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Praise for The Last Judgment

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“The Last Judgment is a story that penetrates into the heart of childhood sadness. Carrie is without tools to fix what is broken, except for the incredible force of her will. The connections she makes between religion, parental failure, sexuality, and love make perfect sense because they are told in her bell-clear voice. This story is warm and tragic and, at moments, grimly funny.”
— Rebecca Rosenblum, author of Once and Road Trips

Preview

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I fell asleep each night saying my prayers and that was a sin. I should get up by the side of the bed and kneel to say my prayers the way other people did—proper, religious people. But I knew that if my mother or Lily ever saw me praying, they’d laugh at me. My mother would say something like, “She’s going through a phase,” and I’d feel small and stupid. My mother must never know. But this was another sin: that I couldn’t risk embarrassment and tell everyone I believed in God and the Bible, that I prayed every night.

The only thing I was allowed to think about at night, besides the Bible, was my father, because my father was somewhere else the way God was somewhere else, and it took hard concentration to make him real in my mind. Because my father was a serious topic, and I felt as bad about his leaving as I did about sinning. I felt so bad about his leaving that I could hurt myself by thinking about it, and somehow make up for all the sin. I kept playing and replaying in my mind the night in July when my father had slammed out the door of our old apartment shouting, “I can’t win with you!” In my imagination, I ended the scene in different ways: reaching the door before he got out, and going with him. Calling him back. Dragging him back. But on the night it really happened, I didn’t do any of those things. I did something I didn’t understand. On the night it really happened, I locked the door behind him.

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