I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah's Witness Upbringing

by Kyria Abrahams

Book Overview

Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, Kyria Abrahams's childhood was haunted by the knowledge that her neighbors and schoolmates were doomed to die in an imminent fiery catastrophe; that Smurfs were evil;... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1615235205
• ISBN13: 9781615235209
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, NY
• Length: 339 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great snapshot of life as a born-in JW...

This book was terrific. A mix of the hilarious and the heartbreaking, I was surprised to see how many stories mirrored my own JW upbringing. I highly recommend this book to anyone. If you've had some experience with the Witnesses, most definitely pick this up- but even if you haven't, you'll find the author's story to be engaging.

Hilarious read.

I really enjoyed this book. It's not out sending a message that is really negative towards Jehovah's witnesses... it just is the story of a girl with a dysfunctional family and belief system that shaped the creation of her life path, besides... Kyria is really funny. I at times disliked Kyria's actions and her decisions, but I really feel like she was just a product of a screwed up religion and limited parental guidance (and I mean who here wasn't a teenager at one point??). Kyria offers no apologies, just the story in it's raw truth. Thanks for sharing it with us.

A Hilarious Yet Sobering Look at Where Being a Jehovah's Witness Led The Author, and Her Life as an

Kyria Abrahams' I'm Perfect, Your Doomed, is a hilarious look at her youth as a Jehovah's Witness. With impeccable wit, she explores the precepts of the religion, as well as what her childhood was like immersed in it. At first, she doesn't question anything, and wants to obey every single rule because that's all she's known. It's clear from the first few chapters that part of being a Jehovah's Witness is about only associating with other Jehovah's Witnesses. She takes us on a tour of the kinds of people she grew up with as part of her worship, seemingly full of eccentrics. Of one man, whom the congregation strongly suspected was gay, she writes, "We all know I'm sublimating my true sexuality, he seemed to be saying, so let's at least have a laugh about it. Also, I am dying inside." Sex, in fact, proves to be what ultimately gets her disfellowshipped; she has an affair, but when she tells her husband, he wants her to stay. She's young, alone, and has turned to cutting and alcoholism, neither a happy topic, but both she manages to use her humor to cut through what could be a very sad story. In this way, Abrahams manages to mock herself and her situation, while making for an engaging story. She winds up finding herself within the slam poetry scene, full of its own eccentrics, but of a different sort. The gap between her former life and her poetry one is powerful, and she makes it clear that she's struggling (not stumbling, the Jehovah's Witness term for causing someone to falter from their faith) with who she really is, outside the confines of what she's known her whole life. Abrahams takes us inside her life as a Jehovah's Witness, from going door to door to recognizing, as she gets older, just how different she is from her peers. When she witness a birthday party, she's genuinely shocked that it is not the bacchanalia she's been prepared for. This and many other revelations cause her to slowly lose her grip on the religion. She doesn't portray it as a single catastrophic event, but a slow realization, via the Internet (remember AOL chat rooms?) and a stint in a mental hospital, that she is not happy and wants to try something new. Some of her best lines have nothing to do with Jehovah's Witnesses; they're just plain funny. "I knew the snowsuit was embarrassing and almost always unnecessary, but it was like wearing a warm mug of cocoa over my entire body." We don't quite get to find out how she came to be a comedian, but that's okay. Her glossary at the end offers more than enough humor (in fact, numerous laugh out loud moments). Feel free to read it first. Of "Field Service," the practice of preaching door-to-door, she writes, "Possessing a quiet reverence for creation and a personal sense of the divine, only without the quiet or personal part." I would have liked to know what her current spiritual beliefs are and if she has any contact with her family (presumably not since she's been disfellowshipped), but she manages to end on a hopeful not

Quirky and hilarious

I'M PERFECT, YOU'RE DOOMED is a hilarious book. I come from a Catholic family, but early in my childhood one of my older sisters became a Jehovah's Witness. I always wondered what it was like for my nephews to grow up as a Witnesses, but of course I could never ask such a thing. Thanks to I'M PERFECT, YOU'RE DOOMED, I now have a sense for what they experienced. It takes a lot to make me laugh. But this book had me literally laughing out loud several times. I loved the author's discussion of the 144,000 people who are going to go directly to heaven. (I remember attending a Memorial and wondering why no one ate the unleavened bread but instead it was just passed around the room.) And I loved the very apt descriptions of the Watchtower publications with their naive painting of lions lying down with lambs, next to geisha and sheiks who converse next to African pygmies with a basket full of parrots. And it's fascinating that the author's mother is Jewish, because it seems that a pragmatic Jewish sense of humor is present throughout the book. In fact, this book is not really so much an autobiography as it is a memoir in the tradition of Jerry Seinfeld's Seinlanguage. The author is a comedienne, so maybe this is a stringing together of her stand-up material. While I believe in freedom of religion, do not discriminate against Jehovah's Witnesses and have in fact always found them to be some of the nicest people in the world, their dogma always left me scratching my head. This author articulates so beautifully so many of the concerns and questions I always had about the religion. I mean, I was eight-years-old, back in the 1980s, when my sister started telling me that the world was going to end within a few years.

A seat at a different dinner table...

What an interesting book this is. We've all seen them, we've all probably made fun of them, and we've all met them, particularly on Sunday mornings,when bands of Jehovah's Witnesses disturb our ritual NY Times and coffee rituals. But how many of us have ever gotten to know this odd bunch of people who are convinced demons are ready to pop up out of the sock drawer if you let your guard down? Kyria Abrahams has invited us in for coffee, so to speak. Her book is warm and funny, and her family isn't nearly as weird as we might guess. They're different, but really, whose family doesn't have its quirks. Kyria's believe that they and 144,000 of their brethren are going to ascend into a big rock candy mountain type heaven, with happy leopards and ice cream rivers and all manner of wonders. The other billions of us? We're gonna get siezed by the topknot and heaved into cauldrons of flaming doodoo. This seems harsh because, after all, either up to ones hairline in flames OR doodoo would seen sufficiently awful a place to spend eternity, but I digress. This is a fascinating look in the kitchen window at a way of life most of us will never get to experience. A good, fast read.