When Authors Abuse Their Protagonists: Narrative Design and the Denial of Agency

Some books don’t just constrain their protagonists—they sideline them. Not because the plot requires it, but because the author is more invested in something else: satire, format, descriptive indulgence, shock value. The character becomes a tool rather than a person. Their agency is limited, their interiority is thin, and their autonomy is withheld because the author has other priorities.

Two of these books—Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales—are recent reads that I rated two stars specifically because of this pattern. The third, All the Light We Cannot See, I read in 2019 and rated one star. It remains the clearest example of how an author’s priorities can completely override a protagonist’s agency.

Natalie: Drugged for Satire and Reproductive Servitude

In Yesteryear, Natalie is drugged by her husband and family for fifteen years. Her memory breaks apart. She can’t trust her own perceptions. It’s domestic horror, but Burke doesn’t treat it as horror. Natalie’s confusion becomes a device for mocking influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric. She’s written as judgmental and foolish, and the book frames her chemical imprisonment as a kind of deserved consequence.

And then there’s the reproductive servitude. Natalie may be foolish, unkind, or driven by shallow goals, but none of that justifies forcing her through nine children, several of whom are conceived via turkey baster. The book tries to justify this by having her promise Caleb’s father—Doug, the three‑time presidential candidate—that she’ll give Caleb “lots of babies” and build a “big American family” on the Idaho property Doug purchased for $5 million. But buying land does not entitle you to a woman’s reproductive labor. It doesn’t make her a “good wife” to have nine children. It makes her exploited.

Even within the story’s own logic, the promise doesn’t hold. A vow made in her twenties does not explain why she’s still being artificially impregnated into her early forties. It doesn’t explain why she and Caleb share a bed when neither of them is interested in sex with the other. It doesn’t explain why her reproductive life is treated as an obligation rather than a choice. These pregnancies don’t deepen her character or advance the plot. They’re not consequences of her decisions. They’re consequences of the author’s decisions.

The solo birth at forty to a blue, oxygen‑deprived infant is the same problem. It’s dreadful to read and completely unnecessary. It doesn’t illuminate any theme. It doesn’t catalyze change. It’s just another moment where the narrative punishes her instead of developing her. Her reproductive life becomes a spectacle—a place where the author can escalate suffering without earning it.

The parallel storyline with Caleb's mother Amelia, also chemically diminished, gets dropped. The book sets up a family-wide pattern of controlling women through pharmaceuticals and then abandons it. Natalie never gets clarity about what happened to her. The ending doesn’t resolve whether she escapes, stays, or even understands her situation.

Her fractured state isn’t a character arc. It’s a narrative convenience. The satire takes priority over the character.

Emily: Denied Interiority in Service of Format

Across the first two Emily Wilde books, Emily reads as possibly neurodivergent: literal, structured, uncomfortable with emotional reciprocity, and reliant on observation rather than introspection. These traits make sense within the journal/field‑note conceit. Her voice is clinical because the format is clinical. She processes the world through taxonomy, classification, and data. Even her one moment of longing for Wendell is immediately reframed as a recurring physical sensation she’s been tracking: a feeling she notes rather than experiences.

But in the third book, the format shifts. The “journals” become more like standard first‑person chapters with date stamps. The writing leans into immediacy rather than documentation. And as the format loosens, Emily’s characterization loosens with it. She suddenly has more fluid emotional reactions, more spontaneous commentary, and less structured observation. The traits that previously read as neurodivergent become inconsistent—not because Emily has grown, but because the narrative device has changed.

This is the core problem: Emily’s interiority isn’t rooted in who she is. It’s rooted in whatever the format requires. When the journal conceit is tight, she’s clinical and distant. When the narration becomes more conventional, she becomes more conventional. She isn’t allowed a stable inner life because the author is more committed to the epistolary device than to the character herself.

Meanwhile, Wendell remains consistently thoughtful—protective cloaks, tailored clothing, specialists for his dying dog, an entire library commissioned for her research. Emily responds by complaining the journals are too fancy. She doesn’t examine his care or her own reactions to it. She doesn’t let any of it matter.

By the third book, the distance isn’t restraint. It’s avoidance. Emily is kept emotionally inert because the format demands it, not because the character does. The format takes priority over the character.

Marie-Laure: Infantilized for Descriptive Prose and Shock Value

Doerr’s prose in All the Light We Cannot See is undeniably beautiful, but Marie-Laure is written as an “Angel in a Glass Box.” She’s blind, so she’s treated as incapable of basic tasks—packing, dressing, washing her own hair. Her father does everything for her. Her disability becomes a device for sensory description rather than a lived experience.

She survives the war, earns a PhD, works in a museum, writes books. She does all of this while blind, yet the narrative never allows her access to the medical intervention that would restore her sight. Cataracts are treatable. By the book’s timeline, she lives in an era where surgery is available. But the author keeps her blind because her blindness serves his aesthetic.

Instead of giving her autonomy, he adds more cruelty—rape, traumatic brain injury, land mines, a magical diamond subplot. Shock value accumulates while her agency stays static. The prose takes priority over the character.

Across all three books, the protagonist is sacrificed to something else:

• Burke’s satire replaces Natalie’s agency.
• Fawcett’s commitment to format replaces Emily’s interiority.
• Doerr’s descriptive agenda replaces Marie-Laure’s autonomy.

None of these characters are allowed to become fully realized. Their constraints come from authorial preference, not narrative necessity.

A protagonist doesn’t need to be likable or triumphant, but they do need the chance to be a person. They need interiority, choice, contradiction, growth, failure—something that belongs to them rather than to the author’s agenda.

When a book denies that, the character becomes a prop. The narrative calls it sophistication, restraint, realism. But the cost is paid by a protagonist who never gets to want anything, understand anything, or choose anything.

That’s why Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium landed at two stars for me. The concepts work. The prose works. But the protagonists are never allowed to fully exist, and the books treat that as a feature rather than a flaw.

All the Light We Cannot See earned one star because it takes this pattern to an extreme—Marie-Laure’s agency is not just limited, it’s systematically erased.

When character sacrifice becomes the foundation of the narrative, the narrative itself is weakened. No amount of technical polish compensates for a protagonist who’s been denied the chance to be a person.

REVIEW: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (2-stars)

Yesteryear is as domestic horror disguised as homesteading satire. Burke establishes almost immediately that Natalie is unreliable - she references a Whole Foods that may not have existed in her supposed era (there's only one WF in Idaho, est in 2012 in Boise) and describes a 500-acre property with the reverence of someone who probably has no idea how long a mile is (500 acres is less than 1 mi by 1 mi squre). These aren't authorial oversights. They're tells.

But the real horror is Caleb's systematic drugging of his wife. Over 15 years, he and his son (and possibly his parents) keep Natalie in a pharmaceutical haze whether it's Valium or horse tranquilizers is hard to say.  The first valium were supplied by his mother Amelia, who spends her own days drinking Chardonnay and disappearing into chemical dependency. Natalie's memory gaps, her inability to recognize her own children, her confusion about what's real: these are the direct consequences of chemical control. By the final section, Natalie can't distinguish between actual events and delusion, and we genuinely don't know if that final interview with her college roommate happened or was another drug-induced hallucination.

This is genuinely dark stuff. But here's where the book loses me: Burke sets up Amelia's parallel decline as a smoking gun: the mother-in-law visibly wasting away, cognitively compromised, on the exact same substances that Natalie consumes. This detail appears and disappears. The author never returns to it. We never see Amelia's story, never explore what it means that an entire family operates on the principle of chemical control of women. Shannon tells Natalie directly: "In order for me to be a homewrecker, you would have to have a home for me to wreck, and you don't. You don't even have a family. What you have is a business." That line is devastating:  it delivers the realization that Caleb's entire family conspired to build and maintain a fantasy that kept Natalie compliant and isolated. And then the book largely abandons this realization.

The children are parentified to catastrophic degrees. Mary, at 15, slaps her mother across the face and lectures her on behavior while complicit in drugging her. Clementine initially leaves at age 16 with all but one of her younger siblings, and returns 15 years later to rescue the rest of them.  She says in response to learning her mother is "constantly moving in and out of a pharmaceutical haze": "Perfect. That's just perfect." By the book's end, we learn Mary has written her own story and works at Whole Foods, which feels like authorial commentary, but it's never clarified. Maybe it's paid advertisement or a wink at influencer endorsement.

Burke's satire of influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric has real bite. But the cost of that satire is steep: the characters are abused to the point of becoming cautionary tales rather than people. Natalie could have been a story about a woman who realizes she's trapped by a man and a family invested in her delusion and chooses to leave, or chooses to stay, or discovers the trap was never real. Instead, we're left in ambiguity that feels less like literary technique and more like the author chose psychological torment over resolution.

The unreliability works as a narrative device. But by the end, you're not reading about Natalie's survival. You're reading about a woman so thoroughly broken that you're not sure what's real anymore and the book never quite earns that level of darkness because we come in late in the game.  Does Natalie simply deserve this fate because she's unkind? How ironic.

UPDATE: Opting out of the Catholic Church

 This is a short update to my post: Opting Out of Churches: I Wanted to Get Excommunicated, But Here's What Actually Works

I have received the signed USPS postcards for both Catholic churches;  the church nearest me in the same state has already sent back a letter confirming that they have annotated their records and that my contact information is not in their files.  Still pending the postcard from the Lutheran church. 

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett (2-stars)

Another Hugo reading list book, "Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales" is the 3rd book in the Emily Wild series. Emily's refusal to have an interior life stops reading as restraint and starts reading as evasion.

Throughout the trilogy, Emily processes experience clinically. She journals about magical encounters like they're field notes. She observes Wendell's emotional labor without reciprocating it. She finds him physically attractive but fundamentally mismatches his values. And when she finally admits to missing him—the single moment of genuine emotional depth in this 300+ page book—she frames it as clinical observation: "I missed Wendell with a sudden and painful ache that left me short of breath, a sensation that would have surprised me had I not been experiencing it regularly, even when he'd been there beside me." Even her longing is processed as data.

This wouldn't matter if the book was actually a journal or field notes. Real journals have interiority. Real scholars question their own biases and feelings. But these "journals" just read like convenient first-person narration. The dated chapter headers feel like window dressing—there's no sustained reflection, no self-examination, no moment where Emily genuinely reckons with why she's with Wendell or what she actually wants.

Wendell doesn't just observe her needs—he solves them thoughtfully: protecting her with Veil-sewn cloaks he carefully adjusts as circumstances change, tailoring her clothing so she actually looks like herself instead of a shapeless outline, commissioning faeries to create an entire library of journals for her work. Emily's response is to complain they're too fancy. She doesn't examine these acts. She doesn't thank him. She doesn't let them matter.

The book compounds this by piling narrative complications onto an already thin emotional foundation. A wicked stepmother a la "Snow White" repents offstage and asks for "just give me a nice ADU, Dear"—completely unearned, never explained. A grandfather's secret journal reveals a unashamed faerie serial killer who drips blood everywhere and lives in the castle. A new layer of lore gets grafted onto the existing mythology. None of this deepens Emily or Wendell's relationship. It just makes the book busier.

What's genuinely interesting gets sacrificed to plot density. Wendell created a love nest for the lesbian couple from the previous book and lets Emily visit them—that's touching and unexpected. But the characters remain one-dimensional plot devices. There's an underwater castle accessible only to mortals that serves as sanctuary, a refuge where different rules apply—but Emily never considers it as her own safe space. Poe (the small one) gains depth and affection, but Emily never advocates for herself, never asks what she actually wants from faerie queenship, never negotiates with the people making her clothes about functional specifications even though she's the actual the queen.

She won't put her notebooks in the magical pockets of her new garments because she's afraid they'll disappear. She picks the plainest gown from many options because she's committed to being unremarkable. She refuses special treatment based on an unfounded and implied belief she doesn't deserve it. This isn't humility. It's a refusal to inhabit her own agency. And after three books, that refusal has shifted from interesting neurodivergent coding into something more like punishment.

The book abuses Emily through systematic self-abnegation and refuses her the depth it claims to offer. You finish reading journals that never actually examine the person writing them. The abuse isn't physical or magical—it's narrative. Emily is kept so carefully at a distance that you never know what she actually feels or wants, and neither does she.

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett 

RATING: 2-stars

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett (3 stars)

The Emily Wilde books are part of my Hugo nominee reading list.  I found the second book amusing and fun to read. The plot engine works well: Emily and Wendell flee Cambridge after publishing groundbreaking research, pursued by Wendell's homicidal stepmother who wants to eliminate him as a rival claimant to the faerie throne. They rescue two missing academics trapped in faerie limbo, then Emily ventures into Wendell's kingdom to retrieve his cat—the only thing that can cure him of mysterious poisoning. She agrees to marry him. They reclaim his throne. The adventure elements are engaging, the stakes escalate pleasantly, and there's genuine pleasure in the narrative momentum.

Fawcett's interiority remains primarily Emily's, though a section where Wendell writes in her journal gives us his voice—a good choice that shows rather than tells his emotional investment. The relationships with the "small ones" (Poe and the new character Snowbell) gain depth and genuine affection. Supporting characters like Emily's niece Ariadne and department chair Farris Rose function primarily as plot devices. Rose begins as an antagonist wanting to fire both Emily and Wendell, but after the assassination attempt and magical fiasco in Wendell's class, he joins the trip and becomes an ally. Both characters are so flat and superfluous that removing them from the story would not materially change the narrative.

But the central problem persists: there is no real chemistry between Emily and Wendell. Emily finds him physically attractive:  he has the prettiest golden locks and his green eyes make her lose composure. But that very marginal physical attraction exists alongside a fundamental mismatch in how they value and experience the world. Wendell is pathologically tidy, finds deep satisfaction in decorating and arranging spaces, attributes this to "house elf" ancestors. Emily observes that his efforts make spaces feel better, but she doesn't feel the drive to do it herself. She appreciates the outcome without understanding or sharing what motivates him. When she's shocked at how much better a space feels after he moves the rug and cleans the floor, she's making an intellectual observation, not experiencing genuine connection with his values.

This echoes the first book: he decorated the cottage and said "if you don't understand, you may never get it." She still doesn't understand. He continues performing emotional and domestic labor while she benefits and observes without meeting him. This includes tailoring and enchanting her clothing items so that she is protected but also looks more stylish.  There’s a lot of repeated emphasis on Emily being “mousy” and unattractive.  The "opposites attract" framework doesn't create interesting friction or genuine connection, just one-directional emotional labor that the book frames as romance. Wendell's "unrequited love finally requited" arc resolves with Emily agreeing to marry him while he is unconscious and because it solves a practical problem and she's attracted to him, not because she's actually reciprocating his emotional investment.

There's also a darker undercurrent: enchantments work like being roofied or groomed. Emily experiences memory gaps, foggy recollection, loss of agency when enchanted. The book treats enchantment similarly to predatory grooming—what happens to her with Wendell's stepmother, what the ice king did to her in Book 1. Having her agree to marriage with a faerie king after experiencing that kind of violation, without the book explicitly reckoning with the trauma or consent issues, is troubling. The romantic resolution doesn't acknowledge the gravity of what's been done to her. There's an implied sex scene in a tent in the Alps (Wendell uses magic to enchant her cloak into comfortable bedding), but it's not graphic—it codes as Young Adult despite the kidnapping, roofying, and manipulation throughout.

The anachronisms continue and deepen. Everyone wears cloaks constantly, but historical photos from 1900-1910 show people in snowy regions wore winter coats and jackets, not cloaks. It's another example of using historical aesthetic detail: cloaks feel old-fashioned and atmospheric but demonstrate either a lack of  understanding of what people actually wore or failing to establish this aesthetic for this alt universe. This joins the real taxonomy words for invented faerie classifications and the other tonal inconsistencies from Book 1. The "cozy" label seems to mean "not dystopian" rather than actually cozy; the book is clearly a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements, and the romance isn't working.

If Book 3 continues with zero chemistry as the baseline and expects readers to accept "he loves her, therefore they belong together" as sufficient romance, I'm not interested. The adventure plot can only carry so much weight.

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett 

RATING: 3 stars

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

This is the first book in a Hugo-nominated series and a genuinely fun book to read. Fawcett has created a premise with real charm—the faerie economics, the slow-burn romance between Emily and Wendell with its constant crackling tension, the humor that runs through the scholarly voice. The adventure works; the magic feels tactile and interesting. There's genuine pleasure in following Emily through the woods to find an enchanted tree, in watching Wendell charm his way through social situations that would paralyze her, in the domestic sparring between them where he understands something she keeps missing. The anachronistic elements—the wood-splitting lesbians, the bohemian freedom of the village community—read as charming rather than jarring. Fawcett isn't trying to write a museum piece of 1909 England; she's creating a world where faeries are real and certain social rules bend differently. That's actually enjoyable. And yet, as I read, I kept bumping up against choices the book makes about what it wants to be, choices that create real tensions between the story it's telling and the framework it's supposedly working within.

The author presents us with an alt universe where faeries exist and can be studied—but are elusive enough that few people really have deep knowledge of them. Our chief protagonist, Emily, is a relentless researcher driven by a deep desire to learn new facts and collect data. She's an intellectual and an adventurer who strives to be "first." She's balanced by her friend Wendell, a handsome bon vivant capable of charming just about everyone around him.

The book operates across three distinct layers:

Layer 1 -- Faerie Economics: The premise works beautifully: fieldwork to go find faeries, ask them questions, learn about how they operate. They don't like money or metal, but value trades of goods for information, for example. The trade of the brownie Poe of bread for shoveling snow is a great example and maybe that's "cozy." These are the faerie economics and the delightful surface-level details—descriptions of household furnishings and nesting that create a genuinely charming tone.

Layer 2 -- Romance and Reciprocity: The adventure parts are genuinely interesting and fun. Hiking through the woods to find an enchanted tree or a faerie winter fair, the magical artifacts and words are all engaging as are the "fight" scenes and magical conversion. The "will they/won't they" tension between Emily and Wendell is well-maintained. The role reversal in the domestic sphere is particularly effective—where she questions the value of decorating the rental cottage because they'll only be there a short time, and he basically says "if you don't understand, you may never get it" but she lets him do it anyway.

Interestingly, I'm reading "A Little Bit More Social" by Nicholas Epley in parallel, and there's a fascinating dynamic between Emily and Wendell. She wants to be "by the book" and pay for all her meals while doing fieldwork to avoid bias, but creates bias by doing so. Wendell has to teach her about developing trust through genuine connection and allowing others agency. Creating space for reciprocal interaction is what allows relationships to develop. By the end of the story, Emily demonstrates through her advice to Aud about gifts for Wendell that she's picking up on this—she now thinks of him and what would make him happy, translating the villagers' gratitude into something meaningful to him specifically.

Layer 3 -- Horror: But then there's the third layer: kidnapping and child trafficking, homicidal rage and torture. Emily being enchanted to control her and cutting off her own finger with the axe to maintain some control is sheer body horror. The horror of being enchanted and the clinical way she processes that entire traumatic experience—journalling it, trying to track days—suggests something important about her character.

In some ways, Emily is neurodivergent coded. Her inability to read danger and heed warning signs (even with Wendell standing on the other side of a river bank warning her and trying to get her to step back); her incomprehension of Wendell's care for her and her repeated mentions that she can't "read" the emotions on his face (and the faces of others), constantly creating misunderstanding by not reading others or social norms; the horror of being enchanted, cutting off her own finger and processing that entire traumatic experience clinically—these all suggest neurodivergent coding. Interestingly, this context helps explain what might otherwise be historical implausibility.

The book is set in 1909-10, yet the social environment doesn't really communicate that era. Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge, an institution that didn't grant women academic status until 1948. Women could not get a Cambridge degree until after WWII, let alone be a tenure track professor. Forget about holding an academic position. And while Wendell reaches out to Emily's host in fake Iceland to arrange to show up—suddenly her squalid cottage is a 3-bedroom house with space for Wendell and his two student assistants to join Emily. In the early 20th century, an unmarried woman and unmarried man sharing lodgings would have been highly irregular and would have had serious consequences for both of them professionally.

More problematically, Wendell is casually sleeping with village women in the house he's sharing with Emily and the students, and no mention is made of why casual sex is laughed off in an era when reliable birth control and social norms were opposed to this sort of behavior. He is potentially leaving women pregnant or infected with STDs, and the book glosses over that predatory behavior as part of his "charm." The women are grateful for the opportunity to have slept with him and think of him as a sex doll? There are no shotgun weddings, and it's all much more bohemian than I would imagine for an isolated rural village in fake Iceland.

This might be less concerning if Emily's neurodivergent coding explained her obliviousness to these dynamics. But the book itself doesn't address the consequences; it simply ignores them.

Sometimes, I think that authors choose to set books in the pre-technology past just to avoid the complications of computers, internet and cell phones. The stories read like they are set in contemporary times except for descriptions of long skirts and horse-drawn conveyances.

It's telling that Fawcett renames Iceland but keeps Cambridge. If she were truly committed to building an alternate world free from historical constraints, renaming the university would have been trivial—call it Ashford College or Thornton University. But she keeps "Cambridge," and that choice reveals the problem. Cambridge carries centuries of institutional authority and prestige; it lends credibility to Emily's position in a way an invented university wouldn't. But that same real name also carries the historical baggage that women couldn't actually be there as degree-granting students in 1909, let alone as professors. By keeping the real institution's name while ignoring the real constraints, Fawcett gets to have it both ways: the atmospheric weight and authority of a real place, without having to reckon with what that place actually was. It's selective use of historical detail taken to its logical endpoint—keeping what feels grounded and authoritative, discarding what complicates the narrative.

Once you suspend disbelief entirely for this alt world—there's a Department of Dryadology at Cambridge that has female professors and students in 1909—then we can move on to some of the other challenges, such as a young villager having a same-sex love interest in another village that is accepted by her neighbors as normal and sweet. Okay, Boston marriages were not unheard of at that time, but the later conversation about dating history and a spurned lesbian lover attempting to burn down a barn was emblematic of how alternative we're talking here.

Finally, my other objection is the description of "cozy." There's not much cozy in kidnapping and torture, so I can only imagine that the "cozy" part refers to the emphasis on clothing and household furnishings. It's more like a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements and a scholarly framing. The academic tone and the relationship growth don't erase the fact that there are serious crimes and real harm happening. The contrast between Emily's intellectual, almost humorous observations and the actual darkness of what's going on might feel tonal, but that doesn't make it cozy.

One last note: Emily overly depends on the word "habit" to a noticeable degree.

Opting Out of Churches: I Wanted to Get Excommunicated, But Here's What Actually Works

As a child, I felt I had no choice in the matter of religion:  baptism, first communion, confirmation, going to church on weekends or catechism on Tuesday nights when I would rather be doing anything else. 

I have often wondered: why I couldn't just request excommunication from the Catholic Church? There should be a certificate, right?  It seemed simple: I don't believe in it, I haven't participated in it for decades, and I don't want to be counted among its members. Surely there was a form. A process. Something.

With all the recent headlines about the schism created by the Vatican excommunicating six bishops and 750 priests and any lay followers of Society of Saint Pious X (SSPX) -- I decided to dig into this a bit more.  What I learned is that excommunication is something the church does to you and it is a punishment for heresy or transgression. You can't request it. You can't opt in. It's an action the institution takes when it decides you've crossed a line. If you just want to leave quietly, you're still in their files.

But there is a way out. Not excommunication. Something better: formal defection. Annotation. A paper trail that says, explicitly and on record, "I was here, and then I chose to leave, and this is not my belief system."

That's what I'm doing this week. That's what I'm asking you to consider too, if you've ever felt the same frustration I did.

I was baptized at a Lutheran church when I was a few months old. I didn't have a choice in the matter - my parents made that decision for me, without my input, without my understanding, without my consent. It was just what people did and it was considered "normal."

By the time I was in elementary school, we switched to catholicism, adding more sacraments to the list:  holy communion and reconciliation.  I was a kid in third, fourth, fifth grade - still not choosing, still just doing what my family told me to do because that's what you did. Then confirmation, as a minor making a "choice" that wasn't actually a choice. My mother says I could have said "no" but she made it really clear that there would be hell to pay and I actually thought that there would be an earthquake and the roof of the church would crack open if I did that. 

I haven't stepped foot in a church for worship or services in nearly forty years. I don't identify as Christian or with any other religious tradition. These childhood commitments that were made for me but don't represent me. They never did after I was old enough to think for myself.

And yet, somewhere in those institutional files, I'm still being counted. In their membership numbers. In their statistics. In their records of who belongs to them.

Any genealogist knows: Churches keep detailed records. Baptisms. Sacraments. Confirmations. Communions. These are logged, filed, and retained indefinitely. They use these records to calculate membership numbers, which they report to their denominations, which get used in funding decisions and institutional statistics. You're in their database. If you were baptized anywhere, you're counted. Even if you've never set foot in that building again.

Here's what really bothered me: fifty years from now, when someone in my family is doing genealogy research, they're going to find those records and they'll think, "Oh, she was Catholic/Lutheran."

They won't know that I never chose this. That these were things done to me as a child by my parents. That I spent the last forty years not believing any of it.

The record will misrepresent me, not maliciously, but completely. It'll tell the future a story about who I am that isn't true.

This is a data problem. It's a consent problem. It's an institutional power problem.

We spend a lot of time talking about data privacy. About opting out of data brokers. About getting your information removed from credit reporting agencies. About controlling your own digital footprint. But for some reason, when it comes to religious institutions, we just... accept that they keep records on us in perpetuity, count us in their membership numbers, and there's nothing we can do about it.

That's not right.

Formal Defection: The Thing That Actually Exists

Turns out both the Lutheran and Catholic churches have processes for this.

The Catholic Church has a thing called "formal defection" in their canon law. It's not heavily publicized. Most priests probably won't bring it up. But it exists. If you were baptized Catholic and you want to formally withdraw, you can request it.

Lutheran churches handle it differently, but they do honor formal withdrawal requests and will annotate your baptismal records.

The key thing -- and this is important -- is annotation, not erasure. We're not trying to pretend the baptism never happened. It did happen. It's part of the historical record. What we're doing is adding a notation that says, "This person was baptized/confirmed/received communion, and they have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from this institution and should not be counted as a member."

That notation matters. It preserves the truth of what happened while also making it absolutely clear what the person's actual position is. Future genealogists won't be confused. The record won't lie about who I am.

How to Actually Do This

It's straightforward, and you don't need a lawyer or a priest to hold your hand through it.

Step one: Identify which churches you have sacramental records with. If you were baptized, you know that one. If you did first communion or confirmation, you know those churches too.

Step two: Write a letter to each church. Keep it simple. Include:

• Your current name
• Your name at the time of the sacrament (maiden name if applicable)
• The approximate date you were baptized/communed/confirmed
• A clear statement that you are permanently withdrawing from the church and do not consider yourself a member

Step three: Make your requests explicit:

• Remove your name from all active membership rosters
• Place a formal, permanent notation in their historical records (baptismal register, sacramental records, whatever they call it) stating that you have formally withdrawn
• Send you written confirmation that this has been done

Step four: Set a boundary. I put this in mine: "Please process this request administratively without sending clergy, elders, or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected."

They might not honor that boundary. But it's worth stating.

Step five: Send it certified mail, return receipt requested. You want a paper trail.

What to Say: The Template

I'm sharing the language from my own letters because it works. Here's what I used:

---

[Your mailing address]

[Date]

[Church name and address]

Dear [Pastor/Father name],

Please accept this letter as formal notification that I am permanently severing all ties and withdrawing my membership from [denomination], effective immediately.

[Brief context about when you received sacraments, under what name, and that it was decided by your parents/family, not by you]

These childhood actions did not reflect my personal beliefs then, nor do they now. I do not consider myself a member of [the church/this religious institution].

I request that you immediately take the following actions:

- Completely remove my name, contact information, and records from your active parish membership and administrative rosters.

- Place a permanent, formal written notation next to my entry in your [baptismal/sacramental/confirmation] register explicitly stating that I have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from church membership.

- Reply with a brief written confirmation to my mailing address verifying that my record has been updated and annotated.

Please process this request administratively without sending clergy or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected.

Sincerely,

[Your current name]

---

That's it. Clean. Direct. No emotion, no explanation, no room for debate. You're not asking permission. You're informing them of an action you're taking.

Why This Matters

If you've ever wondered, "Why can't I just opt out? Why am I still counted? Why do they get to keep my information?" this is your answer. You can opt out. There is a process. It's just not advertised, and most people don't know it exists.

This matters if:

• You were raised in a religious tradition you no longer identify with
• You're atheist or agnostic and tired of being counted as a member of something you don't believe in
• You converted to a different faith and want your records to reflect that
• You're just deeply uncomfortable with institutions keeping records on you without your ongoing consent
• You want your genealogical record to be accurate about who you actually were

It matters because your institutional identity shouldn't be determined by what your parents chose for you when you were an infant. It shouldn't persist just because you never formally objected. And it shouldn't be used in statistics that misrepresent your actual beliefs and affiliations.

The Bigger Picture

This is a workaround. It shouldn't have to be. Ideally, churches would make this easy. They'd have a form. A process. A way to formally withdraw that didn't require you to figure it out yourself and send certified letters.

But until they do, this is how you take back control of your own institutional record.

I'm sending my letters this week. I'll update this post once I get responses—which churches honor the requests, how quickly they process them, what they actually do with the annotations. Because real data matters. This isn't just theory; it's something people can actually do.

If you've been sitting with the same frustration I had—wanting out, not knowing how—now you know. You have more agency than you think. Your records belong to you. And you can demand they reflect the truth about who you actually are.

Go reclaim your institutional autonomy. The churches can survive without counting you.

REVIEW: "Talk to Me Nice" by Minda Harts (3-stars)

 Talk to Me Nice reads like a warm pep talk — as an audiobook, it feels like a supportive voice in your ear reminding you of things you already know but sometimes forget to practice. Minda Harts brings her trademark encouragement and identity‑centered perspective, offering relatable scenarios and steady affirmations aimed at helping readers find their voice and navigate early workplace dynamics.

For seasoned leaders or anyone who has read widely in communication, influence, or organizational behavior, this won’t break new ground. The concepts are familiar, and the framing is intentionally simple. But that’s also the point: this is a book designed for people at the beginning of their professional journey. The journal prompts at the end of each chapter are especially useful, giving newer professionals a structured way to reflect and build confidence.

I’d recommend this most strongly for early‑career readers — even older teens — who are just starting to think about communication, self‑advocacy, and leadership in a methodical way. As an audiobook, it’s an easy, encouraging listen. For more experienced readers, it’s pleasant reinforcement rather than revelation.

A Few Notes From This Year's Hugo Reading List: Do Not Sleep on the Novellas!

I loved every novella nominee I read this year. Most of them would work just as well, maybe better, for a young reader as any of the 650-page books currently marketed as YA or YA-adjacent. That's really the whole observation here. I'm not trying to relitigate the "why is YA bad" discourse that's apparently already all over TikTok -- I haven't watched any of it, and I don't need it to have an opinion based on what I actually read this season. I just want good books. Age category is beside the point.

The novellas earned their length. I went into this year's Hugo process already planning to rank Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz #1. I'd read it as an ARC last year and loved it. It's doing something genuinely distinct within the same broad territory as the rest of the category: identity, chosen family, and fulfillment, but through non-human, non-binary characters — robots and synthetic humans figuring out their own gender identities on their own terms (robot sex included, and it's funny). But the competition this year is genuinely stiff; every novella I picked up held its own. The Summer War by Naomi Novik, Cinder House, and The River Has Roots are all doing versions of the same thing from a different angle: twisting traditional fairy tale and mythological structures toward something that actually values female agency, love, and family — without tipping into sappiness or self-importance about it. (Cinder House in particular is spicy and genuinely weird, in the best way.) None of these books pad. Every worldbuilding choice and character beat is there because the story needs it, not because there's 500 pages to fill.

The doorstoppers didn't earn their length. I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar earlier this summer: 650 pages, nine Guardian Animals, a map promising nine palaces the story barely visits. There are real ideas in there (a genuinely compelling possession theme, a court intrigue plot that could've carried the whole book alone), but they're smothered under too many subplots and minor characters, all competing for space and none getting quite enough to develop properly. Bloated and thin at the same time -- that's what happens when length substitutes for structure instead of following from it.

I saw the same failure mode, from a different angle, across Tracy Deonn's Legendborn trilogy. Book one set up something specific — a grieving, academically advanced 16-year-old navigating exceptional circumstances, grounded by her father and her own competence. By book three, that infrastructure is just gone: her father barely appears, the protagonist's sidekick goes from the most competent person in the room to a coma-bound plot device for someone else's arc, and thematically loaded material — root magic as gendered power, a trafficking plot involving children — gets raised and never examined. Where Hodgson's problem is too many ideas with no room to breathe, Deonn's is real ideas set up carefully and then abandoned as the series goes on. Different mechanism, same result: a book that's long but not full.

Age classification isn't the variable that matters. Some of my favorite reading this Hugo season was the graphic novel category — The Space Cat, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Tana Ford, aimed at a much younger readership than any of the above, and doing more with confident, uncluttered storytelling than a lot of the "adult" nominees managed at ten times the length. A good book knows what it's doing with the space it has. That's it. That's the whole thesis.

Tomato Sauce - Equipment Essentials

If you are new to canning and curious about what kind of equipment you may need - here's an overview of what I use.  Typically, I can 100-150lbs of tomatoes in the fall and end up with 30-50 quarts of marinara.  I do not put in any spices, garlic or salt -- I halve the tomatoes (usually a roma variety like San Marzano, or Early Girl), squeeze the seeds and juice gently into a stainless steel mesh colander that is sitting in a bowl, and then process the tomatoes through the manual food mill.   I save the juice from the seeds to freeze and add to soups later (it also reduces the cooking time a bit - you'd be surprised how much water is in the center with the seeds). 

• Food mill - I have a Vittorio Food Mill which jams up but it's a good option
• Cooking/Stockpots: At least two large pots for sauce:
  
• Cuisinart 4-Piece Cookware Set, 12 Quarts, Chef's Classic Stainless Steel Pasta/Steamer, 77-412P1 (purchased for $75 in 2010, now $120 on Amazon)
• Prime Pacific 18/10 Stainless Steel 20 Quart Stock Pot With Glass Lid (paid $50 in 2010, now $68 on Amazon)
• I really like the 20 Qt pot and use it more thanI thought; this particular one has a very nice heavy bottom that helps minimize scorching/sticking. I also use cast iron heat diffusers on my stove burners.
• Bowls & Colanders: Very large colanders and stainless steel bowls - I got my massive colanders from family/garage sales
• Canning Equipment:
• Hot water bath canner (can be had cheap/free if you ask on Buy Nothing groups or check thrift stores)
• Pressure canner: In 2011, I upgraded my hot water bath canner to a Presto 01781 23-Quart Pressure Canner and Cooker which cost me $85 on Amazon (it's now a whopping $185).  Totally worth it and a real upgrade from hot water bath canning for quarts of tomato sauce as well as low acid canning in bulk.
• Jars, lids and bands! Ask on your local "Buy Nothing" group and look for these in thrift stores - a dozen jars costs around $12-15, so a used mason jar shouldn't cost more than 25-50 cents in a thrift store (they are smoking crack if they charge more for these mass produced items). 
• Always check your jars for cracks and feel the top edge of the jar for nicks or "flea bites" that convert them to dry storage or hobby use but no longer safe for canning.
• Lid rack is optional and nice to have
• Jar funnels - I have three of these. They are incredibly helpful for reducing spills when pouring into your jars.  Look for aluminum versions at thrift stores and online - much better than buying the plastic versions.
• Pyrex Measuring cups:
• I got an 8-cup Pyrex measuring cup as part of a set of 3 from Amazon for $17 in 2015 (now $26) and it is one of my favorite kitchen items:  I can dip the clean Pyrex container into the sauce, use a silicone spatula to wipe the bottom and pour cleanly into the sterilized jars next to the stove.  The L-shaped handles hook onto the edge of the pot while I am cleaning jars and preparing the next batch.
• Wooden spoons, silicone spatulas, knives, and lots of towels for cleaning and wiping your area (I just throw wet towels right into the washer and run a load after).

TIME: this is the most important part.  You can do this in one day but pay close attention to your stove and the flame height.  You don't want to reduce your sauce too quickly -- it will bubble and spatter and you risk scorching on the bottom of the pot.  If you do start to scorch - don't panic - pull it off the heat, pour the sauce into big stainless steel bowls you have on hand and THEN scrape and clean the pot. This way you don't have as much burned flavor in your sauce.  If you have time to leave it on super low overnight - this will result in much thicker sauce, fewer jars, and less canning time. 

If this is a lot for you - there may be options - some states have canneries that are available to the public.  My friend goes to Castlewood Cannery (https://www.russellcountyva.us/237/Canneries) which has a gorgeous operation for canning whatever you bring.  These places don't all have websites - you have to call and have a conversation to find out what they offer.  The Pick Your Own website suggests contacting your local ag extension office and they have a list of canneries and community kitchens here: https://pickyourown.org/canneries.htm