Ironically, given the primacy of love in most religious doctrines, it is often love — destabilizing, transformative and messily human — that represents the greatest threat to extremist indoctrination. Knowing this, authoritarian organizations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses exert tremendous effort to curtail the intermingling of believer with nonbeliever. After all, religious absolutism is no match for the handshake, the shared meal, the neighborly conversation, the kiss. So it was with Scorah. In China, where the denomination is outlawed, she cultivated secular friendships for the first time in order to secretly proselytize. She went to dinners, invited people out for excursions and gradually began to ask questions that come naturally to those not born into cults: How do you live your life? What is your religion about? Do you even believe in God?

Ultimately, it was through an email correspondence with a man that Scorah found the courage to court apostasy, focusing on the contradictions in Witness doctrine, its misogyny, and how its promotion of ignorance and lack of education undermines any sense of personal choice, rendering the word almost meaningless. When this email affair turned physical, Scorah was finally able to extricate herself from both a loveless marriage and a life-consuming cult. Her memoir, most valuable as an artifact of how one individual can escape mind control, tracks this transformation from zealous believer to apostate.

Scorah’s book, the bravery of which cannot be overstated, is an earnest one, fueled by a plucky humor and a can-do spirit that endears. Her tale, though an exploration of extremity, is highly readable and warm. However, her straightforward, unadorned prose, which many will admire, feels not so much intentionally accessible as the product of a mind still forming the ability to see the secular world, one not trained in the speculative that is the foundation of poetry and lyricism. Given the painfully restricted life she led until her 30s, this is entirely understandable, yet remains artistically limiting.

Likewise, there are unfortunate ellipses in the text, especially at moments of particular heat — the death of her father, the tryst with her lover, the argument that ends her marriage — that seem a product of two problems equally: a young writer’s struggle to consistently sculpt narrative movement, and the remnants of a Christian modesty not well suited to the task of memoir. While too many memoirists appear willing to fling anyone under the publishing bus, reticence can be equally troubling. Scorah would do well in her next literary outing to occupy a bolder space between ethic and revelation, perhaps the memoirist’s trickiest task.

And, hopefully, there will be another memoir. Many readers know Scorah through her viral article in The New York Times about the death of her son on his first day of day care. Though the introduction of this material in the final chapter conflicts tonally with what precedes it, her description of that loss in terse, blunted prose is deeply moving. Suddenly, we see an emerging writer come into full emotional expression. This, one senses, is her brutal but beautiful route into a new book — a shorter, wiser one, sharp and devastating. Here she reveals a chastened existence, steeped in grief and unknowing without recourse to pacifying religious answers. It is precisely through this unknowing, and her ability to bear it alongside the loss of her son, that Scorah most effectively accomplishes what her book sets out to do. She teaches us how integrity is determined not by assenting to the juvenile claims of fundamentalism, but by enduring the universe as we find it — breathtaking in its ecstasies and vicious in its losses — without recourse to a God. Given the enormity of her grief and the wholesale collapse of her previous belief system, the intellectual integrity that Scorah displays is nothing short of a miracle.