"The goal is to get to the root of your sin and pluck it out."
I don't remember the exact timestamp, but when Conley describes the clinical, almost bureaucratic way the conversion therapy counselors frame their work - like they're performing spiritual surgery - my hands tightened on the steering wheel so hard my knuckles went white. I know what institutional language designed to strip people of their humanity sounds like. I've heard it in hospitals, from administrators who've never touched a patient. This was worse. This was that same cold efficiency weaponized against a teenager's identity.
I didn't listen to this on my usual post-shift drive. I was wide awake at 2 AM on my night off, couldn't sleep (night shift has permanently rewired my circadian rhythm, and Carlos has stopped asking why I'm up reorganizing the pantry at midnight). I put my earbuds in and started this thinking I'd drift off. I did not drift off.
The Architecture of a Closet Built by People Who Love You
What wrecked me about Conley's memoir isn't the conversion therapy itself - though those scenes are gutting, clinical in a way that made my skin crawl. It's the before. The careful, painstaking construction of a life where being gay isn't just sinful, it's literally unthinkable. His father is a Baptist pastor. His mother is deeply embedded in the church. And Conley doesn't paint them as villains. That's what makes this so much harder than a simple abuse narrative.
He writes about his mother with this aching tenderness that kept catching me off guard. She's not a monster. She's a woman operating inside a system that told her she was saving her child's life, maybe his eternal soul. And Conley holds that complexity without flinching - the love and the damage, coexisting in the same hands that packed his bags for Love in Action.
As someone who's actually worked a code - as someone who has watched families make devastating medical decisions because they genuinely believed they were doing the right thing - I recognized something in this book that most reviewers probably miss. The parents aren't the disease. The system is. Conley gets that. He writes about it with a clarity that's almost surgical.
Michael Crouch Knows When to Be Quiet
Here's what I'll say about the narration: Crouch doesn't oversell. And in a memoir this emotionally loaded, that restraint matters more than range or vocal fireworks. There are moments - especially when Conley describes the group therapy sessions at Love in Action, the forced confessions, the bizarre exercises designed to "masculinize" behavior - where a lesser narrator would have leaned into the horror of it. Crouch keeps his delivery steady, compassionate but controlled, and it made those scenes land harder. The horror is in the content. The narration just gets out of its way.
His tone shifts subtly between the present-day Conley looking back and the nineteen-year-old Conley living through it. It's not dramatic vocal changes - it's more a slight tightening, a younger uncertainty that creeps in. I noticed it. I appreciated it.
I don't have enough data to tell you whether he nails every Southern accent or perfectly captures specific character voices. What I can tell you is that for eight hours, I never once felt pulled out of the story by the performance. For memoir narration, that's the highest compliment I can give.
This Is Not a Hospital Book, But It Hit Like One
Look - I read medical thrillers to yell at my dashboard. I read memoirs to feel something real. This one made me sit in my kitchen at 4 AM with cold coffee, thinking about every queer kid I've ever treated in my ER who came in after a suicide attempt, every set of parents in the waiting room who looked terrified and confused and like they loved their child but didn't know how to hold both that love and who their child actually was.
Conley doesn't write about conversion therapy like it's a political issue. He writes about it like it happened to him. Because it did. The twelve-step structure, the Bible study sessions used as psychological tools, the slow erasure of self dressed up as spiritual growth - it's all rendered with the kind of specificity that only comes from lived experience.
Carlos asked why I was crying in the kitchen. I blamed allergies. In July. In Phoenix. He didn't buy it.
Who Needs This and Who Doesn't
If you're looking for a light listen, keep scrolling. The last time I pressed pause on an audiobook because I needed a minute to breathe, it was Street Cat Named Bob — and that one was grief, not this particular species of institutional cruelty. Content warnings are real here - psychological abuse, sexual assault, the particular violence of being told your core self is a sickness that needs curing. But if you want to understand what conversion therapy actually looks like from the inside - not the headline version, the real human version - this is it. This is the one.
My mom would love this. (She still thinks I should've been a doctor, but she's also the woman who cried when marriage equality passed, so.) I'm sending her my Audible login.
Night shift approved - but only if you're ready to feel something.
