WORLDLY GIRLS - Tamara Jong (with Erica H Isomura)

Join us for the Toronto launch of Tamara Jong's Worldly Girls, with guest reader Erica H Isomura.

Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

ABOUT TAMARA JONG

Tamara Jong is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative nonfiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine's collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book.

ABOUT ERICA H ISOMURA

Born and raised on the west coast, Erica H Isomura is a writer, artist, and community educator. Her practice combines text, drawing, bookmaking, printmaking, collage, and other mixed-media art. Erica's work has appeared in Ruth Beer's SEEP/SWELL (Burnaby Art Gallery, 2025), The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, 2025), The RAVEN Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2025) and elsewhere.In 2023, Erica was artist-in-residence at The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency in Steveston Village, BC. Erica received ROOM magazine's Emerging Writer Award and won first prize in Briarpatch magazine’s Writing In The Margins contest for creative non-fiction.Erica earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph (2024), where she produced a visual book for her thesis project. She holds a B.A. in Social Sciences with minors in Environmental & Indigenous studies from the University of Victoria (2015).Erica currently resides in Tkarón:to/Toronto, ON.

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