Worldly Girls: A Memoir

by Tamara Jong

Tamara Jong’s debut memoir is a moving portrait of trauma, addiction, grief, and forgiveness. In sparse yet searing prose, Jong documents the tragic history of her fractured family and her fraught relationship with her strict Jehovah’s Witness religion. In doing so, she shines a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty, Jong collects the fragments of her unstable and unconventional childhood with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her indoctrination into and later rejection of her faith, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the religion she long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—alcoholism, estrangement, grief, depression, infertility—the ultimate message becomes one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

Detailing the slow unravelling of one woman’s connection to her faith, Worldly Girls is a brave journey into the truth and will offer solace to anyone who has wrestled with the ghosts of the past.

216 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful collection of essays about family trauma and deconstructing from the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Rather than being a linear memoir, the essays in this collection intersect with and speak to one another, each sharing a different aspect of the author’s life, or framing her experiences in a new way.

I’ve heard it said that the true believers are often the ones who later make a complete break from strict religions. Rather than nominal believers who can stay in a faith community while bending the rules, they are the ones who can’t give their faith less than their all. When they become disillusioned, they are hit hard by these feelings, and ultimately end up on another life path that feels more authentic to them. This seems to be the author’s experience. She was a gold-star “good” Jehovah’s Witness girl, giving everything to the church and then realizing it was offering her little in return. It was a source of stability and community during a childhood fraught with family problems, but it also held her back from fully experiencing life until she left the faith in her late thirties.

Despite all she has been through, she has found joy and stability. This book is the creation of someone who has done the work, looked inward, and healed. Her writing is beautiful and her message is an important one.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if all you ever knew was strict doctrines of the Jehovah Witnesses? This memoir is raw and real portrait of leaving family, friends and trauma behind.

Thank you @bookhugpress and @river_street_writes for this complimentary copy.

[Mridula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary 🌟 Tamara Jong reckons with her subject matter with sensitivity and great care. Her words are precise and the storytelling, sublime.

[Rachelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow. Raw, desperate, funny, irreverent, tender, honest and hopeful. A must read memoir.

[Lucy Black]

Worldly Girls by Tamara Jong is a skillfully written memoir about the foray that she and her mother made into the Jehovah’s Witness religion, and her ultimate coming of age journey. The first-person narrative is both raw and vulnerable as memories and reflections are shared in short, powerful essays. Jong’s need to find her place in the world is underscored by the way in which she is treated as a mixed-race individual. When her mother becomes a Jehovah’s Witness, Jong similarly embraces the church as a way to find both meaning and emotional safety. Finding purpose in her life is overshadowed by a somewhat dysfunctional family unit, and although Jong builds loving networks around her, she is plagued with both grief and addiction issues. The later mid-life struggles she documents include heartbreak, a suicide attempt and problems with fertility issues. Thoughtful meditations highlight not only Jong’s gritty tenacity but also her endeavour to live an authentic and meaningful life.

Full Review forthcoming The Miramichi Reader

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to @river_street_writes Tamara Jong & @bookhugpress for the gifted copy.

This is the first book I've read by Tamara Jong, and it's one that many people will definitely relate to. Tamara grew up in a strict Jehovah's Witness home, dealing with family issues and trying to figure out who she is outside of religion, expectations, and her trauma. If that doesn’t hit close to home for many of us, I don’t know what does. This book is raw and real, and that’s what I enjoyed about it the most. It doesn’t hold back. I truly appreciate the honesty poured into these pages. If you’ve ever had a complicated relationship with faith, family, or mental health, this book will probably speak volumes to you. I also liked that Tamara wasn’t afraid to dive deep. It’s not overly polished, and that’s a strength, it makes her writing feel deeply human and genuine.

[Mary Therrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tamara Jong's memoir reveals a traumatic life lived in the cult-like atmosphere of the Jehovah's Witness with an absent father and an alcoholic mother. Tamara thought the religion was the answer to how to live. They shunned her mother when her drinking took over her life and cause a rift between mother and child, until the untimely death of the mother. This is an unflinching look at addiction, trauma and grief.

[Shantell Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I too was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, and it was interesting to see where Jong's experiences intersected and diverged from mine. There is a commonality to be found in ex-JWs. I tore through this book eagerly. It is a ragged, heart-ripping tale of trauma and survival. It is also a tale of motherhood despite the odds. I feel grateful for the opportunity to read it.

[John Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this book down. I stayed up all ñight until I finished it . I applaud the author for her honesty and courage in writing this book. It gives insight to a religion and lifestyle I did not know about it. It also shows a growing up in a dysfunctional family. I am sure it will help others find the courage to live their lives with honesty and freedom .

[Lenna Halkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful memoir written in direct prose that never falters. Feels raw and honest and moves effortlessly back and forth through time. I couldn’t put it down. If you’re looking for nonfiction with substance, pick up a copy of Worldly Girls. It’s gripping.

[Alison Gadsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that remembers as best it can a childhood that exists in the shadows of grief, alcoholism, divorce, mental illness, heartbreak, and the unimaginable loss of a mother who can’t be grieved. Written with incredible skill, you can feel the pen gliding across every page in a whirl of emotion. WORLDLY GIRLS contains stand-alone essays that feel like fragments of a whole, a puzzle you only to realize is incomplete when you discover the missing pieces, what has been dropped, lost, or perhaps never packed into the box. A model of how to collect one’s thoughts and relay them with honesty and a depth of emotion, it felt as though I were standing beside Jong as she ‘traced her past by visiting the places that had scared her as a child.’

Worldly is a word used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to describe, “a non-worshiper, unbeliever, outsider, someone who is “bad association” that can lead a Christian astray from Jehovah.” While Jong explores a life without the Witnesses, the religion floats around her too, and I felt the grief at losing religion as significantly as the death of Jong’s mother. As humans, we are desperate to belong, our connection to others is essential to our survival in so many ways, and when that connection is intrinsically tied to church, its loss can hollow us out in incomprehensible ways. I still dream of clinging to the pew, hanging on every word the Monsignor spit out of his mouth on Sunday mornings, belonging to something larger than myself, that today, as an atheist reading Tamara Jong’s memoir, I want to return to that hard wooden pew and feel whole again.

Reading Jong’s memoir reminds me that we are all wandering around, seeking and searching as Jong’s therapist says, holding on to childhoods that cannot be traced with words, that cannot be screamed into a pillow (Jong’s thoughts), childhoods that can only be revealed in slow details, in a deliberate and methodical unravelling of the moments that define us, the losses we carry with us forever. Jong made a record, and while she writes it is as much for herself as it is for others, reading Worldly Girls was something I really needed right now, and I’m grateful.

[Carolina Familia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author’s journey of finding herself after surviving trauma, growing up with an alcoholic mother, distant father and after leaving the Jehovah Witness religion. Also focuses on her desire to have children and be a better mom then the one she if. Honest, heartbreaking, but hopeful story.