Rift:
A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
by Cait West
DETAILS:
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover
Length: 226 pg.
Read Date: March 23-30, 2025
What’s Rift About?
A gripping memoir about coming of age in the stay-at-home daughter movement and the quest to piece together a future on your own terms.
Raised in the Christian patriarchy movement, Cait West was homeschooled and could only wear clothes her father deemed modest. She was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing, to go change. There would be no college in her future, no career. She was a stay-at-home daughter and would move out only when her father allowed her to become a wife. She was trained to serve men, and her life would never be her own.
Until she escaped.
In Rift, Cait West tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.
Rift is a story of survival. It’s also a story about what happens after you survive. With compassion and clarity, Cait explores the complex legacy of patriarchal religious trauma in her life, including the ways she has also been complicit in systems of oppression. A remarkable literary debut, Rift offers an essential personal perspective on the fraught legacy of purity culture and recent reckonings with abuse in Christian communities.
“Lyrical Meditations on the Geology…”
I really didn’t intended on talking about this, but reading that line in the jacket copy drives me to it. Every time West started talking about the geology, in using contintental rifts as a metaphor for what was going on in her family, and so on–I rolled my eyes.
It was clear what she was doing, but there was no subtlety to it. I’m not trying to say that this kind of thing should be subtle, but it shouldn’t be so heavy-handed and artless. It just came across as pretentious.
Critiquing Patriarchy
I picked this book up because I heard an interview with West and was intrigued by her–when I heard that she had a book out detailing her story in more detail than she could in 30 minutes or so. So please understand, I have very little sympathy for those who would be considered–by themselves or others–part of the Christian patriarchy movement. But I don’t think this book is an effective critique of it.
I do think it’s a tragic case study into what this movement can do, and has done, in one family. And it is easy–maybe too easy–to critique what this father did to his children. It’s hard to see the things that were experienced by others nearby–who thought similarly, but not necessarily identically to, this man.
So, what did I think about Rift?
This is an accessible read–frequently powerful. I do wish that West had curbed her attempts at artistic flair. I also wish that she’d done a more thorough job of trying to show how her father’s beliefs and behaviors lined up with others, and were linked to specific teachings by particular individuals rather than just a vague guilt by association.
I fully believe that documentation could be made, let me stress. But for what are probably good reasons. I don’t get them–but I assume she had them. If for nothing else, it’d change this from a memoir into some other kind of thing. I guess I’d hoped for that something else–a memoir +.
But it’s Cait West’s story, hers to tell how she wants. For this reader, it wasn’t enough. But I’m probably in the minority.
It took a lot for her to put this together–to expose the pain. My problems aren’t with her or what she said. Simply the experience as a reader.
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