“Family is a heck of a thing, fierce and frightful.”

Moore makes this statement in describing her family of origin, the one into which she was born. As the memoir goes on, the meaning of “family” stretches to include her fellow Southern Baptists and the family she forms when she marries Keith Moore. All Families Are Complicated in different ways, and only the families that offered Moore some kind of support and encouragement would remain in her life.

“All my knotted-up life I’ve longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who’s good and who’s bad.”

Moore uses “knotted up” to describe the tangled strands of her life: her abusive childhood and wild adolescence, her call to ministry, her marriage and parenthood—including fostering a difficult child she ultimately gives up—and her rejection by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In most parts of her life, nothing is simple, and it is often hard to tell good from bad. In particular, she suffers abuse at the hands of her father, the person who was most tasked with protecting her, and harsh criticism and ostracism by the church whose tenets she professed in her ministry.