Extreme Religious Conversion - Kelsey Osgood on women, religious transformations, and what anorexia has to do with it (PREVIEW)

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, I’m joined by author Kelsey Osgood to discuss her recent book “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys To Religious Conversion.” The book, which profiles women who traded secular lives for religious communities such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christianity, Quakerism, Orthodox Judaism, Saudi-based Islam, and even the Amish faith, is fascinating in its own right. But we also discuss Kelsey’s previous book about her struggle with and recovery from anorexia, which overlaps with her religious transformation in some surprising ways. In that book, How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey wrote not just about anorexia itself but the culture surrounding it, notably the “peak sad girl” era of the late 1990s through early 2000s. The therapeutic approach that accompanied it, she argues, took universal human questions that have been asked for millennia and repackaged them as personal neuroses to be indulged and then solved — or, more often, deemed unsolvable. Her conversion to Judaism and participation in an Orthodox community helped reframe her entire way of thinking and changed her life for the better.

GUEST BIO

Kelsey Osgood is the author of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, which was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Godstruck: Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion, which came out in April from Viking. Her work has appeared online or in print at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's, and the New Yorker, among other outlets.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	But I do wonder a lot what would have happened if instead of being given sort of certain
0:07.0	therapeutic concepts or things like lots of different kinds of medications as a teenager.
0:14.0	If instead my, the clinicians had said things like, you know, we don't know the answers to all of these things.
0:26.3	We don't, we don't know why people suffer or we don't know what, where to draw the line between unnecessary and necessary pain in life.
0:37.1	And we don't know why we're here or what it means to try to figure out how to be a moral person
0:41.3	in a world that's confusing.
0:43.3	But here are some, here are those things reflected back at you from, you know, William James or
0:52.3	or, or Kierkegaard or whatever, if that had been brought there,
0:57.0	I do wonder whether that would have been different.
1:03.4	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. I love this conversation
1:08.5	that I'm about to bring you. It really surprised me with all the different turns it took.
1:14.3	This is with an author named Kelsey Osgood.
1:17.4	She has a new book out called Godstruck Seven Women's Unexpected Journeys to Religious
1:23.0	Conversion.
1:24.1	It's about just that.
1:26.4	The stories of young women who grew up with one kind of background, often no religion
1:33.1	at all, and made pretty radical conversions.
1:36.3	For instance, one of them became Muslim and moved to Saudi Arabia.
1:42.8	Another entered the Amish community. There's stories about
1:47.9	conversion into evangelical Christianity, the Mormon church. Kelsey herself became an Orthodox Jew
1:55.9	after growing up not Jewish at all. But I have to say, beyond the conversation about religion, we also
2:05.1	talk about eating disorders and anorexia. So Kelsey published a book in 2013 called How to
	...

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