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The Truth Book: A Memoir (University of Nebraska), was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association and was adapted and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine.
Adopted at birth by a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, Joy
Castro ran away at fourteen. Now a professor of literature,
she has written a literary
memoir that explores the fragile intersections of gender,
identity, sexuality, religion, violence, ethnicity, and the
body.
The Truth Book has been adopted as a text in courses
on autobiography, women's literature, creative nonfiction,
and women and psychology.
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Reviews
| "gorgeous, disturbing, and grippingly alive..." |
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~ Caroline Leavitt, The
Boston Globe
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| ". . . The Truth Book soars in its nightmarish truths--an unforgettable tale of hypocrisy and cruelty." |
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~ Chas Bowie, The Portland
Mercury |
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| "While she is forthright about
abuses which she experienced, Castro also introduces
us to kind individuals and caring families, relating
her own particular experience in spare and lyrical prose. At times it felt like poetry to me,
as if there were a lot of white space on the page, although
there isn’t. While there is this clean sense to the prose,
the details are lush and specific." |
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~ Anne
F. McCoy, Rain Taxi
Review of Books |
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| "A brave and lyrical work about all that the human spirit
can survive—and what it cannot. Before I picked up this
book, I knew nothing about Jehovah's Witnesses beyond what
they told me at the door, knew little about what it might
feel like to be adopted, but I identified so deeply with this
memoir because of the sheer humanity of these individuals
and my total trust in the narrator. I'm savoring the inexplicable
sense of hope it leaves on my tongue." |
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~Ariel Gore, author
of Atlas of the
Human Heart and The Mother
Trip |
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| "When Joy Castro was a girl, her zealously brutal stepfather,
in the name of his Jehovah's Witness faith, took away her
books. Now, by writing her own book—one so insistently,
exquisitely honest that a reader, despite the pain, feels
cleansed—Castro gives witness to a higher truth: that
of storytelling." |
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~Michael Lowenthal,
author of
The Same Embrace and
Avoidance |
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