AWAKE: A Memoir

SUMMARY

Awake is Jen Hatmaker’s deeply personal and provocative memoir—a coming-of-middle-age story about losing what you thought defined you and discovering who you really are. In raw vignettes told in real-time spanning 40 years, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife and the systems that built the whole house of cards: the shocking loss of a 26-year marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and grief that accompanies change you didn’t ask for.

But Awake is ultimately a story of hope—a personal renaissance. Jen explores what it means to shed the structures, roles, and narratives that no longer serve us: patriarchal scripts about our bodies, purity culture’s toxic grip, limiting relationships, and faith systems that demand blind allegiance. With bald candor, she illuminates the tender process of grieving what’s lost, cherishing what remains, and entering the second half of life wide awake. 

This is a mirror for every woman disoriented in the middle of her story when the world tells us we’re supposed to be at our most stable. Jen asks big, messy questions: What do we hold on to? What do we let go of? And how do we rebuild when everything changes?

Divorce. Empty-nesting. Changing bodies. Shifting careers. The reconfiguring of faith. For anyone grappling with loss, reinvention, or the quiet pull to finally tell the whole truth, Awake offers paver stones for your own path forward. It’s discovering the change you long for never comes from the outside—it’s an inside job.

Jen shows us what it means to embrace a Midlife Renaissance—to lose something precious and still emerge stronger, wiser, and more alive than ever. Because even when the ground falls out from under us, we can still rise. Awake is the story of how we don’t just survive change—we thrive.