Book Review: My Dear Hemlock
Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock. Canon Press, 2024. 198 pp.
In My Dear Hemlock, Tilly Dillehay exposes the devil perched on every woman’s shoulder. A clear homage to C.S. Lewis’s iconic The Screwtape Letters, the novel presents a series of “found” letters from senior tempter Madam Hoaxrot to less-experienced demon Hemlock. As in The Screwtape Letters, Hoaxrot offers advice to Hemlock as Hemlock struggles to tempt a Christian woman (referred to as “the patient”) to turn from the Lord (referred to as “the Enemy”). It’s a bold mission—to confront the vices of modern women and write a spiritual sequel to The Screwtape Letters—but Dillehay pulls it off with grace, in both style and her efforts at Christian edification.
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Hemlock vs. Screwtape
While My Dear Hemlock adapts the structure and narrative tone of The Screwtape Letters, it stands apart in its audience and intention. Most obviously, Dillehay focuses on modern Christian women as her audience. The novel’s patient is a present-day American woman; her demons belong to “the Ministry for the Absorption of Women,” and the demonic narrator has assumed the feminine moniker Madam Hoaxrot. As such, the patient’s temptation revolves primarily around experiences that are unique to women (e.g., pregnancy, motherhood, and envying the pastor’s wife) or general issues filtered heavily through a woman’s perspective, such as how social media leads women especially to vanity and how women withhold marital intimacy to discipline their husbands.
The Screwtape Letters, in contrast, features a contemporary British man as its patient, with a masculine demonic narrator (Screwtape, the senior demon, refers to himself as the “uncle” of junior tempter Wormwood) in the broader Temptation Department. Lewis’s patient undergoes primarily universal experiences (e.g., his temptation as a recent Christian convert to view himself as intellectually or morally superior to mature Christians). The male-oriented issues, such as navigating the mother-son relationship and risking his life to save others during the bombing of London, feel like the exception, rather than the rule.
Audience, Scope, and Instruction
While both authors intend their novels to edify Christians, Dillehay takes a more direct approach. Each chapter title in My Dear Hemlock announces the subject on which the reader will receive instruction, ranging from “On Prayer” to “On Wine Night.” Lewis’s chapters do not have titles or such clear-cut topical organization.
Moreover, Dillehay’s patient takes a proverbial backseat in the narrative, allowing the reader to more easily put herself in the patient’s place. The reader always knows the patient’s phase of life or current struggle, but the narrative often omits the finer details. For instance, Chapter 8, “On the Emotional Affair,” explores the patient’s attraction to a male coworker without directly showing the characters’ interactions or even telling the reader what they do for work. Instead, the chapter functions more like a mini sermon or moral essay, exploring the nature of women’s lust and the dangers of non-physical affairs. This pattern repeats throughout the book, making My Dear Hemlock feel like a self-help book cloaked in fiction, rather than the novel it technically is.
Lewis’s Story-First Approach
The Screwtape Letters, on the other hand, provides more “in scene” moments of the patient’s life. For instance, when the patient first attends church, Lewis gives the reader more insight into the character’s emotions and thoughts, as well as more specific details about the setting and the people around him. While moral lessons abound throughout the novel, Lewis trusts his reader to intuit them from the story and Screwtape’s subtler writings. Thus, The Screwtape Letters gives the impression of an inverted fiction book laced with Christian edification.
“Who can find a virtuous woman?”
Despite the obvious connection to The Screwtape Letters, My Dear Hemlock deserves to be evaluated on its own merits as a standalone novel and for anyone who has not read Lewis’s work. Most importantly, My Dear Hemlock offers solid spiritual advice for Christian women at the major moments of their adult lives, including marriage, pregnancy and motherhood, changing or navigating church society, and aging and illness.
For example, the novel reminds women of the Christian view of marriage. Dillehay warns against treating marriage as yet another worldly economic transaction and subtly calls out modern women for trying to find a man who ticks all their boxes or provides them the best life—or, I would argue, creating idols of the non-existent perfect man or marriage.
As Hoaxrot writes,
When you have a pretty young woman marrying a nice, average, hardworking young man, I’ve had much success inviting her to think often of how the young man ‘married up.’…marriage, according to human dogma, is supposed to be an exchange of free love and commitment, not an exchange on the stock market. But the thing is, most humans think of marriage exactly as we [demons] think of it: an exchange of goods and services.
These words echo our own To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism, which describes Christian marriage as “uniting [a couple] in self-giving love, joy, and faithfulness.”
Ancient Foes, Modern Weapons
Likewise, Dillehay takes on several trending modern topics. Her chapter on social media and cell phones, which Hoaxrot appropriately calls “pocket mirrors,” is particularly convicting. It describes how over-use or addiction can wreck our bodies, souls, and relationship with God. Hoaxrot writes, “In the end, she’ll be sitting at a table with friends, and the burden of having her legs touch the road of time will be too much, even at such an easy and pleasant part of the road! She’ll pull her phone out of her pocket, and it’s not even WORK she’s avoiding; it’s pleasure. The advantage for us [demons] is that our patients can be brought to the end of a wasted life more gently and easily than ever before.”
Dillehay fills My Dear Hemlock with poignant passages like this one, often convicting the reader and exposing how the secular Western world lures her into sin. Yet, mercifully, Dillehay balances the gravity of her writing with moments of hilarious levity. In my favorite example, Madam Hoaxrot begins a letter by telling Hemlock, “I was on vacation last week, inhabiting the front left wheel of a Walmart shopping cart. Thoroughly enjoyed.” Who among us has not cursed such a small inconvenience?
Missed Opportunities
While no book could cover every issue modern women face, Dillehay does leave out a few significant topics. Her patient was raised Christian, if somewhat loosely, and seems to follow a traditional path of life. As happens to many young women, the patient’s one apparent faith crisis occurs in college when she leaves her Christian community and dates a non-believer. Yet My Dear Hemlock picks up after the patient has returned to Christ, missing an opportunity to reach readers who may still be experiencing the temptations of a highly secular university environment.
Moreover, Dillehay does not discuss how work can become an idol for modern women, the pursuit or lack of money (a top cause of divorce among Americans), many women’s tendency toward materialism (one of the key sources of hypocrisy that drives young believers away from the Church), or the idolization of famous people (one particularly Era-defining pop star comes to mind).
For Sons, Brothers, Husbands, and Friends
While My Dear Hemlock is intended for a female audience, men can still gain much from the novel. The book discusses multiple issues that affect men and women equally. Two that stand out are prayer (including challenges of frequency, not knowing what to pray, or the feeling of just “going through the motions” during prayer) and confession of sin, which Dillehay espouses should be both private as well as done in community (something, thankfully, the Book of Common Prayer equips us to do).
As a woman, I believe My Dear Hemlock accurately conveys many temptations modern women face. It shows the tension that arises between Christian values and the secular values that surround us, such as submitting to our husbands in the Biblical sense when the world tells us to maintain independence. Men could easily pick up this book to gain a greater understanding of the battles waged by their wives, mothers, sisters, friends and daughters, as well as how to support them. Naturally, every woman’s experiences will vary from the patient’s journey, and this is still a work of fiction. But most men will probably find this short, clever novel more enjoyable than some of the academic tomes on women and their religious lives.
The Devil on Your Shoulder…and in Your Shopping Cart…and Everywhere
When I had the privilege to meet the Rt. Rev’d Felix Orji at my husband’s ordination, he indulged me in a few theological questions. Having recently read The Screwtape Letters for the first time, and as someone who enjoys supernatural fiction, I asked him how much influence and power demonic forces have in our world. He advised me, as one who seems sensitive to such topics, not to give Satan or his minions much thought and instead to focus my attention on the Lord.
When Demons Become Too Visible
For similarly sensitive readers, My Dear Hemlock could be a bit disturbing or even lead toward an unhealthy preoccupation with demons. While the novel admits that humans have mortal weakness and sinful natures, it centers on how demons exploit these flaws. Following the premise established by The Screwtape Letters, each human has a personal demon who constantly whispers in her ear, spies on her life (even in the marriage bed), corrupts her mind and sometimes her body, and even lurks in innocuous inanimate objects like finicky shopping cart wheels or packing tape. It is easy, after reading My Dear Hemlock, to see demons in every aspect of one’s life—and to place blame for your sin wholly on them.
Anglican Guardrails for Discernment
It would do Anglican women good to remember that our temptation to sin comes from multiple sources. As stated in To Be a Christian, we’re tempted by “the false promises of the world, the selfish desires of [our] flesh, and the lies of the devil.” Demons absolutely can “cause spiritual and sometimes physical harm to mortals, and they sow lies that lead to confusion, despair, sin and death.” Anglican doctrine does not specify the full extent of demons’ powers, but regardless, God remains more powerful than them.
Demonology, Exorcism, and Perspective
My husband pointed out that Anglicans have a complicated history with demonology and exorcism. He recommends A History of Anglican Exorcism, in which Francis Young traces how the Anglican tradition has swung between endorsing, marginalizing, and outright rejecting exorcism, sometimes dismissing it as either Roman Catholic superstition or evangelical excess. But the ACNA does take it seriously and works closely with the Society of St. Michael to train lay and ordained people in deliverance ministry.
So, to echo Bishop Orji’s advice, take the novel’s edification seriously but remember that its particular demons are fiction. Keep your fascination, whether awesome or fearful, on its proper subject, our Lord and Savior.
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