All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

In Chapter 9, Moore says that everyone comes to Jesus by faith and “No one comes by formula” (118). The idea that there is no single path to redemption occurs repeatedly in the memoir. Moore learns that God never deals in absolutes or black and white; instead, He finds a way to guide people along their own unique path through the messiness of life. Moore begins building this concept with her “knotted-up life” image in Chapter 1, saying she has always longed for the “sanity and simplicity” of knowing good from bad (14). God, however, was “aloof” to her request and remains so throughout the memoir. Her awareness that God does not deal in absolutes would instead come to her as she grew emotionally and spiritually over the course of the memoir.

As time went on, Moore could see God in complicated people and institutions, even those that betrayed her the most: her father and the Southern Baptist Convention. In Chapter 5, she says that a “good dad” would never do what her father did by sexually abusing her. By the time her father was dying, Moore was able to express her certainty “that the man went to Jesus” (261). Similarly, she says something bad was happening to the SBC when it turned on her with ridicule and condemnation. She is nonetheless able to compare the church to her own family, filled with people she loves. Moore can also portray her beloved Nanny as being both a virulent racist and a loving, constant presence in her life.

In the last chapter, she returns to the image of sorting out good from bad; as her life went on, she thought that she would have “More people sorted out. More grays dissolved to black-and-white” (289). Instead, she was unable to do so. The natural complications of life taught her over time that the moral absolutism she may have been exposed to ideologically as a child—which would’ve helped her navigate her own struggles with more certainty—simply doesn’t apply. Her ability to overcome her difficulties and mistakes resulted in a life within the church that she could be proud of and proved that simplistic judgments can’t be made of others. More than anything, Jesus is at the center of her own messy life, something of which she is “utterly sure.”

Throughout the memoir, Moore portrays religious institutions as places capable of shielding hypocrisy due to their influence, expectations, and power structure. She begins by portraying her church’s belief in “doing stuff in front of people” (46), or showing off through actions such as memorizing hymns or putting their check face-up in the offering plate. This presentation is eventually exposed as a means of constructing careful facades, wherein members of the congregation can be perceived as upstanding and moral by meeting a checklist of sanctimonious behaviors.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) harbored those perpetuating a wide variety of harmful mindsets and behaviors, according to Moore, including racists, philanderers, sexists, and abusers. The church was founded on a racist support of slavery and continued to those attitudes in Moore’s time. The author shows this through Nanny, saying that racism “ran through my grandmother’s red blood like orange iron” (101). Nanny, who read the Bible every night and wept at hymns, had a “deep and appalling gash of hypocrisy in the armor of her piety” (102). These beliefs have no Biblical foundation, demonstrating how existing cultural views influence how people interact with religion.

Her immediate family, who were upstanding Baptists with “high visibility” at church, were also hypocrites. This is shown through “churchy” Dad, who thought alcohol was an unpardonable sin but sexually abuses Beth when she is 11. The rest of the family also believed in keeping up appearances. The night their mother disappeared from the house, nobody called the police because it would have damaged their reputation in the church. Moore describes how her mother “lost her tolerance for hypocrisy” and for church after discovering her husband’s past infidelity (71).

Moore begins to peel away the layers of respectability in the SBC when she describes speaking out about the church’s tolerance for sexism. This followed the 2016 disclosure of Donald Trump’s brag to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about being so famous that he could do anything he wanted with women. The SBC leaders turned on her with a fury that shocked her, even as reports began to surface of rampant sexual misconduct by church leaders.

The author makes a clear distinction between hypocrisy that hides repugnant attitudes and deeds and the struggle to better oneself. As a teenager, Moore constantly tried to be a better version of herself but fell short. At the time, she wondered if it was “still considered hypocrisy” if she pretended to be her ideal self (92). In her teenage prayer journal, she berated herself for not being the Christian she felt she ought to have been. Only as an adult could she see how she constantly returned to church and tried to become a better person; this was not hypocrisy but hope. The practices within the church that harmed her and drove her from the SBC involved using social practices and hierarchies to shield abusers. She was finally able to establish that an earnest interest in betterment despite flaws or failures was more important than performative behaviors that earn external validation.

In Chapter 1, Moore states, “Family is a heck of a thing, fierce and frightful” (13). This is shortly before she introduces the image of her “knotted-up life” (14). While she is speaking of her family of origin here, the complications of family life extended to her church family and to her marriage. Moore’s childhood was clouded by the failure of both her parents to protect her. Her father betrayed her when he sexually abused her; her mother abandoned her children during a years-long bout with depression. During this time, the older children closed ranks to protect Tony, Gay looked after Moore as best she could, and Nanny was ever-present. Despite Moore’s crippling self-doubt and what she describes as “self-sabotage,” she had enough family support to survive her childhood and make her way to the better version of herself to which she aspired.

Her church family within the Southern Baptist tradition was similarly complicated. On one hand, church was like a second home to her. She describes Southern Baptists as “my people,” the same phrase she uses to describe her relatives. She discusses having been let down by them at various times, but she says, “that’s how it goes with family, isn’t it? And make no mistake, this was my family” (246). Nonetheless, the Baptists also betrayed Moore, first when they condemned her for speaking against sexism and then when they accused her of trying to usurp the male role of preaching. Unlike the family members who stepped up to help her survive her trauma, this betrayal offered Moore no life preservers or footholds. She describes it as a current that sucked her out to sea and forced her to let go.

The family that Moore formed when she married Keith was also complicated. Both Moore and her husband suffered from past traumas, and they had “nothing but chronic brokenness” in common and fought constantly (123). Keith, whose brother died in a fire when both were young, had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He would later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In her marriage, as with her birth family, Moore had the support that allowed her to survive. With Keith, it was mutual compassion, commitment, and courage that held their marriage together and made it a success. These various examples of nuanced, complex relationships relate to Moore’s overall message that families and the people in them can’t be separated into “good” and “bad.” Instead, each comes with a spectrum of experiences that one must consider in full before deciding if those people should be in their life.