Why Am I Thinking About Hell?

An Autobiographical Review Of Hell Is A World Without You

Content Warning: This post contains themes of being raised according to someone else’s religious beliefs, self-harm, physical abuse by a parent, sexual harassment, and transphobia.

I did something different over Thanksgiving: I read a novel. It's the first time I read a novel since freshman year of college, over 20 years ago. I loved reading as a younger kid. Of course, as a nine year old kid I relied on my parents to buy me books. I gobbled up the Hardy Boys and other mysteries meant for kids much older than me.

I continued that trend of reading things intended for older audiences, talking my parents into buying me roleplaying game books, even though I had no one to play with and was far too shy to actually reach out to other kids to form a gaming group at that time. (I never heard of any kids who played.) All of my reading crashed to a halt when I was caught sneaking away from religious school classes to read a copy of the Cyberpunk rules. My younger brother's babysitter played Cyberpunk and talked about it sometimes, so my parents knew what I was getting into and they were not happy.

Joke's kind of on them. I moved away from reading to playing into Magic: The Gathering. They were happier spending hundreds of dollars a year on getting me the new cards to try and win tournaments. than reading something that may corrupt with with unapproved ideas about life.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read Hell Is A World Without You by Jason Kirk. I got it because I knew the author from his college football podcasting and progressive writing. A novel about teenagers being raised as Evangelical Christians seemed like it would be about as far from my experience as possible. I was Jewish. I was the only Jewish kid in almost all of my classes, sometimes my entire grade. I never knew anyone at school who was openly Evangelical or talked about God in the context of any religion.

For the first third of the book, it felt like anthropology, seeing a fictional example of a culture I'd heard stories about but never experienced. The only thing that really touched me on a personal level was when the narrator talked about stabbing himself in the eye. I recoiled because I suffered a long term eye injury three years ago and part of the treatment was getting medical injections into the eye. It sounds much worse than it is—doctors can numb the eye beforehand. I'd been interested in Hell Is A World Without You since it came out, but decided to wait until it was on audiobook because of that eye injury. I can fully function in everyday life and in work that relies on reading screens, but the physically printed word might make it harder to get back into novels.

Everything started to flip when Sophie's character is introduced in more detail in the second year of high school. Sophie is the pastor's tomboy niece. She's in homeschool and being groomed to marry a Christian man and make babies, despite clearly being smarter and more academic than the narrator. My dad used to tell me that I was the last in the family line so it was up for me to continue it by getting married and having babies. He also told me that he and my mom had to get married at the UN Interfaith Chapel because he was Jewish and she was brought up Catholic, so only the UN would accept both families. The pressure felt more than a bit hypocritical so I never bought into it.

For most of my life, my father wanted to be a rabbi on some level. Part of that meant raising a godly son. I hated all the stories from Jewish myth in religious school. It felt like we got the boring, first draft of mythology while the Greeks were far more interesting. Give me the Odyssey! But my dad forced me to go to religious school and Hebrew School and have additional make up tutoring to be able to have a Bar Mitzvah. I largely recited from memorization of recorded sounds, never understanding what the Hebrew prayers meant. I just knew there'd be cash at the end from dozens of family members and I guess other random people who showed up. Never met or talked to any of them.

I felt for all the kids in Hell Is A World Without You in some way, because they were all controlled by parents and religious institutions who wanted them to grow up the right way. They all cared about each other more than any adults cared about them. I wanted to care for them in a way I rarely do for fictional characters.

But Sophie's story of being the most controlled was the biggest page out of my own life. When I was in second grade, I was far and away the best player on my hockey team. I was a fat kid and have always been overweight, but on the ice I was a wall who could shut down the attack and get the puck back. No one scored from my left side of the rink when I was out there. No one. But my dad turned me against the sport because it conflicted with Hebrew school. His negative influence forced me to quit the only time I ever felt good about my body.

I never felt like I knew anyone who could truly relate to that experience. It took my therapist years to figure out exactly why this was so painful for me. But in Hell Is A World Without You, minister's niece Sophie has a kind of similar experience. She ran cross country until some older perverted men were staring at her chest as she ran. The pastor convinced her that it was her problem for tempting those men so she had to quit and focus on religion. Very different gender dynamics, but its the only time I've seen someone else express that loss of control over feeling good in my own body and the corrupting influence of religion that I felt as a kid.

I cried off and on for the rest of the novel. Some were tears of joy. More were tears of "yeah, my high school experience was a mindfuck by many of my elders." I kept wondering "does everyone who reads this book cry this much?" That’s probably why I can’t write a traditional review.

The irony is my rabbi in high school was one of my best influences. We talked about how to become an adult and try to do some good in the world. As a Reform rabbi who trained as a zoologist before becoming a rabbi, he instilled a good understanding of all the exceptions to Jewish religious law to preserve someone's life. Confirmation class was the only place I got something close to sex education. My rabbi led a discussion about whether we were able to buy condoms without embarrassment and the one fearless girl in class said yes, she would be fine. The rest of us saw her courage while we were embarrassed to talk and realized we weren't actually ready for sex.

The problematic religious influences came from my dad. He tried to plant in my mind that I had some type of destiny to be some kind of upstanding moral leader, because somehow I was better than everyone else. He was the congregation president at that time, working to raise money for the temple's own building instead of renting a room next to a donut shop. It was less about faith, honest conversations about God, or even dishonest conversations about God. Thankfully he’s found a way to get closer to God decades later and those conversations are much better.

He said he saw something in me. I saw a person in the mirror I didn't like all that much. I was a fool about a lot of things at 16. Most 16 year olds are! But I was right about not having a likable personality. Voted most serious kid in school. Too angry. Too hurt to actually show the vulnerability that everyone my age had deep down.

Instead of getting to play or watch football on Sundays, I had to be the teacher's aide for Sunday school throughout most of high school. I didn't have to actually do a lot, just be around. Sophie's the character who does the most work for the megachurch, translating the pastor in ASL. As I saw more and more of how she was being controlled, all I cared about was her finding a way out of that church.

Eventually Sophie has a breakdown senior year and the central character steps forward to help her out, which sets her on a path of freedom from the megachurch.

I never had a best friend like that in high school, but I did have friends who gave me what I needed during my crisis in senior year. I was recruited to the Academic Decathlon team as one of the smartest kids in school and they needed a ringer with a competitive streak to try and beat our more successful rival. I didn't know anyone there before joining. We mainly studied and didn't hang out much.

One night, I missed our practice / study session from 5-7:30 PM. I didn't say why or call in sick. I just drove to a parking lot near the back of the school and showed up in the classroom, eyes red, around 7. I said there was a major incident at home and I had to stay around and off the phone to make sure everyone was safe. My younger brother was in 4th grade and struggling with math problems. My mom tried to help but failed and they started screaming at each other. We didn't know at the time that he had some short term memory problems that made math difficult.

I went into my little brother's room to try and help. It was the only time he let me in without protesting. We weren’t close. He said he was afraid that my mom was going to hit him. I panicked and after doing what I could to calm him down, I tried explaining how much my mom had overreacted about math problems and the feelings she was causing. That's when my mom said how dare I bring that up and she described how her father used to bounce her against the wall. I was pretty sure about this in the abstract. After all, I'd never met anyone on my mom's side of the family. I knew I couldn't leave them alone in the house to go to Academic Decathlon study.

Once my dad got home and I could leave, I drove to what was left of practice and started crying my eyes out in the parking lot. That's when I absolutely knew I had to get out of that house for college and be far enough away that it wasn't an easy drive. Berkeley was out. I told my teammates what happened. I had to let it out. They didn't really know what to say. None of them had been around a situation like that and we hadn't built personal bonds. But they stopped practice, hugged me, and did what they could to console me. I felt loved in a way I'd rarely felt before. It was compassion I'd never felt before. I'd gone through a traumatic experience and everyone just wanted to give me shoulders to cry on to help deal with it.

That type of compassion in incredibly important and Hell Is A World Without You is full of that love between characters. I think I cried so much because the book was so full of what I was going through and what I needed at that time in my life.

It wasn't just one incident senior year. One of the things we had to do for Academic Decathlon was deliver a 7 minute speech and some improvisational speaking. I was the only person on the team with any kind of improv background, so I taught them a few things about how to calm down. The prompt is a piece of paper. It won’t bite! Everyone else on our team had an interesting personality to shine while our rivals were a bunch of dorks. Confidence boosted!

For my speech, I decided to largely adapt my college application essay because it was a good story about trying to help a widow of a military veteran find some sort of justice after her husband was exposed to radiation during military service and died of cancer. But when I read what I wrote to all of my teammates, there was confusion in the audience. Mr. Davis, who coached the team, gave me the brutal truth: it sounded like the first and second half were written by two separate people.

I read my statement for the first time in months and wow, the two pages were written by different people. My mother was in graduate school and teaching college-level composition then, so I went to her for help editing the essay. The first page was more of her voice, far more formal and less personal. I was mortified to let someone else take my voice. It's a good thing that my grades and test scores were so high that no one actually read my essay at UCLA.

I was rattled and couldn't fix the speech, so Mr. Davis yelled "quack quack quack" at me. At the time, my favorite teacher was well on his way toward convincing to go to the University of Oregon, his alma mater, so the duck call loosened me up and got me to think about my own voice. I was all in on Oregon until I visited UCLA. I started actually having fun with the speech and with my teammates for the first time. Fun wasn't valued in my house and I didn’t really learn what i was missing until college.

I finished 4th in my small county (out of 30 in my category) the Speech event. I finished 4th and 5th in a lot of things. The top 3 finishers in each event got to go on stage and get a medal at the end of the year banquet. Except the top 3 overall scorers weren't awarded. You'd think that the highest overall scores would be given the biggest awards but nope, we weren't mentioned. I got so close on so many things that I was third overall but had nothing to show for it and was devastated. My teammates consoled me again. There's that compassion from people who just realized showing compassion was the right thing to do. The most attractive girl on the team hugged me and I had brief visions of something more romantic because I was a teenage boy clueless about these things. When I got home, my parents focused on how unfair it was, reinforcing my negative headspace.

Any time I was exposed to religion growing up, I questioned why trying to instill faith was so coercive. No one encouraged me to try and figure out my own beliefs. I wanted to try and be a good person. I didn't always know what that meant and needed far more examples of people being good and doing good. I needed more people like my academic decathlon teammates.

Judaism isn't really a coercive religion. We don't have missionaries and try to convert people. We don't believe in Hell. So how was a book about teenagers who have been convinced that they are going to Hell unless they do exactly the right thing so affecting?

At the risk of spoiling the novel's epilogue, I felt several of the characters relatable, but I felt a real kinship with Sophie that I couldn't fully explain. There was something about her depiction that felt like more than living with controlling family who wanted to see me go on a certain direction. Sophie was the main character who played around with their hair and their look, not quite conforming to gender roles. I had the weirdest dye jobs in my high school, eventually settling on a shade of red so dark my hair looked kind of purple. It was my third accident of due jobs getting an unexpected color but this one I loved.

In the epilogue 20 years later, "Sophie" is a professor who has come out as a demi-girl, feeling some connection with femininity but also with being nonbinary. They've changed their name to Kori. When a character is authentic, sometimes you just know. On some level I felt it for most of the novel. We don’t know when Kori came out. I started coming out as nonbinary 20 years after high school. I never really loved myself until I did. I've never put it in quite that way, but demi-boy is probably the best gender descriptor for me. And I was at my happiest when I could teach classes as a college professor, but that career path didn't work out.

I felt like I was the only kid going through these things at my high school because I kind of was. Any time I've talked to friends about my high school experience they say, "wow your school was weird." No cliques? But not being able not relate to others about my religious experience just made it worse.

I don't have regrets for not really figuring out how to express this part of my life until my early 40s. We can only do the best we can in the moment we live it. Then we can go on to try and make sure other people have it better than ourselves. Folks who are compassionate can go even further, trying to uplift people who have different experiences to focus on our shared humanity and try to help us imagine how we really aren't so different after all, no matter what it may seem like on the surface.

In 2021, I was still reeling from my first queer mentor sexually harassing me as soon as I tried to come out instead of helping me come out. Few could think of an often masculine person who loved college football as a nonbinary person, let alone a sexual harassment survivor. Jason Kirk and the rest of the Shutdown Fullcast crew was, out of nowhere, one of the stronger voices of nonbinary acceptance and questioning gender roles as just a construct as conservative states started passing anti-trans laws. When Donald Trump's bigoted anti-trans election ads hit a crescendo on television, Mr. Kirk used his weekly newsletter to try and spread hope to trans and nonbinary people.

Many of us have gone through a lot and we will likely endure even harder times over the next few years. I've been so broken at times by so many of the things that I've gone through in life that I wonder sometimes if I've got anything to give. The lovable teens in Hell Is A World Without You reminded me that no matter what we're going through, compassion is something we can give. We have to have faith that a shared sense of compassion and love of humanity can bring us together.

On a personal level, part of me has thought of writing a semi-autobiographical novel for years, ever since I almost died. But I never knew what I wanted to write about. My life had lots of periods of “wow this is awful” but I didn’t want to dwell in that headspace while writing or ask others to while reading. After reading Hell Is A World Without You I asked myself what would I write about and suddenly had five pages of notes where Iowa football starting 12-0 had an important role. Adapting some of my time in graduate school into a story of finding a balance between work and life, valuing compassionate friends more than professional prestige might actually work. Possibly pursuing this is much scarier than discussing undefeated Iowa!