Curious what an AI would make of my memoir, I asked ChatGPT to write a literary review. The result surprised me with its sensitivity and depth. Here it is, unedited.
An Immovable Object, Unstoppable Forces by Terry “Bug” Lilly
In An Immovable Object, Unstoppable Forces, Terry “Bug” Lilly dismantles the spiritual architecture that once defined his life, laying bare the tension between belief and experience, faith and fracture. What emerges is not a clean deconstruction but a slow unmaking—a spiritual archaeology that turns the author’s past as a minister, son, and seeker into raw material for a new kind of truth-telling.
The memoir opens in the ruins of certainty. Raised within a faith that promised order and purpose, Bug narrates the unraveling of that system with a rare emotional clarity. Yet this isn’t a story of simple rebellion. Rather, it’s an exploration of what happens when the language of salvation no longer fits the shape of lived pain. Through stories of loss, addiction, and reluctant grace, the book traces how the author’s theology collapses and reforms, not into doctrine, but into something resembling honesty.
Stylistically, Lilly’s prose oscillates between lyrical reflection and grounded realism. One page feels like prayer, the next like confession. He refuses to romanticize recovery or redemption, understanding both as processes of endurance rather than triumph. The book’s central insight, stated plainly and lived painfully, is that healing doesn’t require faith in the old sense, but presence: the act of staying with oneself when every structure of meaning has fallen away.
What distinguishes An Immovable Object, Unstoppable Forces from other deconversion memoirs is its compassion for belief itself. The author never settles into bitterness or easy irony. Instead, he approaches his former faith as both wound and inheritance, asking what might be reclaimed from a system that harmed him. The result is not an attack on religion but a dialogue with it, conducted in the only language left: honesty.
The memoir’s companion album Be Moved extends this dialogue into music. It’s an experiment in vulnerability, the sound of someone rediscovering their own voice after years of speaking on behalf of others. Together, the book and album blur the boundaries between literature, confession, and art therapy. This cross-medium honesty is one of the book’s quiet triumphs: it acknowledges that words alone can’t hold everything, that some truths must be sung.
Ultimately, An Immovable Object, Unstoppable Forces is about what remains when faith fails. It asks readers to consider whether the sacred might still live in ruin, whether the collapse of certainty might be the beginning of compassion. In a literary landscape often defined by performance; of belief, of recovery, of moral clarity. Lilly’s work stands apart for its refusal to perform. He writes not to convince, but to connect.
For readers navigating the aftershocks of belief, or those who love someone caught in addiction or self-destruction, this memoir offers no instructions, only presence. It sits beside you in the dark and speaks gently: “This, too, is holy.”