Until He Comes A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

A hilarious, touching, and relatable memoir about religion, sex, and one woman's search for her own personal saviorin all its various forms. Picked on by jocks and obsessed with her own ugliness, young Dawn Goodwin fantasizes all day about having sex, but is hard-wired with fundamentalist warnings about how disappointed her Future Husband will be. Sunday school teachers, unfortunately, did not address brimming self-hatred or her compulsion to write reams of kinky stories about horny Minotaurs. The Bible had no fine print explaining how many points you lose for going to second base. And will dry humping reduce the chances of going to hell by up to 35 percent? Now, in Until He Comes, she shares her personal and sometimes raunchy journey navigating the murky waters of religion and sexualityand the struggle to reconcile two unspoken Christian traditions: doing everything-but-sex behind closed doors and being everything-but-yourself out in the open. With the laugh-out-loud humor of such bestselling authors as Jen Lancaster and Laurie Notaro, Goodwin presents not just a tortured tightrope walk through fundamentalism but also provides a powerful reflection of the core issues facing young women: low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, sex (and almost-sex), and hypocritical messages of perfection.

Who She Is: Dawn Goodwin is the daughter of recovered fundamentalist missionaries and a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, where she majored in English and Creative Writing, despite her fear-n-loathing of Famous Literature.

Where Is She now: For the last fourteen years Goodwin has been living in rural western Georgia, meth capital of the Southeast. She now enjoys blowing stuff up, taking pictures of billboards, and shopping at the Dollar General. She is a single mom of three kids because of course. "When you’re this far below the Bible belt," Goodwin explains, "there’s really not much else to do but breed. And burn trash." 

Publishing History: Between lighting explosives, feeding her naked toddlers Diet Coke in their baby bottles, and letting them beat the hell out of an old rotary phone with some PVC pipe in the neighbor’s ditch, she has published numerous freelance creative pieces in local and national papers, pimped out her essays for grant money, made insurance coding sound sexy, and had her book awarded Finalist in the Georgia Writer’s Association 2013 Author of the Year competition–all that, while wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a bad bleach job, praise Jesus. "And when you’re working that hard Lord," she says, "the carpet don’t have time to be matchin no dang drapes."