A soft announcement about a new (old) book: Conversion Experiences: An Absolutely True Memoir

A little over a decade ago I released a memoir about quitting religion called I Hope I was Wrong About Eternal Damnation. I initially posted it online for free as a series of blog posts, and then released it as a self-published book on Amazon. I spread word around among people I knew, but I generally didn’t do much to promote it - in part because I had no idea how to sell a book, but more because at the time I didn’t have the emotional energy to have repeated conversations about it. The book was the first public announcement that I was leaving behind the religion of my upbringing and abandoning my career path as a minister in the Episcopal Church. Releasing it was a handy way to pull the bandaid off quickly, but it meant that my enthusiasm for promoting the project was essentially non-existent. Imagine posting a letter to your family online telling them that you’re leaving them, and you’ll get a sense of the complicated emotions I had around it.

I subtitled the original book ‘Losing Faith for the Avante Garde Christian,’ but I don’t like that phrase anymore. It’s clunky, but also, nowadays I’m not a fan of calling what I went through ‘losing faith.’ Referring to the process of leaving religion as ‘losing faith’ couches the experience in negative terms - and terms defined by the religion itself. The book I wrote was about the process of growing disillusioned with the faith of my upbringing through a series of realizations that occurred across more than a decade. While that process did involve a lot of loss for me, and a lot of grieving, it also involved learning and growth. To become ‘disillusioned’ literally means to lose your illusions, which implies coming to see the world more accurately. The process might be painful, but disillusionment is an essential aspect of enlightenment, and to paint leaving religion as ‘losing faith’ does a disservice to the actual experience. It ignores that, for many people, it's a mostly positive decision.

While it may not be immediately obvious to readers, my second, and much more aspirational book The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life was sneakily a sequel to that first one. The Dirtbag’s Guide is self-help for people who don’t like having a job, but it was also my own way of compiling the things I’ve learned about how it’s possible to build a good and meaningful life without religion. The ‘without religion’ part was unstated, and not an essential requirement of the reader, but for me, as I was writing, I was aware that I was verbalizing the things that had allowed me to move forward after I’d quit my faith. The first book was staunch and honest and I think genuinely funny, but also ultimately sad. The second book was hopeful and confident that I’d found a better way.

For an independently published book, The Dirtbag’s Guide has continued to do well - better than expected even. Angel (my wife if you aren’t in the know) organized a full on Amazon advertising assault last year, and it’s sold (low) thousands of copies since then. Brag alert, but towards the end of last year the book got me on the popular Art of Manliness podcast, and (in an unrelated event) I was offered a proper publishing deal from a big outdoor press. I ultimately turned that down because, like a lot of traditional publishing deals for new authors, it would’ve been a bad deal for me financially, and for a book with an established readership likely wouldn’t have accomplished anything miraculous in terms of audience.

Another issue was that my heart has honestly been less in line with the hopefulness of The Dirtbag’s Guide in the last few years than with the complicated emotions of I Hope I Was Wrong. If any of you have been able to maintain a level of confident optimism through 2020 and 2021, congratulations, but for me, these last few years have been about fighting back depression, disorientation and, yep, disillusionment. This time around the experience has felt like losing faith in my country of origin, and gaining a different set of expectations about what type of future might be ahead for humankind. Life right now is sad and hard, but those emotions are bringing back memories, and in my experience this kind of disillusionment is essential to finding a better way. It’s undeniably a form of suffering, but it’s a future-focused sort of suffering and a necessary part of the process of figuring out the best way to live.

That might be why I’ve recently gotten together the motivation to do something that I’ve thought about for years, which is to give the project I started in I Hope I was Wrong the attention it deserves - to dive back into the emotions I was experiencing in those days, and to rewrite that story, refocus it with the things I’ve learned across the last decade, and market it more intentionally. Part of me has always thought that this book was, in ways, better than The Dirtbag’s Guide, or at least funnier, and a more important story. During the last year, I’ve renamed it and tried to give it a more professional makeover. It’s out and about with beta readers at the moment, and sometime in a vague couple of months, I should be ready to unleash it on the world.

I’ll get you more details later, but I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while that I’m working on this, so here you go. That’s what's next for me.

At the moment, I’d love to hear feedback on the cover and title - pros and cons. I’m not 100% committed to either and would love to hear how they strike you (including fonts, image, color, general impression, whether the cover and title grab you, etc. Comment here or shoot me an email on timothy_mathis@yahoo.com)