GOOD CHRISTIAN GIRL by L.L. Edgerton is a forthcoming literary novel about childhood religious trauma that continues into adulthood.

As a child, Lee Ellis was surrounded by spiritual hypocrisy and her mother's eating disorders. Twenty years later, Lee navigates the isolating routines of marriage and parenthood. As her depression segues into a series of dark, unsettling dreams, she realizes that she needs to address her mental health before the past destroys her. Written in the style of a personal narrative, GOOD CHRISTIAN GIRL will appeal to readers of Sylvia Plath’s themes of domesticity and mental decline (The Bell Jar), Michelle Richmond's nuanced prose (The Year of Fog) and Margaret Atwood's blunt, often somber explorations of the psychology encompassing relationships and sex (Cat’s Eye).

excerpt from

GOOD CHRISTIAN GIRL

It occurred to me for the first time that there was solace to be found in food, that there were moments in which a dessert was so satisfying that it could be a temporary bandage, of sorts, on all the parts of my emotions that were laid bare and open and vulnerable and hurting.

I didn’t understand how that wonderful dessert, and Amy's words of praise, could possibly be connected to her own mother. Amy's mom had chided me once about leaving the water running as I had washed dishes by hand. I've never forgotten how embarrassed and unappreciated I'd felt that day, and I resent the unwelcome memory that threatens to overshadow the taste of this wonderful pastry.

“I see you don't care about wasting water,” she had said, appearing at my side, standing too close as she glared at my slow progress.

“I was going to rinse them as I go,” I had said, frustrated that what had seemed logical to me had apparently been the wrong thing to do. She saw that there were a lot of dishes for just one person to deal with; she could have offered to help me. Before I could think of anything else to say, she had stomped away in obvious annoyance. I still didn’t know what I'd done wrong that day.

I had tried to make excuses for why Amy's mom would have been rude to me and whether her words and demeanor would have been different if another adult had been present or if my dad had happened to walk by instead of being busy grading papers. I thought often about the afternoon at the playground, only a few weeks prior to that mid-summer potluck, wondering why she as the only adult in the vicinity would have gone to such lengths to deny me a treat, especially since all of the other children in the outdoor play area had one. Maybe something terrible had happened to her, something that caused her to always be upset, although I didn’t think that that would have been a viable excuse for the way she had treated me. I knew this: if I ever became a cafeteria lady, I would pass out smiles and hugs for free to any children who wanted or needed them. I would make them feel heard, seen, important; I wouldn’t dismiss their words or their feelings.

After I finished eating, I felt tired and sad; I wished I'd brought a book to read until my parents were ready to go home. I thought about how good it would feel to slip beneath my cool sheets, with the windows open to the cicadas' loud chatter and the other night sounds, crickets and distant car horns and sometimes the sound of voices laughing in the distance. I would be able to read until I fell asleep. I looked around the gymnasium at everyone else eating and talking and I thought about how it seemed as though no one else in the world around me felt emotions and worries as much as I did; my predilection to sensitive awareness both frightened and filled me with inspiration. I thought that maybe I would write a story about it, about introverts who observe the people in their orbit and who feel like outsiders most of the time. I wondered if my own parents thought that I was strange. They never asked what I was thinking or feeling; I knew when to be quiet, to tamp down the urge to ask what might be misconstrued as an inappropriate question but which was simple curiosity born of ignorance. There was so much that I didn’t know that I longed to know. Sometimes, sometimes, I felt as though I was born already knowing how to leaf through a dictionary's pages and look up answers to the things that I knew I could never voice aloud; the books I read didn’t judge me, didn’t demand explanations or justifications or apologies, the way adults did. I wondered if, whenever people looked at me, they saw only a weird, introspective girl, someone who peered out at everyone else from big eyes behind big glasses, someone who asked too many questions.