Unfollow
Unfollow is Megan Phelps-Roper's 2019 memoir of growing up inside the Westboro Baptist Church, the small Topeka congregation founded by her grandfather Fred Phelps that became infamous in the 2000s for picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers and AIDS victims with placards reading God Hates Fags. Phelps-Roper writes from the inside out. She describes the warmth and certainty of her early childhood, the rigorous biblical schooling she received from her mother, and her teenage role as the church's online voice, running the Westboro Twitter account and engaging in long, often vicious public arguments. She also describes the slow, mostly online conversations, especially with a Jewish blogger and an Australian programmer, that gradually exposed contradictions in her doctrine she could not unsee. In 2012 she and her younger sister left Westboro, breaking permanently with their parents and most of their siblings. The book is unsentimental and without self-pity.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Unfollow
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up the granddaughter of Pastor Fred Phelps inside the Westboro Baptist Church compound in Topeka, Kansas, picketing soldiers' funerals at age five and running the church's Twitter account by twenty-three.
Yes. Megan Phelps-Roper's memoir documents her childhood inside Westboro Baptist Church, her role running the church's social media, and her eventual departure.
Yes. She produced the podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling and has written and spoken extensively on extremism and exit narratives.
Unfollow was written by Megan Phelps-Roper, published in 2019 by Quercus.
Unfollow is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Unfollow takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Unfollow is a standalone novel by Megan Phelps-Roper, not part of a series.
Unfollow is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.