The Last Days: A memoir of faith, desire and freedom

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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’d recommend this book to many to assist and support them in the healing process of leaving JW organisation if that is what they have decided to do. May Ali’s experiences resonate with others and assist in setting them free from a very unloving organisation. As journalist, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Stylist, The Sunday Times and Caught by the River. She has been profiled by The Sunday Times, The Sunday Post and appeared on the BBC World Service, NBC National Australia, Times Radio, and Talk TV. She will appear on a Channel 4 documentary with Rebekah Vardy, recently recorded in the winter of '22. She has read and appeared at festivals and events including Edinburgh International Book Festival, Wigtown Book Festival and Camp Good Life, as well as across digital platforms on podcast, blogs and Youtube channels. 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. Unfortunately JW ORG has done a very good job of blinding millions with so many untruths that’s it’s hard to comprehend this is happening still today.

Millar is also talented as respecting individuals. With few exceptions, she insists on understanding where other people are coming from. 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. 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. The end felt a bit rushed. I would have liked more detail on how she left the Witnesses. The corruption of the Witnesses is touched upon but again not enough detail. A blog, by the author, is also mentioned, but never named. She is trying to protect others identities so maybe Ali Millar is a pen name. Anorexia became a form of penance. She mortified her flesh until it turned a translucent blue – she felt “angelic”. Starvation made wings of her shoulder blades. At 16, she was hospitalised, but recovered and eventually returned to the faith (marrying and attempting to serve as a submissive wife and mother), before her epiphany in that lavatory.

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. A biography of murderer turned Church of Scotland minster James Nelson, The Minister and the Murderer is not only about Nelson’s reinvention but the power that books have. As it unfolds, a doubling occurs; Nelson eludes Kelly, Kelly searches for the God he abandoned in favour of atheism. It’s a book that shows the complexity of fresh starts, and asks if they’re even possible in the wake of a terrible crime. And in the case of Kelly, is his return to God a beginning or a repetition? It is 1982 and in the Kingdom Hall we are Jehovah's Witnesses. The state of the world shows us the end is close, and Satan is like a roaring lion, seeking to devour us. I am not harassed to participate, visitors talk to me, no talks to me about religious matters at all.

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 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. 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? Wow. What a tremendous memoir. I’ll preface this review by saying my thoughts on JW as a religious organisation are not clear cut. I have friends who are JW and are really happy, my friend doesn’t appear oppressed by her husband and her children are bright, happy and just regular kids. As a CofE Christian myself there are a few things that my friends Kingdom Hall do that I really think we could learn from as our church slowly dwindles as it’s ageing population dies. BUT all that aside I have no doubt that Ali’s experience is genuine and that she and many hundreds or even thousands of other ex Witnesses have been traumatised by the very people and place that are supposed to provide you with comfort and safety. The fact that, like Mormonism the JW faith has been written and designed by ‘modern’ day white men in ivory towers in the USA is enough to make me suspicious of its true biblical purpose and reading how women are expected to be submissive to their parents, then church then husband it’s definitely something I couldn’t be a part of. When she finally breaks away it is heartbreaking as she is forced to make the most unbearable of choices.Some people like religion, and an awful lot of ex members of whatever religion, stay religious, they just find a new one. 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. 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. The Jehovah’s Witnesses religion is not one I am familiar with, so I found learning about the denomination interesting. I never knew that they didn’t celebrate Christmas or birthdays, allow blood transfusions, and are constantly living in fear of an imminent apocalypse. It’s just they can’t put a date on it, and at one stage when an airplane is shot down over Ukraine, Ali Millar believes that the end days are starting. You can really get a sense of her spiralling into fear.

As an ex-Witness I found this book about being a Jehovah’s Witness, and then leaving, incredibly moving. I sometimes think books like this can’t be fully appreciated by anyone else other than ex-Witnesses, seeing as it’s such a peculiarly cultural thing. Yet when I read Millar’s memoir, I soon realised that the small similarities with my own childhood were drowned out by the howling differences. By the time I put it down, I was positively raging on her behalf at the way she was treated by the elders of her congregation, interrogated in her home about her sex life as if by seventeenth century witch hunters. Just as damnably, their religion has cut her off, perhaps forever, from her mother’s love – to which her book is a kind of memorial. A nearly impossible new start … Vanessa Redgrave in the National Theatre adaptation of The Year Of Magical Thinking. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian In the end those of us fortunate enough to have left sport a lifestyle-hole that cannot be truly filled, banished by those who only know conditional love, something Ali points out towards the end.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. A lyrical and powerful memoir of leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses, from an exciting new literary talent. Faith, desire, control, abuse of power… I devoured The Last Days, an incisive takedown of an exploitative, destructive organisation via a personal story.