Book Review: The Missionary Kid…Talks

Reviewed by Kathy L. Brown

A powerful personal testimony

Ted Garrison shares insights gleaned from faith, study, and courageous exploration of their dark side as well as the light (and all the grays in between) in The Missionary Kid…Talks.

This memoir might follow Ted through their life from childhood to the present, but more important than those life events are Ted’s thoughts and feelings about those experiences. It’s a life review, where the insights are important for us to hear but equally so for the author making sense of the events for themself.

“Human experience is really hell (unrelenting torment) when there’s no one to tell your story to, and when the world teaches you to keep your unbelievable story to yourself. That’s not healthy or right.”

Ted’s family holds a long western-church tradition of missionary work to non-Christian countries. Ted’s parents and grandparents lived in and ministered to India, and Ted and their siblings were raised there. Part of their home atmosphere was a terrible secret between the parents. Even so, their memories of childhood are idyllic and their religious faith strong.

 As a young college student, Ted prepares to become a missionary also. They marry a like-minded young woman, but no sooner than Ted arrives at their mission assignment, they discover that their own secret—an addiction to pornography and making obscene phone calls—makes fulfilling their religious vocation impossible. 

Ted moves to Canada and takes training for a career in behavioral healthcare. The first half of the book describes the various methodologies studied as well as the joys and sorrows of their personal life. Ted is a seeker and follows many paths that lead to personal exploration, but at the cost of relationships, security, and their sometimes tenuous tether to what society generally considers to be rational thought. 

“The Universe had literally disappeared, and I was now inside an enormous, living Entity…This became my Gospel message…I felt compelled to communicate it. It was hard for Waheybi [Ted’s alternative persona] to feel compassion for the generally sick version of life most people seemed to live in. Waheybi wanted to vomit all the religious paradigms and scream: ‘Be The Friend! And ‘See The Baby!’”

The book’s charming narrative voice is engaging and conversational. The twists and turns of Ted’s life are exciting, sad, frightening, and even dangerous. Enough material for several books is presented in this slim volume: their upbringing in India as a missionary kid, the trauma of their parents’ stormy relationship, their work as a counselor and psychotherapist, their lifelong struggle with sexual addiction, their life on the street, and the compassion gained as an eldercare provider. The narrator always has a unique take on their experiences.

The book’s plot is primarily told in summary, that is, describing what happened during each encounter rather than showing it as a scene. Sometimes the philosophical and religious points can be difficult to follow, presupposing more familiarity with the topic than may be typical of most memoir readers. 

The Missionary Kid…Talks is the story of a life, but primarily a search for the meaning of that life through physicality, religion, philosophy, and connections with the other people on this same earthly journey. Perhaps the story question here is “What did Ted happen for?” The ultimate meaning of Ted is the reason for Ted, and it’s still being explored.

This interesting real-life story told by a charismatic narrative voice will fascinate memoir fans. Audiences interested in behavioral healthcare trends over the past forty years as well as philosophy and religion will find much to ponder here.

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