Interview with Gloria Beth Amodeo, Author of God’s Ex-Girlfriend
Gloria Beth Amodeo’s fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Literary Review, Carrier Pigeon, American Atheist and H.O.W. Journal, where Mary Gaitskill selected a short story of hers as the winner of a fiction contest. Gloria received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and currently works at an advertising agency in New York City.
In 2020, she was featured in the documentary, People You May Know, on Amazon Prime, where she discussed her experiences with Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) and how the organization is now using big data to convert vulnerable college students. God’s Ex-Girlfriend is her debut work. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Gloria Beth Amodeo’s debut memoir, God’s Ex-Girlfriend, is available from IG Publishing. She sat down to answer questions on audience, revisiting the past, and the balance of the personal vs. the critical in memoir.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on your forthcoming memoir, God’s Ex-Girlfriend! What was it like revisiting your past as you worked on this book?
Gloria Beth Amodeo: Deeply cathartic and kind of uncomfortable! Cathartic because I had been screaming from the rooftops for around two-or-so years after leaving evangelicalism about the manipulation and cult-like structure of the movement, and how I had seen it positioning itself to take over our social and political systems. Organizing my experiences into a narrative, on a chapter scale, and then reading through the entire tapestry of a memoir, was more healing than anything else I could have done.
But it wasn’t always pleasant to write. In the beginning, I spent some time building an outline and figuring out which anecdotes were going to appear in the book, and where. And as I worked down the outline, there were some I really dreaded diving into. I wrote mostly on the weekends at coffee shops and got through those portions by being like “Alright, today I’m going to write about this thing I kind of hate revisiting, but I’ll make it easier by getting one of those cookies I really like with the huge chocolate chunks…”
Scott: What was it like to deconstruct and critically look at evangelical Christianity and Cru?
Amodeo: Awful when it started. I think that most books begin forming a long time before anyone intends to write them, and whatever deconstruction I needed to do for this book started when I was still in the movement. Those years were probably the hardest because I didn’t want to lose my faith and all the time, energy, and pride I had invested in it. I also had a community I loved, and I knew leaving the faith would mean losing them. By the time I put pen to paper, I had been deconstructing for around four years (two in the movement, two out of it), and it felt like I was using ideas that had destroyed a massive part of my life to, instead, build something that could be really beautiful.
Scott: Was it difficult to find a balance of personal and critical analysis? How did you approach that challenge?
Amodeo: At first, yes, it was very difficult. Some of the earlier drafts of the initial chapters were quite ramble-y because I was trying to find the structure and the voice amidst all these big feelings and thoughts and beliefs I had. To help my brain adjust, I read other memoirs—some from people who had left their fundamentalist faiths, others from people who had infused themselves into the writing. (All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby.) All those books not only helped me realize what I wanted this book to be, but they put me on a path toward creating thematic chapters that explored one aspect of my experience. The rambling was then contained because I was able to organize everything I wanted to say (personal or critical) in these little chapter containers. And suddenly, the big feelings and thoughts and beliefs were actually manageable.
Scott: What do you hope readers take away from your memoir?
Amodeo: On an intellectual level, I hope they become aware of the ways in which anyone is susceptible to fundamentalist conversion—because it’s not about how smart you are, and cynicism doesn’t protect you either. It’s about your vulnerabilities, and whether or not you’re around someone who really knows how to exploit them. (Spoiler: lots of people in the evangelical movement are meticulously trained to do just that!)
Even if readers just become super aware of how vulnerable college students are to fundamentalist conversion, I’d be happy. That’s why so many evangelical college ministry groups exist and get on campuses/coerce students into setting up clubs. (Cru, InterVarsity, The Navigators, etc.) If even one parent about to send their kid off to college decided to forego the lecture about drugs and drinking and instead had a serious talk with them about all the people they may meet who don’t have their best interest spiritually at heart, I’d be ecstatic.
Scott: Do you have any creative influences? Who or what are they?
Amodeo: From a writing perspective, my queens are Mary Gaitskill, the late Joan Didion, and Flannery O’Connor. (I discovered O’Connor in my evangelical days and felt a particular kinship with her around faith and Christian realism, and I can see now that the way it all sat beside the southern grotesque rang equally true to me—and that impact lasts to this day.) But before I ever picked up a copy of Wise Blood, I would say that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies and all the Tolkien I read after had perhaps the earliest influence on me creatively. Between the two of them, my brain became sort of steeped in world-building and the power of relationships, and I think that’s not only influenced how I tell stories (comprehensively, and with all the details!) but also what moves me (the way we interact with each other, and what that says about us.)
I also love comedians and think that humor, done well, is a gateway to the hardest, most important truths. Tig Notaro taught me that more than anyone, and I’d say that not only influenced my approach to this book, but the way I operate as a human.
Scott: What role does the idea of audience play in your writing?
Amodeo: It’s a significant one for sure. I’m always thinking of audience when I write, and I’m also pretty aware that it starts with my own perception—I’m writing what I think a person needs to or wants to read, and that’s inextricably derived from my own experiences and the way I see the people around me. I often feel like I’m reaching out into the world being like “Do I have this right? Does this deeply held perception that I’ve formed into a theme or analogy or character work with what you’re seeing in the world, too?”
For this book, I was both my audiences at different points in time. I wrote it for (1) people who left evangelicalism and (2) people who had never been evangelical but were curious about the movement. I wanted to write the book I needed to read when I had first left the movement, and before I joined the movement and could have used a heads-up about what was coming my way. In that way, this book is absolutely the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written!
Scott: You once said, "I’m interested in what’s stuffed in the closet, what’s underneath the dresser, the messes we make of things we don’t want to see." What's stuffed in your closet and underneath your dresser right now?
Amodeo: So many ideas! While I’m also plagued by it, I’m very interested in anxiety and the role it’s meant to play in our physical/emotional preservation. As awful and devastating as it is to experience on a daily basis, I’m fascinated by the biological aspects of it and the ways it can be quite legitimate—even when overblown.
There are also at least 3 different fiction projects swirling around in my head right now, which is just par for the course.
Scott: Do you have any author events planned, and where can readers find out about future events?
Amodeo: Events and some readings are in the works, but the details are still being settled—you can find everything coming up at gloriabethamodeo.com/out-and-about.
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Amodeo: Along with getting the word out about this book, I’ve been working on a fiction project that takes place in a small evangelical beach town. And I’m reading The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney and Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford. I just got off a months-long Ursula K. Le Guin kick, which was awesome.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Amodeo: To “start every story as close to the end as possible.” That sentence got this book off the ground. (Thank you to my friend Sara Batkie for that one!)
From IG Publishing:
God’s Ex-Girlfriend by Gloria Beth Amodeo
Gloria Beth Amodeo was a freshman in college when she met someone who would change the trajectory of her life. Cate was smart, beautiful, and an evangelical Christian. Soon, Gloria had left behind her troubled family—which included her mother’s mental illness and addiction to pills—and joined Cate as a member of Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru).
Embracing her newfound belief system, Gloria became a cultural warrior for Jesus, militantly focused on converting everyone she met to her conservative brand of Christianity. Over the next seven years, she spent spring breaks preaching to MTV partygoers in bikinis; hung out in bars as she tried to convert her fellow creative writing students in New York City; and kept a strenuous hold on her virginity, as she considered herself to be in a relationship with God.
Slowly, she came to realize that a God who believed that LGBTQ+ people were going to hell, that sex before marriage was a sin, and that men had the final say in all marital and relationship matters, among other things, was not a God she wanted to “date” any longer.
Get your copy from IG Publishing.
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