She was trying to write things her mother would approve of. “The problem was that I was still limited by the Witnesses' beliefs,” she says.
There were a lot of complicated mother-daughter relationships,” she remembers of those early drafts. An aspiring novelist who’d never been permitted to express herself, she applied for a Masters in Creative Writing within a year of leaving the organisation, working on fiction manuscripts that wouldn’t stick. Millar attended her last Witness meeting in 2009, but it would take another 10 years before she could write about what happened to her.
“Maybe everything that’s gone wrong in the past was because of this space I didn’t know how to fill, and God couldn’t fill it either.” Eventually, she stopped going to meetings. “I realise there’s space in me,” she writes, reflecting after a snowy, contemplative walk. After learning she has had an affair, the congregation begin to treat her with cold contempt. I don't get thrown out of the religion, but I'm no longer seen as a ‘good associate,’” she says of the book’s turbulent second section. “I start going off the rails, in a delayed way. She married young, at 21, and treated her twenties like a second adolescence. It really was just this complete awakening.” Just absolutely starving for books, and other minds.
That whole summer, my head was just completely blown because it was just all full of ideas. He just had so many brilliant books.” Millar would sneak paperbacks into her handbag, so her then-husband wouldn’t see, and read them on the hour-long train journey to and from work. During an internship in Amsterdam, she lived in a flat that belonged to a Dutch actor. Growing up, Millar wasn’t allowed to read “worldly” books that had the potential to corrupt her. “I start, at that stage, to pull away from the religion, but the relationship that I have with my mum always pulls me back.” So too is her storytelling, using vivid, present-tense narration to take the reader through her childhood and her teenage years. Millar’s writing is bracing, raw and immediate. 'I started to pull away from the religion, but the relationship that I have with my mum always pulls me back' Ali Millar
Instead, she had thought there was something wrong with her. Until I was subjected to their discipline,” she recalls. “I didn't ever think, ‘There's something wrong with the religion’, until that happened. That scene, which appears late on in The Last Days was a lightbulb moment for Millar. Sitting across from me, she’s warm and open, softly spoken but with an unmistakable quiet intensity. The experience of sharing something she had buried left Millar feeling euphoric, too. “I didn't tell people that it was something that had happened to me,” she says. In it, the protagonist is quizzed about her sex life in uncomfortable detail by an all-male panel of ‘elders’. But five years ago, at a spoken word event, she performed a piece she told everyone was fiction. “I've never wanted to speak about growing up as a Witness. Discussing them in a corporate meeting room under fluorescent lights, she’s more exposed. The kitchen is a cosy, private space that she was able to cocoon herself in as she confronted some of her darkest memories. Normally, the writer and mother of four works from her kitchen table, grounded by its green walls and open shelves lined with pots made of clay. We’re on the fifth floor of a glass skyscraper overlooking the River Thames, and Millar is distracted by the view. “I still believe that if that hadn't happened, it's highly unlikely that she would have become a Jehovah's Witness.” “That was this really pivotal moment in her life, when she was made very vulnerable and put in this really difficult situation by a powerful man,” she says. It begins in 1979, the year her mother met her father. In her gorgeous, haunting memoir The Last Days, the 42-year-old author re-lives growing up in a small town in the Scottish Borders. “The story starts before I’m born,” says Ali Millar.