Reviewed by Cristina Deptula
Loving my Enemies and Other Outlandish Pursuits
by Angie Wright
RCWMS
ISBN #978-1-7351431-7-0, Nov 2025, Paperback, $30usd
Angie Wright’s memoir Loving My Enemies and Other Outlandish Pursuits highlights the cultural and ideological diversity of the American South and illuminates the long history of dedicated and courageous work on many fronts for social justice. Even more so, the book shares how Angie learns through time that becoming more effective in her life’s work is intertwined with and inextricable from her personal growth and healing.
The book begins with a scene of grief and brokenness: Angie’s father’s funeral, where we learn that the man was a racist alcoholic with anger issues who wanted nothing to do with his daughters as adults. We follow Angie through a mostly difficult childhood, although it’s interspersed with some positive memories of playing out in nature and spending time with diverse groups of friends.
Her father’s moods terrified the family enough for her mother to leave him, and she later struggled as a single mother to four children and developed severe depression. Angie left home for college at 17 and got married very young, likely in an effort to escape and create a life of her own. The rest of the book follows Angie’s work in antiracist and anti-poverty community organizing alongside people of different cultural backgrounds, her two long-term relationships, parenting her two sons, and her eventual work as a minister.
Angie’s complex relationship to Christian faith and her evolving view of the person of Jesus forms a major theme of the memoir. She points to examples of and criticizes hypocrisy and prejudice in various forms in the church, and also the American Christian focus on individual salvation and personal behavior to the exclusion of working for a better world in a broader sense. However, she experiences a personal sense of Christ’s presence as a teen that stays with her on and off throughout her life.
Also, she watches one of her beloved mentors go through a tragic accident that leaves him bedridden and in a coma, and thinks for awhile that he’s become less useful to the movement. Then, she reads the words of Christian mystic Henri Nouwen, who worked and lived with people with disabilities, and considers that her mentor has value in God’s eyes regardless of his ability to outwardly contribute to the world.
Gradually, she begins to see how she has gauged her own self-worth based on her work and her accomplishments towards worthy causes. While this was likely a rational trauma response while growing up in an abusive and unpredictable home, it leaves her on shaky psychological ground in an uncertain world. We see this when a strident Black woman expresses justifiable disdain for ‘white liberals’ who come into town and think they know better than anyone. While outwardly polite, Angie feels threatened and mentally searches for reasons to dismiss the comment. Only as she grows and develops a steadier sense of self-worth can she approach that sort of feedback with humble self-reflection.
Learning to recognize everyone’s inherent, unconditional worth also helps her move towards viewing even powerful and cruel people who cause harm in the world with compassion, following in the footsteps of civil rights leaders such as MLK and John Lewis. While, understandably, this remains a struggle, she pursues this level of grace as a goal, as shown by the memoir’s title.
We see how fellow activists of color lead the way for her to envision healing of some of her childhood wounds during a ritual to honor ancestors, as they encourage her to imagine her racist family innocent again and free of their prejudices beyond the grave. Through this, Angie begins to see the possibility of social justice activism from a healed space, without the angry need to defy her father and others around her.
Her own spiritual growth, and the many people of faith around her whom she respects, inspire her to study theology and ultimately start a church. Her church is built on welcoming everyone, including LGBT people, those with disabilities and mental illness, and even, humorously, an imagined bird an imagined visitor might have perched on her head. This tender vision, however, begins with acknowledging pain. She asks prospective church leaders to first write down what they don’t want in a church during an exercise in a planning meeting, and they resolve to avoid those tendencies.
Stepping forward into church leadership presents another opportunity for Angie to heal old childhood wounds. As a white community organizer, she vowed to let people around her from marginalized communities lead, as they were the experts on their own lives. She stepped back even at times when she felt her strategies would work better, and this humility kept movements from fracturing or causing more of their own inadvertent harm to marginalized people. However, Angie also realized that staying away from the spotlight came naturally to her, since as a child she had kept quiet to avoid her father’s bad temper. Now, when she had the skills and the vote of confidence of everyone around her to step into the pulpit, she felt like holding back until she recognized the source of her reluctance and moved past that fear.
The conclusion of the book highlights Angie’s personal growth. We’ve come a long way from the discordant beginning with the fractured family at the father’s funeral. There’s now a focus on closure. Relationships are mended, or re-forged in new ways. She helps her ex-husband receive care he needs for dementia, even taking him into her home. Years later, another relationship ends, and we see her meet with her second soon-to-be ex for breakfast so they can give each other a proper good-bye. She retires from leadership at her church and prepares a special parting ritual. And, while her father refuses to reconcile with her even when he’s close to his death, she writes of how she chooses to find closure from her childhood struggles by reconnecting with her mother.
The American South is home to extreme heat, turbulent weather, and storms. Near the end of the book, a violent tornado destroys many acres of Angie’s city, including her home and church. As a metaphor, the storm reminds us of the precarity of life, all the more so for those who lack resources. It also highlights the need for a strong psychological foundation for one’s life, work, and relationships, which Angie discovers and builds together in community with many others over time.
About the reviewer: Cristina Deptula is editor of Synchronized Chaos International Magazine and has been previously published in Talking Writing, Scarlet Leaf, and the Heavy Feather Review. She us the founder of the literary publicity agency Authors, Large and Small.