I'm pleased to announce that Holy Disobedience: Sex, Sin, and Secrets in the Biggest Church No One Knows by Melissa Duge Spiers is now on sale.
It’s a book that refuses to sit quietly on the shelf.
Compelling and insightful, this is an important addition to the growing genre of memoirs about high-control religion.” —Cait West, author of Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy
Melissa Spiers invites readers into a world shaped by control, silence, and secrecy within a strict religious environment, tracing her journey through trauma, rebellion, and ultimately toward something resembling wholeness. This is a book that will draw you in from the first page and keep you reading to the last; it is real, lived experience, rendered with urgency and precision.
But to reduce Holy Disobedience to a story about one church or one system would be to miss its broader significance. This memoir stands as yet another indicator of a much wider phenomenon—the ways in which religion can be used to obscure inequality, protect power, and mask the fractures in our world. It is a book that is part of a reckoning in religion and the United States. Beneath the language of purity or obedience, many readers will recognize something unsettlingly familiar: the quiet erosion of self, the pressure to conform, and the alienation that follows.
“Raw and courageous, these pages expose spiritual abuse, illuminate the shadowed history of Seventh-day Adventism, and transform inherited pain into power and advocacy.” —Stephanie Warren, writer and podcast host of Focus on Your Own Family
And yet, this is not a simple narrative of escape or triumph.
If anything, Holy Disobedience insists that the cure can sometimes be worse than the illness. Spiers’s departure from a controlling religious world does not immediately deliver clarity or peace. Instead, it launches her into extremes—risk, reinvention, and self-destructive patterns—all part of a messy, nonlinear process of reclaiming oneself. The book captures this tension with striking honesty: healing is not clean, and becoming whole rarely looks like the redemption stories we prefer to tell.
I am so grateful that at Lake Drive Books we can deliver courageous stories like the one Melissa tells in Holy Disobedience. This is a page-turning, unflinching memoir that will resonate with anyone who has wrestled with faith, identity, power, or the long shadow of systems that claim to save while quietly wounding. It is provocative without being reductive, and deeply personal while pointing toward something collective.
If you’re ready for a story that challenges, unsettles, and ultimately invites deeper reflection, take a closer look. Click here to explore more, read an excerpt, watch a video of the author, and find the purchase option that works best for you.
David Morris, Publisher, Lake Drive Books
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Melissa Duge Spiers is an award-winning essayist, screenwriter, and advocate for topics of religious abuse and resilience, utilizing her online platforms (TikTok and Instagram, known as “The Glory Whole”) to raise awareness and help others find healing. Her memoir Holy Disobedience won the 2022 Book Pipeline Unpublished Nonfiction Manuscript prize, with excerpts featured in The Huffington Post. Melissa’s writing appears in magazines nationwide, and she’s a contributor to Take the Fruit: An Anthology of Religious Trauma. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College and is based in California.
