'Cut Me Loose': After Exile, A Young Woman's Journey In 'Sin'
Leah Vincent was born into the Yeshivish community, an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism, in Pittsburgh.
"Yeshivish Judaism life is defined by religious law," Vincent tells NPR's Arun Rath. "We keep extra strict laws of Kosher, observe the Sabbath every week, maintain a separation of the sexes, and a degree of isolation from the outside world."
When she was 16, she was caught exchanging letter with a male friend. Contact with men was forbidden in her sect, and she was cast out from her community.
In her memoir, Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, Vincent shares her journey after exile.
"I'm almost embarrassed now when I share stories with other people who have similar journeys," says Vincent. "I wasn't the feminist, I wasn't the forward-thinking intellectual; I just was a teenager. And I made some mistakes, but I desperately — for years — clung to this desire to stay within the world I grew up in."
At 17, she moved to New York City, a hub for the Yeshivish community. New York is where many parents send their children to see a matchmaker and get married. But for Vincent, all ties were severed.
"I just ended up in this precarious position where I was branded a rebel and a bad girl, but I had no desire on my own to move out into the world. I still loved our way of life," she says.
Alone in a vastly different world, Vincent experienced a collapse of her faith.
"This is a story about a lot of sex and sexual trauma," she says, "but then, I grew up in this very sheltered world. I think when girls are raised in communities or homes that obsess over modesty ... it leaves them very vulnerable to the type of things that I went through."