Heretic is her first book.In a memoir of discovery and unlearning, a Midwest girl finds religious freedom on the East Coast. A born and bred Midwesterner, she now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, NYLON, O the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Catapult, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and more. Jeanna Kadlec is a writer, astrologer, former lingerie boutique owner, and recovering academic. And that’s also flawed, this idea that my own choices themselves were not valid, that I had to have a man vouch for me. So no one can critique that because they’d have to take it up with him. No one can talk shit to me at all because my husband has given me quote unquote permission, which is itself such a complicated and fraught idea, to be working and in grad school and in this PhD program. I had what turned out to be the false belief that I’m safe now that I’m married. So yeah, the only period when I’m still in the faith where I feel any relief whatsoever from that monitoring and those expectations is when I’m initially married. You need the permission of or monitoring of a man: a father, a husband, whoever. But that really is baked in this foundational Evangelical understanding that women are not to be trusted because women’s bodies are foundationally evil and inherently suspect. We’re seeing an explosion of that on social media in the wake of the midterm elections, with single women being blamed by Republican politicians and commentators on Twitter (for however long Twitter lasts) for their poor showing. Certainly that was the case in a lot of churches I went to.
But in Evangelical churches, there is such a heightened level of behavioral monitoring. To a certain extent I think behavioral monitoring is common in all groups, whether you’re in a high school clique where you’re having to conform.
On the false beliefs behavioral monitoring culturally presents: Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. This week on The Maris Review, Jeanna Kadlec joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her memoir, Heretic, out now from Harper.
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