When author and podcaster Jen Hatmaker woke at 2.30am in 2020 to hear her husband of 26 years voice-texting his girlfriend from their bed, her life in Buda — a quiet suburb south of Austin, Texas — changed overnight. By 6.30am, after finding the full extent of the affair on his computer, she had told Brandon, a former pastor, to leave. That scene opens her new memoir, Awake, which became a New York Times bestseller in the US and is now publishing in the UK.
The book covers far more than the affair. Hatmaker, 52, recounts how she discovered just how much she didn't know — Brandon had handled every financial detail, from taxes to pensions — and how she confronted her disillusion with the Southern Baptist world she grew up in. Raised in a Baptist household, married at 19 to a man training to be a pastor, she spent decades inside a denomination that bars women from leadership and opposes divorce and same-sex marriage. In 2016, after publicly supporting LGBTQ relationships, she was dropped by Christian retailers, lost speaking work and faced death threats.
What emerges most is the community that carried her. She lives in an old farmhouse on a street full of close friends — a group she calls a "little neighbourhood coven" who tear around on golf carts with cocktails. Her mother brought coffee to her door at 8am every day for a month. Friends finished the porch her husband had abandoned, built her a swing bed and lined up reiki, breathwork and sound healing. She and her five children (three biological, two adopted, including son Remy from an Ethiopian orphanage in 2011) decamped to a borrowed holiday house in Colorado for two weeks — the point, she writes, where she decided to "wake up and live."
There's reconciliation, too, on her terms. Brandon, who has since remarried and co-parents all five children, admitted he'd lied every day for two years, and later published his own reflection on Substack. Hatmaker describes their current relationship as civil but tightly boundaried. And there's a love story: in late 2021 she met author and actor Tyler Merritt through a mutual friend — no dating apps — and the long-distance romance between Texas and Nashville turned serious fast.
For readers, the appeal is less about the scandal and more about what surrounds it: a portrait of rebuilding a life in a specific place, with the farmhouse, the porch swing and the golf-cart posse doing as much work as the therapy. It's a good fit for anyone drawn to memoirs about starting over — and for travellers curious about the leafy, unpretentious side of the Austin area beyond the city's music and tacos. Much of the interview's texture comes from small-town Texas life: neighbours who show up, a Subaru-style slow morning coffee run, a community that rebuilds a porch in an afternoon.
The takeaway Hatmaker offers, six years on: the pain doesn't vanish, but a better, more secure life really can be built on the other side of a catastrophic year.