Thin Places, a Memoir

Thin Places: A Memoir by Mary DeMuth

Beautiful, haunting, joyful, agonizing, stinging, loving, truthful. These are just a few of the adjectives I could use to describe this achingly wonderful memoir.

Reading this book, I feel like I understand Mary. She's honest and forthright, yet gentle at the same time. Using the "thin places" - events in her life that bring her closer to God - she shows a life redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb.

I think it's amazing for Mary to have written a memoir in this place in her life. It's like a column of Old Testament stones: a remembering. A monument that says, This is where I've been. Praise God for where He has brought me. Let my life be a remembering, an offering to Him.

As a woman who is close to Mary's age, I can strongly identify with the desire to make a difference in this world. Often I feel as if I am continually being led into ministry against my selfish will. I wonder how many women I have encountered, and will still encounter, who share some of Mary's experiences. May this book be used to minister to those women.

Media Release:

Every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted and of the millions of sexual abuse and rape victims, 15 percent are under the age of 12, according to a 2007 study by the U.S. Department of Justice. Critically acclaimed author Mary DeMuth is among the millions of adults who are victims of childhood rape and are living with the emotional scars of the haunting abuse.

DeMuth bravely shares her painful story in her new memoir, Thin Places (February 2010). Repeatedly raped by two neighborhood boys at a young age, DeMuth details her traumatic and disturbing childhood in the memoir. Raised in a broken home, she lost her biological father when she was ten and was stripped of her innocence growing up in an unstable environment where drugs were commonplace.

But Thin Places is about hope and healing more than it is about the traumatic events of DeMuth’s childhood. According to DeMuth, thin places are “snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways.” When she encountered the true love of Jesus at a Young Life camp in high school, DeMuth’s life trajectory changed. God reassembled the pieces of her emotionally fragile self, which initiated true healing and peace.

“Folks may wonder why I’ve spent all this time looking back,” says DeMuth, “dredging up what God sees of my story, what my eyes see. Jesus says truth sets people free. This is my way of doing that—of telling the stark truth on the page so others can be set free.”

DeMuth’s desire is to see readers set free from their family secrets. In light of that, she’s started a blog for readers to anonymously share their family secrets. Since the blog launched in February 2009, over 200 survivors have emailed their family secrets for DeMuth to anonymously post, and the blog was featured on Christianity Today’s blog, Her.meneutics. For more information, visit: http://blog.myfamilysecrets.org.

Mary's website

Special thanks to Zondervan for a review copy of this novel, and to Tina of Blog Tour Spot for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour.