Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
Their whole belief system is strange, the way the elders have eyes like Big Brother, and how every other Witness is like an East German spy, ready to throw each other under the bus at the first sign of public sin. The kind of “loving” way they cut people off and then claim victimhood is truly something difficult to explain to outsiders.
Where our experiences diverge though is the author's experience of other Witnesses. There are most definitely those that live a dual life, with their 'meeting face' & what they are like away from the public ministry, & there were cliques, but I also met some genuinely lovely people. We certainly never covered the windows of the Kingdom Hall so we weren't distracted by the outside - that's extremely odd behaviour & I think it says more about that particular congregation than the JWs as a whole. 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. A religious upbringing written from a child’s into adults point of view. A most compelling read, and I am certain this book will stay with me, and be remembered. Faith, desire, control, abuse of power… I devoured The Last Days, an incisive takedown of an exploitative, destructive organisation via a personal story. This is a very important story to tell and I commend Ali Millar on doing so and hopefully giving courage to others who are still enmeshed in the Jehovah’s Witness network who would like to escape.
Featured Reviews
Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and leaving the community when I was 14, I have struggled to find memoirs, if any, that portray the inside of the community as it really is. Most people view Witnesses as quiet but strange with their stances on refusing blood transfusions and not celebrating birthdays and Christmas, but not many people understand the abuse and trauma you can go through when you are a member as well as when you leave. I remember being a young girl at middle school and there being a family of girls who could never join in assembly when we sang hymns and could never join in making cards at Easter or Christmas. We knew they were Jehovah Witnesses but we didn’t have a clue what that meant. Later I learnt they couldn’t have blood if they were in hospital and needed it. But how could we understand, we were 10 years old.
One of the main things I appreciate (however much I wish it wasn’t the truth) is how the denouement isn’t an easy ‘wrapped in a bow’ ending; Millar could have offered up easy platitudes, but she doesn’t turn away from the devastating loss that comes with her autonomy. I urge everyone to read The Last Days, it is a searing indictment of the Jehovah's Witness, an unflinching picture of anorexia and in the end, a story of true courage. This is a lovely documentation of a woman discovering that the ideas she can grown up with could not and would not work for the life she longed to live while also contending with the loss of community and identity that would come with forging her own path. Millar's writing and rawness were a joy to read.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. In this frightening, cloistered world, Ali grows older. As she does, she starts to question the ways of the Witnesses, and their control over the most intimate aspects of her life. As she marries and has a daughter within the religion, she finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into its dark undertow, her mind tormented by one question: is it possible to escape the life you are born into? I do believe millions of JW’s have good and loving intentions however due to WHAT they hear and HOW information is shared to its devotees they are duped and as a consequence are so very unaware of the hurt and pain they unknowingly inflict on their once much loved family members. It’s just so very sad and Ali sees the hypocrisy of the organisation when she was quite young. Her sharing her truth is so very brave of her. That balance runs throughout the book. Later on, there are moments when the secular world seems about to take over: John Peel, Catcher in the Rye, the first fumblings of sex, parties with boys, Malibu and Newcastle Brown. But then, because a real, lived life is chaotic, messy and unpredictable, and rarely runs straight, those roads aren’t taken. Her student days – the time of maximum freedom for most people – lead to marriage to a would-be Witness elder and motherhood. There even are times when a future as a Watchtower-toting Stepford wife looks a distinct possibility. Most people know that Jehovah’s Witnesses are obliged to spend their free time handing out a magazine called the Watchtower, that they don’t celebrate Christmas and they believe the apocalypse to be imminent, even if the precise date of the second coming does have a tendency somewhat to slip and slide. From time to time, newspapers are also apt to remind us of the fact that even in a medical emergency, members are forbidden to accept a blood transfusion from doctors, a doctrine followed on the grounds that it is God’s job, and his alone, to sustain life. But all this stuff, it seems, is just the half of it. Thanks to Ali Millar and her first book, I now know there are many other arcane rules by which a Witness must live if he or she is not to be “disfellowshipped” (translation: shunned) by the elders down at the Kingdom Hall.
Written with such powerful emotion, you can feel the fear and bewildering thoughts of the young Ali. How it was drummed into her, how she felt helpless like her life was chosen for her, without having a chance of how she may have wanted her life direction to go. When she finally breaks away it is heartbreaking as she is forced to make the most unbearable of choices.I enjoyed how Millar structured her memoir. Because she took on the perspective of her younger self, I felt as if I was learning about the flaws and complications in her faith as she did. There were moments where I could see the real beauty of her childhood religious experiences while also coming to question the toxic and painful aspects of that culture. Yes it is patriarchal, yes it is controlling. but not quite to ex-members and their families as she says. But I do what I want, and no-one interferes. I care for mum, and brother...and it's his choice. He's not as "good" as they think...but he's been too long in it for me to convince him it's rubbish even so. I don't tell on his minor transgressions though. Millar was just nine months old when her mother (a former teacher) became one of the church’s 8.7 million members. She had been abandoned by the father of her five-year-old daughter, Zoe, and then by Ali’s dad (who turned out to have a wife and child elsewhere). The seductive lies of unreliable men had left her flailing and the church promised support, forgiveness and routine. The rug would never be pulled out from under her again because the business of the church was preparing believers for God’s ultimate, imminent rug pull. Jehovah’s Witnesses “don’t believe in heavenly hope”, explains Millar. Instead they believe that “Jehovah has anointed 144,000 humans to serve at His side for all eternity. Everyone who survives His coming judgment will live forever on earth.”
It is a story of trauma, religious and intergenerational. Her entry into what can be described as a cult of its own – motherhood, forces Millar to make her final exit from the group: “I could have carried on lying to myself with that doubling, but as soon as you are responsible for someone else it changes, I couldn't inflict that upon her”. The story starts with her mother’s choice to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses and we close with her exit as a new mother, the breaking of intergenerational trauma guiding Millar’s story to a redemptive end.So when it comes to being dragged along as a child to ultra-nonconformist worship, I’ve got form. I’ve seen too how it can give a purpose in life to decent people who have been let down by the world, who want help to cope with fear or pain and who aren’t given to questioning. The difference between Millar and me is that, as soon as I could think for myself, I was embarrassed by my parents’ very real and unswerving faith and – to their enormous credit – they didn’t stand in my way when, as a 12-year-old, I stopped being a Christian Scientist. Truth to tell, I was never much of one to begin with. 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.
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