Reviewed by Amanda Marie Gipson
In August 2019, Andrea Mills—a homeschooling mother of nine and Christian YouTube creator—died of cancer at age 41. By the time she received her diagnosis, she died within days. Her husband, Tom Mills, vlogged every step: her time in the hospital, her transfer home, her final visit with their children.
Driven by a scholarly interest in the intersection of fundamentalism and conspiracy theories, I watched what I could of the stomach-churning videos Andrea uploaded claiming that Sandy Hook and 9/11 were staged. Even so, I never watched those last vlogs. A friend told me Tom filmed himself burning the crib where Andrea had laid each of their nine surviving babies. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was his way of making sure no one else could desecrate that symbol of Andrea’s role within their pro-natalist home.
Tia Levings’s A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy comes from this same world of content, control, and quiet erasure. She too was a fundamentalist wife: homeschooling, sometimes home-churching, blogging. She too crafted a digital persona that signaled self-denial and headship order. Levings’s memoir turns inward to ask what happens when the search for answers moves beyond the certitude, clarity, and legibility fundamentalism both offers and demands. In A Well-Trained Wife, thinking beyond fundamentalism’s binaries becomes a way for Levings to live beyond the role she was taught to embody.
When Matt died, I left his toothbrush by the sink until the plumber needed a clear workspace. When I finally put it away, I packed it in a small Mylar bag, then vacuum-sealed the whole thing. Perhaps a compulsion to preserve what remained of my maternal identity explains why I found Tom’s action too shocking to analyze. For years, Andrea had welcomed viewers into her Christian domesticity, joyfully posting Wal-Mart hauls, birthday parties, and tutorials on how to self-monitor pregnancy out of distrust for the medical establishment. Maybe because Andrea’s death was treated as witness, burning the crib seemed so incongruent with the notion of biblical womanhood that so shaped her testimony.
A Well-Trained Wife turns the weight of that visibility and legibility inward. One phrase recurs throughout the memoir: “Stay where I can see you” (121). Levings frames this as a maternal reminder coopted by husbands, pastors, elders, and institutions. Unlike Educated, where Tara Westover leverages visibility to shield herself from the erasure, gaslighting, and denial practiced by her family and community, or Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull, which exposes theologies A Well-Trained Wife depicts from the inside, the change in Levings’ life begins not when she’s most visible, but when she slips out of sight.
Seeking reprieve from her abusive husband’s increasing fanaticism and volatility, Levings finds solace online, spending time in spaces for Christian mothers to discuss homeschooling, home churching, and home management. She eventually stumbles upon a hidden forum: “Edu-Anon” (125), for homeschooling mothers who themselves felt underserved in public schools. Levings’s online metamorphosis challenges the idea that fundamentalism can be defined by modest dress, home births, or worship style. Instead, A Well-Trained Wife articulates fundamentalism as a deeply embedded cognitive framework that persists even in resistance.
As a result, readers familiar with emotionally direct narratives may find A Well-Trained Wife striking in its restraint. Where The Witness Wore Red or Leah Remini’s Troublemaker emphasize confrontation and clarity, Levings’s story is essential because it deemphasizes the before and after. While seeking complexity and interiority, Levings grapples with the internalized logic of a system built on maternal visibility and female legibility.
Even as Levings begins to find nuance and complexity in online spaces, her narrative voice remains shaped by the structures she is fleeing. Throughout A Well-Trained Wife, pain is often managed, contained, and quickly processed into lessons or calls to action. That tendency echoes fundamentalism itself, where suffering is reframed as obedience and repurposed into meaning.
When cats roaming the property multiply beyond control, their sickness and suffering become part of the daily logistics Levings must manage. She feeds them, avoids the stench of their urine-soaked yard, and scrapes their bodies off the driveway after accidentally running them over. When her father steps in to euthanize them, Levings registers only relief. “I was no longer,” she writes, “overrun with shitting, disease-carrying cats” (211). The act is framed as necessary, efficient, and clean. Even in this small mercy, the cats remain unnamed, faceless, a teeming symbol of chaos she cannot quell.
Later in the text, her husband forces their son to kill the puppies born under the kitchen table. When Levings reaches out to comfort their oldest child, “…his forearm cuffed my cheek. The force knocked me to the wood floor, shocked and dizzy” (215). Suffering is swiftly processed into certainty and action. Left with “…one concrete, glaringly harsh truth: I could not live like this anymore” (216), the conclusion is unambiguous, efficient, and final: she must leave. She cannot stay.
A Well-Trained Wife does not reveal the inner texture of Levings’s emotions and resists the visibility demanded of fundamentalist women. Yet the swiftness with which pain becomes resolution reveals how thoroughly fundamentalism persists as an entrenched worldview. Even her decision to leave it behind is shaped by binaries, by a belief that suffering must serve a purpose, and by the demand to produce a single, clear, directive meaning. Her narrative restraint, then, reflects both agency and aftermath.
Andrea Mills’ aftermath, in contrast, reveals what Levings’s memoir makes possible: the right to reframe, to reflect, to decide what matters and what it means, not only in what’s shared but what’s withheld. Andrea’s dog, Knuckles, died just two months after she did. At fifteen, deaf, and likely suffering from canine dementia, the vet recommended he be put to sleep. Her husband Tom, who had vlogged so many other moments, did not stay in the room. Knuckles’s passing was a gap: a moment Tom could not document, could not make visible. He shared updates afterward, perhaps trying to give the pain of Knuckles’s death purpose for viewers. The questions that linger in my mind are ones, I think, Andrea might have answered if she’d had the chance. Was he frightened, surrounded by strangers? Did anyone sit with him, offer a kind smile and soft touch as the sedative took hold? Did anyone lift their hand, thumb out, pinky and pointer raised, and press it to his patchy fur, unaware that, to Knuckles, love was always Andrea?
Tia Levings chose when to step out of the frame, and how to shape what remained. She turned from clarity to ambiguity and claimed that ambiguity as a form of meaning. Andrea framed her life, too—carefully, visibly. But Andrea did not survive to frame what it meant. Her story, interrupted by death, leaves behind questions no one can answer.
Where Andrea Mills’ ambiguity is abrogated, Tia Levings’ is authored—and beautifully.
Amanda Marie Gipson is a creative writer from Northern Appalachia with a background in community-based agricultural education. She earned her MFA from Wilkes University in 2023 and also holds an M.Agr from Colorado State University. When not working on a memoir-in-letters to her beloved Labrador, Amanda facilitates storytelling workshops in rural and agricultural communities to promote resilience, wellbeing, and community engagement.. Her writing has recently appeared in Artium: A Journal of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry, and The Disruptive Quarterly.
