Book Review: I Want To Be Left Behind

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth: A Memoir
By Brenda Peterson
Da Capo Press, $25, 288 pp.

Reviewed by Martha K. Baker   


    I Want To Be Left Behind is not a memoir of blame written by a black sheep. Brenda Peterson makes it very clear that she loves her fundamentalist parents. She describes her father’s work in the Forest Service and her mother’s work with the CIA -- and her mother’s cooking and praying and singing. It’s her family’s adherence to the End Times that she cannot love.

    I Want To Be Left Behind is a memoir of wonder. Peterson wonders throughout this fine and funny book why she never bought into the Rapture Culture of most of her people. By looking at her youth and adolescence in a “fundy” family and at her continued involvement as good daughter, sister and aunt in this family of good people, Peterson articulates her own spiritual journey.

    “Why,” she asks them, “would you want this world to end?” 

    It’s a question she ponders throughout: why does it matter more who goes and who is Left Behind than it matters how we live now, in harmony with nature? “The forest,” she explains, “got to me first -- before the faithful.”

    Peterson is a nature writer, living in Seattle. She is a daughter born in the high Sierras to a ranger father, who, though he worked in the woods, proclaimed that being a Southern Baptist was his only religion, “was all that was called holy.” Peterson went to Vacation Bible School, Sunday School (and was kicked out for asking the wrong questions), and Glorieta, the Baptist-concentrated camp in New Mexico. She competed in Sword Drills, those peppery rounds requiring intense memory of Scripture.

    She still sings from the Baptist Hymnal; she borrows their lines to title some of the chapters. Also in this memoir, she quotes her many guides, not just the Revs. but the lay pastors, including her grandparents and an editor. “All that really matters is kindness,” counsels Rachel McKenzie, at The New Yorker magazine. “Nothing else matters so long as we find a way to be kind to one another.”   

    Unlike many memory pieces about bursting from Baptist seams but without a balance, Peterson can also explore the parallel growth of her nature-loving and -writing side. Her savviest contribution in I Want To Be Left Behind is her comparison of religious loonies with environmental crazies. She lists nine points of convergence, beginning with “enraptured by doom” and ending with “evangelical,” with “blame, shame, judgment” and “righteous anger” in between. She turns to Rumi to support her moderation: “Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right doing there is a field. I will meet you there.”

    Brenda Peterson is a good writer. This is her 7th book of non-fiction; she has also written four novels and co-edited four anthologies. She knows how to select significant events, not just carom between the sophomoric straits of “then I did this” and “then I did that.” She knows when to add a meringue peak of wit -- Baptist church suppers are “pious pig-outs” and a woman, who always wore mohair, “left little woolly puffs everywhere she wafted.” And she knows when to add history and research, when to place beliefs into context.

    No matter how often Peterson admits being at odds with her family (she’s the only one unarmed, for example), she expresses gratitude throughout her memoir. By inheriting her “mother’s moral universe” and her father’s love of the land and animals, Peterson understands that she has not “wandered far from Eden.” I Want To Be Left Behind is the sort of book one might want to give to one’s own fundamentalist family -- if one had Brenda Peterson’s courage.

    Short of that, give it to yourself.