Cameron Dezen Hammon is a woman on the brink of disaster. That’s how it feels when we meet her in the beginning of her memoir, “This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession,” the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Prize Winner in nonfiction. As we learn more about Dezen Hammon, the perilous balancing act of her life is enough to give the Buddha himself cause for panic. She’s belting out Christian pop songs at a mega church as the music minister alongside her guitarist husband while also maintaining an emotional love affair with a mystery man whose texts she’s silencing in her pocket.
She begins with this: “My phone buzzes in the pocket of my dress. I slip my hand in to silence it. ‘I wish I could hold you.’ The text message is from a man I’ve given no name to in my contact list. Whose number I’ve blocked and unblocked in turns. A man I was with just one week ago, a man I might love, who is not the father of my eight-year-old daughter. Not my husband of twelve years.”
As “This Is My Body” unfolds, the narrator weaves an engrossing story of how she fell in love with God and Jesus, which leads her to speaking in tongues, a rushed marriage and a poorly paid career in converting people with her musical talents within a dazzling evangelical empire in Houston, Texas. During Dezen Hammon’s service to the church, she’s challenged with offenses ranging from sexism to sexual assault, and outside of these specific insults to her body and heart, her yearning for something more fulfilling compels her to him, the mystery man she is considering doing more with—and realizing she might have an addiction to sex and love. Through it all, Dezen Hammon navigates readers through these difficulties with stellar writing, always keeping her audience informed along the journey of her search for her own identity as both a believer and a feminist.
“This Is My Body” takes its title from what a priest says during communion: “Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you . . . ” as the priest snaps a wafer in two, an event Dezen Hammon witnesses repeatedly while working at churches. In the chapter from which the book takes its title, Dezen Hammon explores what it means to break one’s body and to break one’s body for someone else, such as pregnancy, for example, and what’s more, to have one’s body broken by someone or something else, such as a miscarriage or losing a job simply for the body you were born into, or to break someone else’s body with a confession of her transgressions to her husband.
Our bodies are more than just empty vessels for living our lives and our hearts are more than just spirits faithfully abiding a practice blindly. Dezen Hammond explores and questions society’s expectations with humble honesty as she wrestles for autonomy within each space of her own life she worked so hard to create for herself.
THIS IS MY BODY
A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession
By Cameron Dezen Hammon
Lookout Books. $17.95.
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