A RIFT Announcement!

I’ve been sitting on this news for quite some time, but I can finally let you all know that RIFT is getting a new edition! I’ve been hard at work with my team at Eerdmans to get this paperback edition ready for you, and it is now available for preorder, releasing September 17.

What’s so different about this edition? Well, first of all this brand-new cover by the incredibly talented Heather Brewer:

I love how fresh the new cover feels, and I’m excited that it might help the book reach a new audience who’s never heard of it before. This version feels true to the book’s overarching metaphor, with the subtle geological textures, and also emphasizes how Rift is ultimately a personal story from my perspective.

On top of the new cover, the Rift paperback will be released under Eerdmans’ brand-new literary nonfiction imprint, Here Below Books, led by my fantastic editor Lisa Ann Cockrel. Here Below will publish “books for the subversive work of being human,” and I think Rift fits right in. This is from their website:

Here Below champions ambitious books on everything from mysticism to technology that eschew binaries between the sacred and profane. Our authors write in good faith, even when they claim no faith beyond belief in the abiding power of great literature…

Here below, we’re curious without being credulous, sincere without being sanctimonious, and devoted to art without fearing provocation. Always, we’re pushing against the machines that would make us consumption-driven automatons.

You can read more about Here Below at the Publishers Weekly announcement here.

But guess what? The Rift paperback edition also has new material!

Because so much has happened since the book first released, both in my personal life and in the world at large, I wrote a new afterword to catch you up. It was surreal to sit down and write something new for this memoir project that started in a classroom a decade ago, but I also found I had some new things to say. I hope you enjoy!

I am also grateful to Kristin Kobes Du Mez for working with me on a Q&A section to dig deeper into the current American political situation. In a memoir, it’s difficult to talk about fast-moving current politics, so this section provides a space to do just that. I hope it’s a bit of comfort in the chaotic world we live in.

Overall, I’m thrilled with this new edition, and I hope you will be too! You can preorder the paperback now wherever you get your books but here are a few links:

Thank you to all of you for being so supportive over the years in helping me get my story out and spreading the word to people who might need to read it. It truly has been incredible to see how far this book has been able to go.

If you’d like to support the new edition, here are a few things you can do (other than preordering):

• Request a copy from your local library. This is free and easy, and it helps get Rift into new communities where survivors who might not be able to buy the book will be able to access it.

• Invite me for an interview—whether on Substack or on your podcast or for a media outlet. I hope to do a bit more publicity as we near September.

• Send me a request for an event in your town. I love doing readings and Q&As with new audiences, whether that’s in a bookstore, library, school, etc., so if you have a shop or school or writing group or book club that would like to host me, please let me know!

You can contact me directly at my website or by replying to the email version of this newsletter.

Again, thank you for being here, making my bookish dreams possible, and inspiring me to hope for a better world when there is so much to discourage us. You are my favorite!

Rift: A Memoir

An essential story for understanding what’s at stake when women’s rights are stripped away

Cait West was five years old the first time she was told her swimsuit was too revealing. By the time she turned eighteen, the rules in her home were ironclad: no college, no career, no choices of her own. As a stay-at-home daughter in the Christian patriarchy movement, she was trained for one purpose―to serve the man her father would eventually allow her to marry. She learned to cook, to clean, to disappear. She learned that her body was a threat and freedom was sin. Her life would never be her own.

Until she broke free.

While dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale explore the extremes of patriarchy as fiction, Rift tells a true story of gender oppression―one that many American women are experiencing now behind closed doors at home and at church. Weaving together her own gripping story with lyrical meditations on the geology of displacement and fracture, West maps the fault lines of her own breaking: the isolation that kept her silent, the forbidden relationship that became her escape route, and the complex aftermath of choosing herself over everything she’d been taught to believe. Heartbreaking, hopeful, and blazingly honest, Rift is both exposé and invitation―a reminder that freedom and healing are possible for those determined to claim a different life for themselves.