![]() She writes of a numinous experience at 18, alone at the sink of a camp bathroom, which led her to believe she had some kind of calling, but it was unclear to what. In Moore’s telling, she never set out to be a prominent Christian teacher, nor a feminist champion. She suggests that living with Keith’s illness was made more difficult by her belief that a husband is head of the family and a wife should not be the one making decisions. These were complicated by the fact that, as she reveals in the book, her husband Keith Moore, who survived a horrible childhood accident that killed his brother, has PTSD and bipolar disorder. Moore told her father she forgave him at his deathbed, but his behavior had already had ripple effects throughout her life, including a period of depression in her 30s. Her father sexually abused her and cheated in a way that drove her mother into mental illness and to the brink of suicide, yet her parents remained married until her mother died. ![]() ![]() She was one of five siblings in a tight family “zipped up inside the unknown together” that looked like it was doing better than it was. Moore was raised in Arkansas and Texas in one of those childhoods populated by elderly relatives with such old-timey attributes as an eye lost to lye soap, or a spit jar for chewing tobacco, or a willingness to walk a cow 33 miles to a new home. But All My Knotted Up Life reveals something a little more complicated: a damaged but determined woman who, after being adopted into and nourished by a community, realized that the same network of threads that supported her through tough times was now strangling her. From the outside, Moore’s actions looked like the brave stance of a modern woman against the patriarchy.
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