Review: "The Woman They Wanted" by Shannon Harris

The Woman They Wanted by Shannon Harris
Published August 2023 via Broadleaf Books
★★★

Harris held, for years, a very specific role within conservative Christiandom: she was the wife of Joshua Harris, who rose to prominence with his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and was groomed to lead a powerful church himself. He'd grown up within that structure, and Shannon Harris had not, but when they met and mutual interest was apparent, a match was quickly made—because, having literally written the book on chaste courtship, Joshua Harris was under a fair amount of pressure to do everything by that book, avoid even a hint of crossing the strict boundaries he'd laid out for a generation of followers, and marry quickly to prove that it worked.

But all that came at a cost—one that Shannon Harris, not Joshua Harris, paid the bulk of. That she didn't grow up within this particular subculture fascinates me; I suspect that within the church there was a fair amount of trepidation about that (e.g., was she sufficiently indoctrinated to live up to the role?), but she seemed to fit the bill well enough. Since then, though, Shannon Harris has walked away from it all, and Joshua Harris has walked back his convictions and tried to rebrand himself as someone who, having been the fuel for that generation of young conservative Christians to follow his lead, can now help them deconstruct. (Reactions have been mixed.)

This was a heavily anticipated book for me, because although it has very little to do with my own life it is right in line with some of my more specific reading interests. The outcome felt somewhat hit and miss for me, though. Harris does a fantastic job of expressing how she now views her time in this conservative, restrictive church. But I had a much harder time grasping how she felt about it then: what drew in, and what convinced her to stay so long, especially when it went against so much that she'd been raised with? She can see the holes in the stories now, and for her sake I'm glad of that, but I struggled to see the journey she went through rather than just where it has, in the end, taken her.

As an aside—Harris is now going by Shannon Bonne and pursuing the things she was told she couldn't do as the wife of a Christian celebrity. I wonder how frustrating it must be to need to, for publicity purposes, continue to go by a name that is so tied to a life you're trying to leave behind.