Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church

by Megan Phelps-Roper

I wouldn’t realize until much later that the protectiveness I felt for Grace wasn’t just because she was following the rules. It was because she was managing to do so without losing herself. I adored Grace’s creativity and free spirit and the dreams she would so casually mention—of traveling to Paris or Rome to see the sculptures she was studying in art history, or off to Russia, home of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I loved her dreams even though I knew them to be impossible. We could never leave the United States and the broad protection of the First Amendment, and the church’s ban on international travel was just one of the innumerable limitations on our lives that I had long ago assimilated. But because “Grace flies under the radar,” as my parents often noted, she was somewhat insulated from our mother’s watchful gaze and need for submission. She hadn’t yet been broken. She’d made it to age nineteen with her will intact, and she was the only person with whom I could speak openly about my concerns—the only one willing to express disagreement with the elders’ positions without including the standard caveat: “The elders know better. We must be missing something.”