The night is thumping chaos, but my mittened hand is safe inside my mother’s and she guides me forward. Love Warrior is a gorgeous and inspiring tale of how we are born to be warriors: strong, powerful, and brave; able to confront the pain and claim the love that exists for us all. The process begins around four o’clock, when I’m steady enough to get out of bed and begin drinking again.

My dress is too tight around my waist and I'm wearing fake eyelashes, a rhinestone tiara, and heels like stilts. Bulimia was only the beginning as “the food turned into booze and sex and drugs—one hiding place after another” (188).

I want them to see the beauty and power that come from healing their relationship with themselves, which Glennon describes as becoming a “Love Warrior. But even though I’d finished the book, was overcome with emotion in response to it, and had bought copies to gift to my friends, I still didn’t have a clear answer to that question. My daughter was asking: How will I survive being this particular type of person in this particular type of world? Hundreds of us have been sent to this cafeteria with two contradictory duties: Be invulnerable while doing the most vulnerable possible things—fitting in and eating.

There are so many openly bulimic women in my sorority that there is an announcement one afternoon, “When you throw up, please flush the toilets. You go on her journey and see in everyday life and circumstances the choices she made to move into herself. Soon after my release from the mental hospital, I sit on the edge of a convertible in a pretty blue suit, waving to crowds of people lining the sidewalks for the homecoming parade. Love Warrior is a gorgeous and inspiring tale of how we are born to be warriors: strong, powerful, and brave; able to confront the pain and claim the love that exists for us all. We enlisted experts to help us talk to our kids about this and walk us through every possible outcome of making our story public.

I can imagine that there are legions of women out there who are living in similar situations, trapped in their middle class homes with their bad ass kids in a sexless marriage and reading these words from a “Christian mom blogger” (umm, her words) is comforting to them. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it. And I will continue to be that for the truth, because it is good and beautiful and holy and full of grace---grace even for sexual sin, grace even for unorthodoxy. After she gets married, sobers up and starts a family, the news of her husband’s betrayal, when it comes, is overwhelming: “He looks away from me and starts talking.