and show compassion to my younger self. But crucially, I also underscore my desire to finally leave those parts of my life behind and experience a new start.
I pair my writing with photographs from my childhood, as well as Bible verses and old journal entries, to reflect on and help make sense of who I was. Also included are photographs of an art-as-therapy nude modeling performance, in which I relived (for the camera of photographer Sohan Sam) the condemnation of my past, then pivoted to wash myself clean and begin anew.2
After I finished school, part of me couldn’t imagine publishing the work more widely, because it’s so intimate, but the other part of me couldn’t imagine not publishing it more widely, because it was so significant to me as a person and a writer.
As I wrote on the About page of my Substack:
“I have seen myself in other people’s stories. And because I’ve chosen to share my own stories, others can now see themselves in mine. This is the beauty and wonder of writing; it is a reminder that we are not alone, that there is a magic and mystery to be found in the midst of this beautiful mess we call life.”
And that’s certainly my hope with Born Again. I’ve received many very heartening messages about it, some of which I’ve saved so I can re-read them when I need some encouragement. They really have meant so much to me.
Here is some of the feedback that I've gotten:
This work is incredibly brave and vulnerable and illuminating.
I absolutely love your writing. You have a way of welcoming and disarming the reader and painting pictures that are alive and accessible.
It’s so carefully crafted and powerful.
It's an intense process just to read—I cannot imagine the work it took to get through the creation of it.
[It] gives me hope. Your breakthroughs are not only for you, but also a gift to those who come after you.
You can read the eight excerpts I published last year here:
The pigeons photo above was taken in Setúbal, Portugal, in 2021.
I realize it feels small in the grand scheme of things, but the last two days have brought some hopeful developments, which Robert B. Hubbell has very helpfully detailed in his posts The Center Begins to Hold and Another Good Day in the Defense of Democracy. I think you’ll find them worth your time.
Born Again is intended for mature readers who are at least 18 years old.