“Interior States: Essays”, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

 

240 pages, Anchor Books, ISBN-13: 978-0525562702

Man, my local library is becoming one of my go-to places for books; every so often they have a book sale featuring books patrons have dropped off, which is when I picked up Interior States: Essays by Meghan O’Gieblyn for a mere – are you ready? – 50¢. As to why I picked up this book, if you recall (and I’m sure that you do) I mentioned in my review of Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation by Paul Kriwaczek (reviewed on June 10^th, 2022) that “I decided to expand my horizons a tad and start buying books outside of my comfort zone about subjects I had, hitherto, little or no knowledge of”. And so I have. Interior States is not  book I would have even looked at just a few years ago, seeing as it has nothing to do with wars and great men and whatever, which is why I took the 50¢ gamble.

And what is Interior States about? In O’Gieblyn’s words, “[w]hat does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts?” It does not take you, the Reader, very long to discern that our Author is in fact a Midwestern girl at heart, but that is all she is: she frequently describes herself as a (new) non-believer, so the promotion of this book starts off misleading from the get-go. Interior States is as much a dissertation on how one woman became an ex-Christian as it is a tale of one who is unhappy with “the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere”. While we follow her around to various locales over Fly-Over Country (like my dear-old Greenfield Village, about which she has little good to say), she tells us a great deal about modern-day Evangelical educational practices, culture and outlook, and how she slowly but eventually turned her back on it all and found herself…well, she doesn’t really know.

Which I found to be tragic. Meghan O’Gieblyn’s travels around the interior states of the United States forced her to confront her own interior state, and thus Interior States is more a spiritual biography of one woman’s loss of faith than it is about the Great American Midwest. Which is fine, but if I had spent more than half-a-buck for this thing I would have been REALLY upset as this is NOT what I thought I was getting myself into (that, and her takedown of Greenfield Village was really irksome). So this book is ultimately and principally a tragic tale of one Christian woman who leaves the faith of her fathers, and not a tour of Central Americana, which makes this tale doubly disappointing.