All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

Moore describes how making a new start can be both painful and unwanted, as well as a chance to turn one’s life around. Houston was that new start for her family. She began her sophomore year with no makeup and no friends; unlike her small-town life, this meant no longer having to figure out if she was part of the in-crowd. Though other students laughed at her Arkansas accent, she felt free to study and to make friends.

Her new friend Kim invited her to a sleepover and offered her a joint, to her dismay. She dated a boy who took her to a nightclub and got her drunk, causing her to swear off alcohol until she was an adult. Her parents dropped out of church, so Moore went by herself to the church of family friends, the Turners. Mom drove her but refused to come in as she had “lost her tolerance for hypocrisy” (90). The parents would eventually return to church when Beth was in college. The phone rang occasionally with a caller who didn’t speak, and Moore wondered if it was the former mistress.

Moore became involved in the church youth group and choir and enjoyed not having to make a show of her faith. She aspired to be a better person, although she continued to make stupid choices, which she describes as a “cycle of self-sabotage” (91). Somehow, “in the mess of it” (92), Jesus kept his commitment to her. Faith kept her returning to the church.

Nanny died of a stroke in Houston. The family took her back to Arkansas to be buried next to her husband in the cemetery of her old church.

As much as Moore loved her grandmother, she admits that Nanny was deeply racist and believed that Black people would try to “take over.” The children knew what a hypocrite Nanny was to practice piety yet have appallingly racist beliefs. Still, she was a stable force in their lives when they needed her.

Just as Moore followed the Turners to church, she followed their daughter Sandy to college at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State). The college has the lowest in-state tuition in Texas and low admission standards, which Moore needed as her grades didn’t start to improve until her junior and senior years of high school.

During those years, she made friends, was involved in extracurricular activities, and fell for “a pretty wonderful guy” from a churchgoing family with a bank president father and no vices (105). Believing they would not be able to deal with her “ugly truth,” Moore “shoved the door shut on the past” (105). The couple eventually broke up.

Moore embraced college life enthusiastically, joining the drill team and a sorority. She majored in political science, hoping to be a lawyer like Nanny’s husband. Her parents often came to see her perform in halftime football shows, and Moore noticed that they were getting along better. She attributed their relationship to the fact that they had found a church that her parents and Tony now regularly attended. Moore went to the same church, Spring Woods Baptist, when she was at home.

Moore created a convincing “new narrative” that “showed up with inexplicable sincerity” in her prayers (106). As an adult, she read her prayer journal from age 18 and found her writing so earnest and poignant that she cried. She had “bleached” the family story to the extent that she wrote of her wonderful, stable family and good, God-loving parents. The family had recovered from their dark past, but at 18, Moore couldn’t acknowledge that their life had once been very dark. Once again, she found herself shutting out past trauma. Unable to deal with disparities, she shifted all her family history “over to the Good column” (109).

Moore’s college years were good. Mom took a job in a department store to help pay for Beth’s and Tony’s tuition and fees, allowing them to graduate debt-free. In addition, Moore experienced a “life-altering moment” during these years (110). At 18, she volunteered as a sponsor for a sixth-grade Girls’ Auxiliary camping trip, aimed at training girls to love mission works and pray for missionaries. Each night, she gave the girls a bedtime devotional for discussion.

As she was brushing her teeth one morning, she “sensed the Lord’s presence” so intently that she would later divide her life into before and after the experience (111). She felt surrounded by God’s love and believed God owned her. After relating her experience to the camp director, she was told she had received a call to vocational Christian service and should tell this to her pastor at her next church service. Moore did, although she didn’t know what form her service would take.

Moore marvels that both adults took her experience seriously, considering the Baptist tradition discouraged mystical experiences. She says as she shared less-common experiences of this type later in life, she was often greeted with skepticism, but the Bible does not provide “one precise pattern for what it looks like to be summoned by God” (117). She concludes Chapter 9 by describing her personal story with the metaphor of a shirt left too long in the bottom of a clothes hamper. She could bleach and iron it, but it would no longer fit her.

Moore met her future husband, Keith Moore, in the college cafeteria during her junior year of college. Her brother Tony, who had just entered the school as a freshman, introduced them after meeting Keith at a fraternity party. They danced at a party and fell in love, although they were opposites in many ways.

Moore says they had “nothing but chronic brokenness in common” (123) and brought out the worst in each other. She wonders if the difficulty of the relationship was God’s plan for shaping them into the people they became. They fought constantly, but Keith accepted Moore’s declaration that she was going to work for God, and they married. Moore says the marriage has lasted over forty years.

As a child, Keith lost his older brother in a childhood fire that Keith survived. He never got over the loss and had post-traumatic stress disorder. Two years after he and Moore married, Keith’s sister died from a brain aneurysm. Moore had been able to “generally flourish” despite her childhood trauma, but Keith’s issues were ever-present. She reflects on Solomon’s words from Proverbs 14:10: “Each heart knows its own bitterness” (133). Keith was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Moore pauses to reflect that it was important for her to tell the truth of her and Keith’s story, with Keith’s permission about what to reveal. Vulnerability mirrors Christ’s image. Compassion and commitment have allowed their marriage to survive.