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As a queer ex-Catholic from New England now living in the Midwest, reading Jeanna Kadlec’s memoir, Heretic, felt like staring at a reversed image. She’s a lesbian ex-Evangelical Christian that moved from the Midwest to Boston, and her debut explores the ways Evangelicalism–especially white American Evangelicalism–shaped her early life, sense of self, and ultimately painful escape. Honest and empowering, Heretic feels particularly timely when it explores bodily autonomy and patriarchal heteronormativity; I was in the middle of the memoir when Roe V. Wade was overturned. I wanted to shake it at the sky like, “Yes, see? This is how it happened.” This is how it happened, and maybe, this is how we take care of each other. Reach for healing.
Although Kadlec integrates cultural touchpoints and acknowledges the historical and current events that shaped her experience in the church and eventually outside of it, this story is ultimately, wholly her own. I caught up with her on Zoom to discuss the potential bubble of a deeply religious upbringing, new holiness, and her writing process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jen St. Jude
In Heretic, you do a fantastic job of balancing your story with the larger contexts of both political and pop culture. For example, you write about the impossible tightrope pop singers had to walk between purity culture and being sexualized. And those were our role models, our idols in the ‘90s and 2000s, so of course it shaped us. How did you decide where your story intersected with the greater picture and what to include?
Jeanna Kadlec
Even from my earliest drafting, I was bringing in other pieces. I looked back on my journals, old playlists. I considered what music I was listening to. I looked at what I was reading, at what was going on in the world. I don’t know how to write about myself without also writing about what I was digesting and also what I was being influenced by in the world around me. But even in those early drafts I was writing six or seven years ago, I wasn’t making the connections as legible as they needed to be. The first time that we tried to sell the book, we tried to sell it as a straight memoir, and the editors were very confused by how often I was integrating stories about all of these pop singers who were dealing with purity culture, or talking about performance art in the 1970s, or talking about politicians dealing with abstinence-only education. I wanted to explain how this song by Lil Nas X really helped me, and they were like, “What is this doing here?” So it was a process to get to a version of the book that had a clear enough structure and thesis.
As an ex-academic, I also struggle with wanting to have as much supporting evidence as possible. At a certain point, my editor—the wonderful Jenny Xu—was just like, you only get to use so many external pieces of art in a chapter. We really have to focus. This is your personal narrative, it’s the grounding narrative, and so we need to remember that your story is enough to prove things to readers.
Jen St. Jude
I’m always blown away by agents and editors and their vision for things. They just see things so much more clearly than I do.
Jeanna Kadlec
Exactly. I had to trust her, and I did. The book is better for it. It was a journey for me to see my personal narrative as sufficient. It was very much a journey to understand that my story was just as important, which is a strange thing when you consider that it was my memoir, but that a reader would take those things as equal weight or put more weight on my story was a slow realization that I had over time. Again, because of the ex-academic in me, I thought readers would take history more seriously, and I had to show them that the history matters in order for me to matter. And my editor was very much key in helping me realize that that wasn’t true.
Jen St. Jude
While you were growing up, and even into your 20s and your marriage, you felt like you were in the prison of Christianity. In the memoir, you outline the external and internal things that helped you move beyond it and find a different life for yourself. But for those who haven’t read the book, what qualities in you or your life helped you move onto a different path?
Jeanna Kadlec
I think that’s a really interesting question because on the one hand, there isn’t a short answer, right? And that’s why I had to write the book. Why didn’t I know I was in that prison? Why didn’t I know I was gay earlier? How can I be someone who has been told that she’s this smart all her life—and I mean, I was in a Ph.D. program at the time—how did I not know these things about myself? I wrote the book to really understand how faith works, how language works, how culture works, and how all of that works to keep people in certain bubbles and works to ingrain things in us at early ages.
In terms of qualities that I have that may have helped me to bust out, I’m curious both intellectually and creatively. I’ve always been willing to try new things and leave my comfort zone. An early example of that is how I left the cult church that my family was still attending because I didn’t agree with what they were saying at great personal consequence to myself. I’m someone who just has a really hard time talking myself into staying when I know there are better options out there.
Jen St. Jude
I think I’m similar. I might not know right away, but once I know, there’s no turning back. It’s like, “We’re doing this now!”
Jeanna Kadlec
Yeah, and I think that’s been a quality very present in people I know who left extreme religious backgrounds. Especially when their families are still involved, especially when your community is still there. I think that’s something that folks who are on the outside don’t always understand—how much loss is involved when you leave. It’s not like, oh, well, just don’t go to church anymore. That’s your family. That’s the town you live in. The consequences are so steep. It’s all-encompassing.
Jen St. Jude
I liked that part too, where your sister says, “You are always so all or nothing.” You were all the way in the church and then you were all the way out. She’s able to live in the in-between a little bit more, perhaps, because she always has, but you didn’t want to or couldn’t do that.
Jeanna Kadlec
I love my sister so much. She’s just my favorite person, and she’s always been more skeptical about church for whatever reason. She’s always made more space for exploration, which has been really beautiful to watch, but really interesting to witness just how different two people in the same circumstances can come out.
Jen St. Jude
I loved all the kind of ways you talked about queerness as feeling like a new holiness or a new church. I write about that a little too, and I always pick up on it in music and other media. Maybe it’s just because I listen to a lot of women, so I’m sure men do this too, I don’t know. But a lot of women sing about holiness and queerness in the same moment, usually people who were raised religious. I think it’s really beautiful and it always just pings for me in a big way, and it did for me in your memoir. It’s the same kind of holiness that we were taught to expect and also something so wholly different.
Jeanna Kadlec
Yeah, I love that. The concept of holiness has been one that’s been hard to reckon with post-church and it’s been one of the ones I’ve been the slowest to come back to. Words like holy and sacred and consecrated are so deeply baked in religion and in organized religion specifically. But kind of it’s been really helpful for me to reconceptualize holiness, especially as it relates to queer community and to queer love. It’s been helpful to return to its pre-Christian etymology and to go back to the concept of wholeness. Holiness is what makes you feel whole. When I think about it in that way, it could not be possibly more different from church. I find it in the moments when I’m so connected and tuned into my body.
So much of the work I have done in therapy since leaving the church and since leaving my marriage is just learning to ask myself what I’m feeling. Where does it live in my body? It’s been a lot of somatic work due to religious trauma. It was a very staggering wake-up call to be in my mid-twenties and realize that I was so fundamentally disconnected from my body and I just didn’t know, I couldn’t identify what I felt. Reintegrating myself physically, emotionally, sexually, all of those things has been a really holy experience if you want to call it that. It’s always been easy for me to exit my body, whether it’s through dissociation or just being a brain or talking to a spirit. That’s always come very easily. But the embodiment has always been much harder for me. I was raised in the religious tradition of the denial of self, and the denial of physicality. Sex is bad and your body is bad and sinful and you’re a daughter of Eve.
Jen St. Jude
There’s a part in the book where you talk about how for super religious people, you’re trained to think all your thoughts are being perceived by a higher power that’s judging each and every one. Even the subconscious, accidental, physical thoughts. That’s traumatic.
Jeanna Kadlec
Especially for those of us who take it literally. I know that not everybody did.
Jen St. Jude
I definitely did.
Jeanna Kadlec
I did too as someone who is very inclined to follow a lot of rules. Maybe there’s even still a whisper in my head that’s like, “God is watching.”
Jen St. Jude
It doesn’t ever quite leave you, unfortunately. For my final question, I always just like to ask authors: Who do you imagine as your ideal reader? I think when we’re writing, it’s so important to just pick one person and try to write to them, or at least that’s what I try to do. But do you have someone in mind?
Jeanna Kadlec
Yeah, I think it’s very cliche, but different parts of the book are written to different past versions of myself. The earlier parts are very much written with baby Jeanna in mind, and then later parts of the book are written very much towards the me that I was immediately post-divorce. I was reckoning with leaving the church, coming out, and having lost so many people in my life. I felt desperately alone. I remember looking for books about women who had left their husbands because they were gay, and there weren’t many I could find. There was that one article that Laneia wrote on Autostraddle about how to leave your husband because you’re a lesbian and thank God a friend sent it to me, because there really just wasn’t much in the media. And it wasn’t uncommon, but you didn’t hear about it. If you did it was a scandal.
I was 25 when I left my husband, and I was also newly out among people who had known they were queer forever. I was just an anomaly in a way that was really isolating. So I had baby gay me in mind. Even though there are more resources now, I’m honored to be a resource. To be one of those people who guides other people through the isolation, community, leaving. The starting over. It’s been really special and I’m really grateful to have done that for some people in my life. I hope the book can do that for others. I hope it can go beyond me.
NONFICTION
Heretic: A Memoir
by Jeanna Kadlec
Harper
Published October 25th, 2022
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