Leaving a church produces two standard memoirs: the furious account and the tidy recovery arc. Burning Butch declines both, and the refusal is what makes this audiobook worth ten hours. R/B Mertz was raised inside conservative Catholic homeschooling after a divorce moved the family out of rural Pennsylvania and away from an abusive father, and then, rather than escaping, chose to go further in by enrolling at a conservative Catholic college in Ohio. The book sits inside that decision instead of explaining it away, and Mertz is credited with reading it.
Two institutions shape the book and neither is treated as a cartoon. First comes the homeschool household, described in the copy as a world of saints, prayers and as many babies as possible, arriving in a child's life at precisely the moment that child begins to suspect they are queer. Then comes the college, where the early aughts supply flirtations, sexual encounters and relationships with students and faculty that the copy calls confusing, which is a generous word for arrangements involving that much institutional power.
What the strongest response on the record identifies is the mechanism rather than the atmosphere. Writing in July 2023, one entry describes the repeated demand to disown oneself in service of the church, and the particular damage done by adults it calls severely underdeveloped and grossly inappropriate, who nonetheless hold the moral authority in every room. That is the book's real subject. Not belief and not sexuality on their own, but the machinery by which a community makes a young person the negotiable item.
Register rather than substance is where my reservation sits. The copy promises a voice that is at turns rebellious, charming and self-effacing, and that is accurate: the tone shifts often, sometimes inside a single scene, and a listener who prefers a memoir to hold one emotional key will find the ground moving. It also declines to resolve. Nobody arrives at a settled position on the church, on family, or on what was owed and by whom. I read that as honesty. Some listeners will read it as a missing final chapter.
Mertz's Self-Narration Reclaims Who Gets to Speak
Prose quality is the reason this rises above the shelf it sits on. A January 2026 entry, from a reader who came out in a small Midwestern town in the early 1990s, says the book puts the literary into literary memoir and calls it the volume they wish had existed when they were in their twenties. That is the right compliment. The sentences are doing work here, and the retrospective distance is controlled rather than sentimental, which is rarer in this genre than the number of titles in it would suggest.
The numbers agree, with one thing worth noticing. A 4.7 average across 48 grades sits alongside five written entries that are unanimously full marks, which means the votes pulling that average down are somewhere off the page and none of the visible commentary explains them. Self-narration is the other structural fact: the author field and the narrator field name the same person, so a memoir about being spoken for and spoken about is delivered by the one person with standing to tell it.
Alumni Praise It, but the Shelving Misleads
Insider testimony dominates the written column, and it cuts both ways. A September 2023 entry identifies as an alumnus of the same university; a July 2022 entry identifies as a queer alumna of Franciscan University of Steubenville and describes it as the bubble Mertz survived, naming an institution the publisher copy leaves unnamed. Both recommend the book warmly and both are reading it as testimony about a place they know. Their enthusiasm is evidence of accuracy, and it is not evidence that a reader without that background will connect the same way.
Shelving is the clearest defect on the record. This memoir is filed with a Parenting and Families tag, which is an odd home for an account of queer adolescence, faith deconstruction and institutional abuse, and it will send exactly the wrong browsers here while hiding the book from the ones looking for it. The genre field does better. Anyone using the tag as a guide to content should ignore it entirely and read the description instead.
Length is worth weighing too. Ten hours and five minutes is generous for a single-thread memoir, and the material is emotionally heavy in a way that discourages long sessions. The written column offers no guidance on pacing at all, and one of those five entries runs to nine words in total. Plan on shorter stretches than the running time suggests, particularly through the college chapters.
Religious and Queer Readers Will Feel This Hardest
Anyone who grew up religious and queer, or religious and doubting, is the core audience, and the reception suggests the book lands hard with that group. Readers of literary memoir who care about sentences will find more craft here than the subject matter alone would predict. It also has real value for people on the other side of the question: parents, teachers and clergy who want to understand what the demand to choose between community and self actually does to a teenager.
Listeners looking for a warm coming-out story should be steered elsewhere, since this is a book about coercion as much as about identity, and it refuses the resolution that genre usually provides. Anyone with direct experience of religious or family abuse should approach the middle stretch knowing what it contains. And a reader wanting a broad account of American Catholicism will find something narrower and more personal: one household, one campus, and one person refusing to be simplified.
Key Details
- Narration: The memoir is delivered by its own subject, R/B Mertz, with no other voice on the recording.
- Themes: queer adolescence inside conservative Catholic homeschooling, faith deconstruction, community set against identity
- Mood: Wry, raw, and unresolved on purpose
- Verdict: One of the sharper recent memoirs of leaving a church without abandoning its questions.
Common Questions
Does R/B Mertz read the audiobook, and does self-narration matter for this one?
The narrator credit and the author credit are the same name, so yes. It matters more than usual here, because the book is about a young person being described, corrected and spoken for by adults with authority. Having the account delivered by its subject changes who holds the microphone.
Which pronouns does the book use for Mertz?
They and them. The publisher copy uses those pronouns throughout and describes the memoir as the story of a trans and non-binary butch trying to survive with their authenticity intact. Anyone writing or talking about the book should follow the description rather than guessing from the cover or the title.
Does the audiobook require any background in Catholicism to follow?
No. The specifics are precise, homeschooling, saints, prayers, a conservative college, and the pressure underneath them is general: a community that demands you choose it over yourself. Listeners with no religious background at all will follow every scene, though those who lived something similar report recognizing it line by line.
How heavy is the content, and is any advisory posted?
The record carries no advisory of any kind. The description names an abusive father, an oppressive religious environment, and sexual encounters including relationships with faculty, so a listener should expect coercion, homophobia and family harm as recurring material rather than as isolated scenes. Approach the college section with that in mind.
