If anyone can understand where the author is coming from, it's me - I also grew up as a JW, finally leaving in my late teens. A lot of the things detailed are absolutely true; JWs do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas, you are encouraged to keep away from 'worldly people', women are definitely considered second class but it's wrapped up in the language of being a "complement" to man, & having a career/going to university is a no-no.. From my early teens I chafed against the expectations & I had questions about the teachings I was not allowed to ask, & upon leaving I felt exactly like Nicole Kidman looks in that photograph of her shortly after divorcing Tom Cruise - freedom. Ali Millar pulls you heart first through an extraordinary life, somehow making sense of an experience that should make no sense at all. A sublime talent' David Whitehouse, author of About A Son Millar emerges, both true to her younger self, and transformed. You feel the weight, pain and melancholy when she writes to her mother: ‘ My seditious little heart; I knew then, didn’t I, that one day you’d want to burn my book too.’ The Last Days is proof that those who wish can burn all the books in existence but can never destroy the thoughts behind them and the independence of their ideas. They can deny but not erase what is real. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ it is written in John 8:32 ‘and the truth shall make you free’. I think Ali Millar comes very close in this memoir, identifying the emotions many of us go through at different times, the absolute inner-turmoil of conflict that only ever fades but never goes away after leaving. And there is no one really to blame except the faceless organisation itself, since Witness sincerity is actually a thing, their self-delusion another. I could have carried on reading it for days and am a little cross that it was so good I raced through it!

Published tomorrow by Ebury, July Book of the Month is Ali Millar’s ‘The Last Days’, a memoir about growing up in, and then escaping, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is a dam-burst of a book, writes Darran Anderson, which marks the emergence of a major writer. I couldn’t stop listening to Ali’s beautiful voice and her experiences of being exposed to JW Organisation from childhood to a young adult. So easy to listen to her story for a straight 8 or so hours. Cult-like entrapment and myopia isn’t unique to religious faith, and indeed some of the most perilous contemporary forms of groupthink appear to come in secular forms. ‘To keep the congregation clean, we disfellowship unrepentant wrongdoers,’ Millar writes ‘taking care not to associate with them afterwards. This is an act of love.’ It is a form of punitive benevolence that is all too recognisable in our age. These echoes make The Last Days a chilling read at times, particularly when Millar touches on how the road to hell may be paved by good intentions. ‘These are the beliefs you said would save my life and neither of us knew, not then, what they would do to us.’ They are wrong about that. Because by now Millar has found within herself some talent they can’t take away. Something she can use to explain why she has broken away from the faith that sustained her mother through her own hard adult life bringing up two daughters on supplementary benefit, even though the cost of doing so is being disfellowshipped – ignored, cut off, shunned – by her mother as well as by all other Witnesses. She can come through the looking glass of organised religion and write a memoir as good, and as consistently gripping, as this.While my own religious upbringing was very different and less fire and brimstone, I identified with some of Ali’s story, especially the freedom found in music and the struggle to forge your own identity, exemplified in this powerful line: "One day I'll have a house full of books I want to read and music I want to listen to." I don’t think people who didn’t have an upbringing like ours would really quite understand how important that is. Both my parents were convinced and lifelong Christian Scientists, another (let’s be kind) esoteric American religion. They didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, hospitals: all you had to do if you fell ill was to ‘know the truth’ – that because you were created in the image and likeness of God, and because God is perfect, you couldn’t possibly have cancer, a dodgy heart or whatever ailed you at the time. Every Wednesday evening, they held ‘testimony meetings’ which mainly consisted of members of the congregation standing up and recounting how they’d done just that.

Ali is also deeply self-sabotaging. As a teen, she begins counting calories and restricts her eating as a means to exert some control over her own life - leading to anorexia. She drinks to excess, often finding it leads to oblivion or questionable behaviour, but regardless, she quaffs the alcohol down. Finally, although she scoffs at almost everything related to the religion, she takes the step of baptism into the faith which seems completely illogical.The end of Millar’s faith comes in a truly appalling scene in which three elders (all men, naturally, as Jehovah seems to regard women as second-rate) quiz her about her premarital sex life. On a scale of one to five, she is asked, how much pleasure did she get from heavy petting and what did it consist of? Somehow the fact that this is in her own Edinburgh living room – or in the 21st century come to that – makes it seem even more grotesque. Believe me, it gets even worse. Yet still Millar wants to stay loyal to her faith and to make her marriage work. ‘[Actually,’ one of the elders says, ‘it’s up to your husband to decide what happens next. It’s not your decision to make.’ I loved many of my JW friends as most are very nice people. However, they are so caught up in this hypocritical organisation that I’m well aware I could not say anything negative about JW ORG to them.

I knew very little about the Jehovah's Witness before I read this memoir. Ali Millar lays bare the the details of the the sect in a brave and profoundly moving way. She was born into the program as her mother had become a Witness before she was born, he mother uses it as a crutch and life is totally subsumed by the teachings. There is a great deal of hard-won, valuable wisdom here for the more heathen among us. The particularity of Millar’s experience is important, as is the particularity of any book or life is, but The Last Days is by no means exclusive to the Jehovah Witnesses, Christianity, or even religions generally. Instead, it is a warning against departing from objective material reality into any form of ideology or orthodoxy. Little Ali Millar, sitting in the Kingdom Hall, listening to the Elders preach - Waiting for Armageddon. She is terrified about what she may see happen, it haunts her. She attends the Jehovah’s Witness meetings with her Mother and Sister. So much to learn, so much to get right. When she finally breaks away it is heartbreaking as she is forced to make the most unbearable of choices.

Retailers:

I am not harassed to participate, visitors talk to me, no talks to me about religious matters at all. But my experiences aren’t relevant here, Ali Millars’s are and she writes them so beautifully. It is incredible how she manages to capture the spirit of whatever age she is and imbue that into those chapters so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was copying from a childhood log book. Her growing maturity matches the maturity of the storytelling until by the end it is elegiac and fully grown.