In the End: A Memoir about Faith and a Novel about Doubt

by Karie Luidens

Overview

Part memoir, part novel, In the End offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of God as seen through the eyes of a child.

Christianity was the author's birthright: she is the daughter of a pastor, granddaughter of missionaries, and so on for generations. In her earliest memories, God feels like a member of the family, bearing a promise of eternal life in heaven.

But as she ventures beyond the parsonage, the world complicates those simple beliefs. The God of her understanding evolves from father figure to invisible friend to painfully unrequited love-and when she attempts to fortify her faith through study, doubts only multiply.

The greatest doubt of all eventually consumes her young mind: one day we will die, and what then?

In an ambitious quest to understand both her own childhood and the nature of all existence, Karie Luidens employs a mind-bending blend of genres, with evocative prose slipping from fact to fiction in pursuit of truth. Her story wends from village life to the streets of Paris, reviving long-dead philosophers for urgent conversations along the way. Themes of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and naive white saviorism ripple beneath the surface throughout.

In the End combines the intellectual rigor of the philosophical novel Sophie's World with the poignancy of the fictionalized memoir Blankets. Ultimately, by interrogating her Christian heritage and confronting the specter of mortality, Luidens realizes a vision that is entirely her own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781963077018
Publisher:	Left Field Publishers
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2024

Contemplative and penetrating, Luidens’s debut examines her lifelong relationship with the concept of God, from her childhood as a minister’s daughter to an adult studying abroad in France. She begins with a lyrically beautiful retelling of her childhood, christened by her family’s deep belief in a God who celebrates with them, watches over them, and engages in long, intimate conversations that probe Luidens’s youthful musings. But as she grows, Luidens’s understanding of God transforms; when her reflections on what happens after death lead her to difficult questions, she discovers, in the absence of answers, a growing unease with the religion she grew up with.

Luidens writes with a philosophical hand, gently—but passionately—rifling through the religious precepts she was taught as a youth and sifting their weight against the reality she observes in the world around her. Her time spent attending a Christian college is recounted with fresh and frank power, revealing indecision, mistrust, and, above all, desperate yearning to hear God speak directly to her as he did when she was a child. When that fails—“I couldn’t hear his voice or sense his love. I couldn’t feel God. I used to, didn’t I? Not anymore” she laments—Luidens is plagued with a black, questioning cloud that eats at everything she’s ever known, eventually leading her to ruminate about her own death.

The last section of the memoir rebounds with hope, as Luidens travels to France to study abroad. Her time there is spent lapping up the local culture while holding conversations with long gone philosophers (David Hume characterizes her belief in God as a consequence of what she was taught growing up), wading through her anger, disappointment, and, in many ways, heartbreak at being failed by organized religion. The memoir closes, fittingly, on an intangible note, mirroring Luidens’s ongoing struggle to reconcile her newfound awakenings with those “past versions of myself.”

Takeaway: Contemplative reflections on religion, philosophy, and mortality.

Comparable Titles: Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church, Rachel Held Evans’s Wholehearted Faith.

Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: B+ Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

2024-07-17
A writer and artist explores her coming-of-age crisis of faith through a blend of memoir and fiction.

Luidens’ book begins with “Fact,” a section detailing her rather charming childhood in Altamont, New York. As the second of three children, she grew up adoring her father, who worked as the minister of the Reformed Church next door. Early on, she soothed her worries through imagined, nighttime conversations with God, but as she got older, playground questions about hell caused her to question the Bible’s authenticity. In the book’s second section, “Fiction,” Luidens recounts her freshman year at a Christian college, where her intellectual curiosity about biblical origins got her accused of “heresy” and set her on a path to abandoning her faith altogether: “No more mysterious, iridescent Trinity blowing like long curtains through my theology,” she writes. The third section, “Truth,” follows Luidens into a more pronounced existential crisis during her art-focused study abroad in France. As she wandered Paris, she imagined conversations with the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, John Locke, and David Hume, at last finding herself considering a life without God. Luidens’ prose describing her early years is ethereal and affecting—especially the moving descriptions of her father’s love, juxtaposed against her burgeoning skills for sharp analysis and introspection. She skillfully transforms her dreamy prayer-time conversations with God into the hard, academic debates that later occupied her adult mind. Luidens is also graceful in her portrayal of her frustration with traditionalist views without ever mocking her Christian peers. Exchanges comparing the Bible’s account of the great flood to historical fact are humorous but never mean-spirited. The author’s notes on the differences between the book’s sections and how to interpret them as either fact or fiction feel superfluous and unnecessary, though; what Luidens has put to the page will clearly come across to readers as herowntruth—no disclaimer necessary.

An intriguing religious perspective, told through skillful prose and smartly crafted arguments.

Kirkus Reviews