Tia

Levings

New York Times Bestselling Author

Memoirist & Nonfiction Writer

Travels from: Raleigh, NC

“Tia has the exceptional gift of meeting you with the kind of care I recognize as sacred. Through her gentle guidance and stories, she finds the unique, often elusive space for the complexity of trauma and deconstruction. . . No one explains that work better than Tia Levings.” — Karla Kamstra, author of Deconstructing

Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian patriarchy, and I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma. She writes about the realities of religious trauma, evangelical patriarchy, and the Trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture. Her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, The Religion News Network, Newsweek, and the HuffingtonPost. She is an experienced interviewee, speaker, and podcast guest, and has appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream.

Tia's Featured Titles

I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma

St. Martin’s Essentials |

May 5, 2026

Spiritual Self-Help

What does it mean to heal from trauma caused by the people, beliefs, and practices of your faith? And to rebuild a sense of self, when high-control religion said you shouldn’t have one?

Indoctrinated from early childhood to obey, conform, and want what others wanted for her, Tia Levings learned love and acceptance meant being someone other than herself.

After years of abuse in a violent marriage and high-control religion, Tia Levings escaped with her children (a story told in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife) and thought the hardest was behind her.

But leaving was just the beginning.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year quest to psychological peace. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman who is able to tell her harrowing story without retraumatizing herself ―a woman who can reach back to help others claim what’s theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn’t get your present and future too.

Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources, Tia Levings guides readers through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind, soul, and body after religious trauma ―so that you can too.

Creative Nonfiction, Family Narratives, Grief & Loss, Memoir & Personal Journeys, Mental Health & Overcoming Trauma, Nonfiction

A Well-Trained Wife

St. Martin’s Press |

August 6, 2024

Memoir

The instant New York Times bestseller:

“Today it hit me when he hit me, blood shaking in my brain. Maybe there wasn’t a savior coming. Maybe it was up to me to save me.”

Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles––a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.”

Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn’t risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.” So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme choice: stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman’s race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.

Bestseller, Creative Nonfiction, Family Narratives, Feminism, Grief & Loss, Memoir & Personal Journeys, Mental Health & Overcoming Trauma, Nonfiction

Trad Wives and Civil Rights

The trad wife movement is designed to sound comforting and appealingly nostalgic to young girls and women. But it’s the shined-up aesthetic of a hard life that harkens back to a pre-Jim Crow era that treated women and people of color as second-class citizens. This talk explores voter suppression and the lack of the 19th Amendment in patriarchal homes, and what we can learn about the goals of a theocracy by listening to survivors who’ve left the movement. How the patriarchy runs their homes is how they want to run the country.

A new niche of trad wife books: what can memoir do that fiction can't?

YESTERYEAR was one of the biggest books of 2026, and Stephen King called Sarah Langan’s TRAD WIFE the “best horror novel of 2026,” but these are just two examples in a growing niche of books exploring what can go wrong when we live as if the lessons of the past don’t matter. EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU by Jo Piazza and TRAD WIFE by Saratoga Schaeffer are selling like mad. But when fiction readers are hungry for a reality check on the scam of the trad wife movement, fiction may not be what they thirst for. My memoir, A WELL-TRAINED WIFE, reads like a horror novel and the real-life prequel to THE HANDMAID’S TALE, but it’s also the truth–and the connection to our real headlines today. We need all these books to help us resist the patriarchal control of our country.

We All Have Religious Trauma Now

With the rise of Christian Nationalism in our government, actively reshaping our laws, norms, and society, we’re saturated with traumatic news and practices that stress us into survival mode. This talk explores how that impacts us as readers, advocates, and communities, and what lessons I learned as a survivor of extreme religious trauma that helped me rebuild and resist today.

“It’s crucial, and you are the best representative of this hell I have heard or read. You really understand the issues, your brain is fast and you’re a powerful speaker. Keep on.” — M, Substack

“Love your explanations of fundamentalism and patriarchy gained from lived experience.” — L, Substack

“Tia, I just finished your book (audible) and cried my eyes out. You are such a beautiful, poetic writer and your speaking voice is so clear and strong. It was an experience; it changed me. I first heard you on the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast. I’m so grateful I chose that episode as the first to acquaint myself with that pod because I was able discover you and your writing. Thank you ” — B, Substack

“I have learned so much from you, Tia. I first learned of your challenges from a Red Wine and Blue webinar. I’ve grown to understand why the extreme right-wing MAGA mindset is the way it is.” — J, Subtack

“Tia exposes spiritual abuse with raw honesty, courage, and clarity. Her writing helps survivors feel seen and offers powerful insight into the cultic control hiding in plain sight. Truth-telling like this deserves a megaphone.” — V, Substack

“Hi Tia, I was in attendance the day you did your presentation on the Trad Wife Movement with Red Wine and Blue. I watched it by myself that night and then I rewatched it with my husband. Having worked as a counseling therapist helping women who were experiencing domestic violence, I was not shocked. My husband on the other hand, was. Your work is so important and I want to support you. Thank you!” — G, Substack

The Working Writer Podcast Link

Religious Trauma Resources

Honors, Awards & Recognition

New York Times Bestselling Author
Goodreads Reader’s Choice finalist for Best Memoir 2024
Audible Canada Best of Year memoir
Audible Editor’s Choice
3-time Signal Award nominee for Best Podcast Guest, Best Driveway Moment, and Best Video Podcast Guest 2026 (winners will be anncouned October 2026)