Awake

by Jen Hatmaker ★★★☆☆

I had never heard of Jen Hatmaker prior to her memoir popping up in the #7 slot on Amazon's Best Books of 2025. Given the high ranking, I figured I'd give it a try, hoping maybe it would be an incredible memoir from a person I'd never heard of, à la Group by Christie Tate in 2020. Unfortunately, it was not.

For the uninitiated, Jen Hatmaker is a published author of several books, a blogger, a podcaster, and ten years ago was on a reality television show with her family (HGTV's Your Big Family Renovation). In the early days of her public life, her content focused on faith and parenting, but her public profile has evolved significantly over the last decade due to shifts in her theology and personal life. Awake is billed as the deep dive into the dissolution of her marriage in 2020.

And it is...mostly. Hatmaker traces the searing pain associated with her discovering her husband's infidelity in the summer of 2020, and her path to coping with the dissolution of her marriage (and much of her life as she knew it) as a result. The chronicle is far from linear, however. Hatmaker bounces back to her childhood, to random moments from her adult life, and intersperses chapters with little intermezzos, extolling the virtues of a poem she likes or a statement of fierceness she wants to get out. It reads more like a series of slightly connected blog entries than a consistent memoir.

Let's be clear: I am not the target audience here. While Hatmaker's followers aren't entirely female, I'd be willing to wager the vast majority are, and I suspect most are moms. This is a book for scorned middle-age white women who want to empathize with Hatmaker and then rage against the patriarchy and the church and the injustice of life as they know it, and then follow that rage with declarations of empowerment and self-love. "It's a complex endeavor to examine the various systems that encouraged teenagers to get married, defer to men, distrust their bodies, and diminish their own gifts," Hatmaker writes. "What kind of ground allows for such shallow roots? Some combination of patriarchy plus religion, gender roles plus groupthink, power plus the threat of exclusion became the soil in which my marriage ultimately died."

Hatmaker is a good writer, relaying her thoughts in a direct and conversational way. "I just write like I talk, and write how I learn, and write about serious things in a funny way because I don't know you can't do that." It's relatable and charming at times; however, her mini freak outs and bouts of panic, dialed up for comedic effect or not, can be exhausting. When she accepts her first date in almost 30 years, the train swiftly derails. "I then proceed to absolutely panic. I google: What are men right now. How are the men. Who is out there. How do you date a man. What do men in their 40s do. What are dates now. What are dating rules. What are you supposed to wear. What do they wear. Do I pay. Who pays. Are there code words."

Those sort of hair-on-fire moments are blended with some moments of profundity. "Regret doesn't make sense to me. What if I had chosen differently? What did I forfeit? Who would I be? What if I didn't marry him at nineteen? This line of thinking is a nonstarter, because everything I love most on earth is because I did. Imagining a different life would be at the expense of the one I cherish." I wanted to like the book more because of those moments, but it lost me when it veered off course, either to rail against the church or the patriarchy or to quote what felt like full chapters of Codependent No More, to the point that that book's author Melody Beattie should probably receive co-authorship credit on Awake.

Had Hatmaker been able to find more consistency in her timeline and subject choices, and had she been able to use that to craft more of a narrative arc of her redemption from the soul-crushing betrayal of her husband's infidelity, I think she could have harnessed her natural talents into something really special. Instead, we're left with a series of abrupt jump-cuts between timelines, life experiences, and "things Jen likes" that don't really fit together, and the profound moments get muddled among the misses. This felt too much like a bunch of blog entries cobbled together, and unfortunately not all of those entries were equally effective. It never fully landed for me.