Awake: A Memoir - Hardcover

Hatmaker, Jen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 166808368X ISBN 13: 9781668083680

Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025

Synopsis

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, OPRAH DAILY, GOODREADS, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND MORE

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“I can’t imagine any woman reading this without feeling seen, inspired, and totally empowered.” —Mel Robbins, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“A MASTERPIECE, you guys. This memoir by the great Jen Hatmaker *cannot* be missed. I was riveted as if to a thriller and touched/moved/inspired in ways I can’t quite articulate yet. Just please read. You’ll thank me.” —Elin Hilderbrand

From Jen Hatmaker—beloved New York Times bestselling author and host of the For the Love podcast—a brutally honest, funny, and revealing memoir about the traumatic end of her twenty-six-year-long marriage, and the beginning of a different kind of love story.

At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering into his phone to another woman from their bed. It was the end of life as she knew it. In the months that followed, she went from being a shiny, funny, popular leader to a divorced wreck on antidepressants and antianxiety meds, parenting five kids alone with no clue about the functioning of her own bank accounts. Having led millions of women for over a decade—urging them to embrace authenticity, find radical agency, and create healthy relationship—she felt like a catastrophic failure.

In Awake, Jen shares for the first time what happened when she found herself completely lost at sea—and how she made it to shore. In candid, sur­prisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife—the implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies change you didn’t ask for. And, drawing on all resources—from without and within—Jen dares to question the systems beneath the whole house of cards, and to reckon with the myths, half-truths, and lies that brought her to this point.

More than one woman’s story, Awake is a critical analysis of the story given to all of us: the story of gender limitations, religious subservience, body shame, self-erasure. With refreshing candor, Jen explores a midlife renaissance—grieving what’s lost, cherishing possibility, and entering the second half of life wide awake.

About this title

About the Author

Jen Hatmaker is the author of fourteen books, including four New York Times bestsellers, and the host of the award-winning podcast For the Love. She is an author, podcaster, speaker, advocate, educator, mother, and a textbook Enneagram 3.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Over. Over.
At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: “I just can’t quit you.” My husband of twenty-six years is voice-texting his girlfriend next to me in our bed.

It is the end of my life as I know it.

The next four hours are chaos. While he eventually passes out from a treacherous combination of booze and exposure, I follow a trail of betrayal on his computer, an entire other life. My body is frozen. I can’t even cry. My whole world is slipping away click by click. I float above myself watching my brain absorb the impossible, watching my heart splinter. So this is what it looks like when a life unravels in real time. It is quieter than I expected.

The kids are upstairs asleep, unaware that their story has just split in half. They went to bed in the hazy, lazy days of summer polluted by a four-month-old COVID outbreak but otherwise sleeping the comfortable sleep of kids whose parents will always be just downstairs; family disruption might come from outside but never from within. Not ours anyway. I keep thinking: “They don’t know. I don’t want to know. I want to go upstairs with them and not know.”

At 6:30 a.m., having endured as much discovery as a soul can take in four middle-of-the-night hours, I wake him up and ask for the full truth and nothing less. He is unwilling. I tell him to pack his shit and get out.

It is the last night he ever spends at our house.

I text my parents and sisters and brother: I need you at Mom’s house right now. No one asks for an explanation. This type of summons signals a crisis, and everyone is there by 7:00 a.m. I pull into their driveway, and Mom is waiting outside. She has no idea what has happened, but she opens her arms with tears streaming and I finally collapse. I scream like a wounded animal. I can’t stop. I’ve lost all sense of time and space. I feel my siblings throw their arms around me, but I am gone.

Edition details

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 166808368X
• ISBN 13: 9781668083680
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320