Daniel Allen Cox is a novelist, essayist, and QWF’s newest featured member. His latest book, I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness, was a finalist for the 2023 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023. His four novels have been nominated for the Lambda Literary, Ferro-Grumley, and ReLit awards. His essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Electric Literature, The Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere, and have been recognized by Best Canadian Essays, The Best American Essays, and the National Magazine Awards. Daniel is past president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation.
QWF Communications Officer John Wickham spoke to Daniel about his latest book, his motivations for writing it, and more. Here are five questions for Daniel Allen Cox:
1) Congratulations on being a finalist for the 2023 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal! Could you tell us a bit about your book, I Felt the End Before It Came?
Thank you! When I first left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because of the shunning involved, it felt like I’d made a clean break, but since then, I’ve realized that untangling myself from indoctrination is a lifelong process that involves the many strands of my personality. I initially disassociated from the group via handwritten letter; I Felt the End is my effort to keep writing myself out. It’s also a love letter to the many writers I admire who address coercive control and all the places it can manifest, since dealing with it is a collective work.
2) Your first four books were novels. This is your first book of non-fiction. Why now?
I’d covered some of this material briefly in my fiction and in a newspaper column, but I never fully faced it. This is a book I’ve avoided writing for most of my career and friends noticed. The point of no return was in 2018, when Stephen and Ian, two ex-JW friends of mine, died from substance use that I and others believe was related to their shunning. Now that it had become a matter of life or death for people close to me, I ran out of excuses for not telling the story. I dedicated my book to them.
3) What was the most difficult part of this book to write?
I had a hard time writing about cognitive dissonance in myself. How does a child process the fact that almost everyone they know at school will die at Armageddon? How does a teen embrace queerness while preaching that queer people will be destroyed? How were we supposed to remain “no part of the world” while trying to convert everyone in it? It was also tough to think about the aspects of being a JW that I enjoyed, like the discipline and work ethic, and even the music (as toxic as it was.) I was afraid that these feelings would undermine and even betray my project, but as others have pointed out, showing the complexity is a way to reify the points I make about cultic manipulations.
4) You write about many forms of Armageddon, from biblical end times to climate change to the COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics. How did growing up a Jehovah’s Witness affect the way you reckon with such catastrophic phenomena? Did it take any unlearning or re-learning?
Definitely. I knew I needed to reclaim the vocabulary once used against me by my religious overlords. The Witnesses speak in a sociolect, a jargon designed to isolate, create a sense of belonging, and render members dependent on the hierarchy to interpret what it means. It’s also a way to monitor outsiders: beware of people who don’t sound like us. In this lexicon, “apocalypse” refers to a literal Armageddon, which I now know to be made up. I needed to redefine the word “apocalypse” so that I wouldn’t be immune to actual ends of the world when they happened. And I needed to retool other aspects of this inherited vocabulary so that I could continue imagining a queer future for myself. The first time I used the word “Jehomo,” it did something subversive in my brain which I’ve never forgotten.
5) How does your approach to writing memoir compare to your approach to writing fiction?
The research phase for I Felt the End was far more intense than for any of my novels. It’s fragmented work, because cultish groups like the JWs hold onto power by isolating members (and former ones), which prevents them from comparing notes. The group denies embarrassing parts of its history and regularly retires old training materials from public consumption, so the texts I was indoctrinated with have gotten buried over time. As a result, it wasn’t hard for me to feel gaslit when I parsed through four decades of memories looking for patterns. But some aspects of the process are the same, such as my reliance on music when writing first drafts, whether for fiction or nonfiction. In the case of I Felt the End, I played old congregation hymns on repeat to recall certain details of Witness life. Overall, this book taught me to be a slower, more patient writer.
Bonus Question: What are you reading right now?
I’m reading This Is It, a forthcoming new novel by Matthew Fox, Camouflé dans la chair by Mathieu Leroux, Furniture Music by Gail Scott, older work by Marie-Claire Blais, and several incredible works of Indigenous nonfiction that challenge everything I know about language.
Thank you, Daniel!
Daniel Allen Cox’s I Felt the End Before It Came is now available online and in bookstores.