Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker
on September 23, 2025
Genres: Biography & Autobiography / General
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
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Awake by Jen Hatmaker is a raw, brutally honest, and surprisingly funny memoir that lays everything bare—from betrayal and heartbreak to resilience and rediscovery. Hatmaker begins with the night her life shattered: waking up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering to another woman from their shared bed. What follows is the unraveling of not just a marriage, but an entire identity she had spent decades building.
Hatmaker pulls readers into her journey with an openness that feels both intimate and incredibly courageous. She doesn’t gloss over the devastation—suddenly divorced, battling anxiety and depression, overwhelmed by financial realities she’d never been taught to navigate, and parenting five kids alone. For someone who had spent years encouraging women to find authenticity, agency, and healthy relationships, this felt to her like a total collapse.
And yet, Awake is also a story of rebuilding. Through short, engaging chapters (a format I loved—it makes the book incredibly easy to tear through), Hatmaker moves back and forth through forty years of girlhood, marriage, parenting, faith, and self-questioning. She gives readers a deeply reflective look at the myths and expectations she’d been taught to live under—and the painful but liberating process of letting them go.
While the memoir centers on an unexpected divorce, the themes reach far beyond that. There is truly something here for every reader to take away: the grief of unasked-for change, the courage of starting over, the honesty required to rebuild your life on your own terms, and the unexpected beauty that can emerge from the rubble.
It’s raw and honest, but also warm, witty, and incredibly human. I found it thoroughly engaging—in that way where you keep telling yourself “just one more chapter” until suddenly you’re at the end.
Awake is a poignant, powerful memoir about heartbreak, healing, and the surprising ways we come back to ourselves.
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