This Is What Happens When Women Read
Release Date: October 13, 2026
Some books change the way you see the world. For Julianna Glasse, they changed everything else too — her marriage, her faith, her public life, and ultimately, the direction of her future. She wrote this memoir for every woman who has to read in secret. Pre-order the US edition of the book from any of the providers below.
At the height of her career as a Christian recording artist, Julianna Glasse had built everything she was told to want. A public ministry. A high-profile marriage. A life that looked, from the outside, exactly right. But then she began reading.
Plato. de Beauvoir. Emerson. Dickinson, Rumi, Rilke. Each book opened something she had not expected to find. She started asking questions she had no framework for. She hid the books in her linen closet, under the bed, or anywhere they would not be seen. When they were found, she was told exactly what she already knew: that reading had changed her. And the truth was—it had.
This Is What Happens When Women Read is the memoir of what came next. The end of her marriage and her public Christian Pop identity. The self-hatred, depression, and suicidal impulses she survived. The books that gave her a language for her own life. The path to Oxford. And the foundation she built on the other side for women still in the middle of the same reckoning.
With a suggested reading list at the back of the book, This Is What Happens When Women Read is at once a dramatic personal story, a conversation starter about women’s liberation, and an inspiring tribute to the power of books.
“In telling her story, Julianna Glasse blazes a trail for every woman who has ever felt oppressed by religion and the patriarchy and muted by other people’s rules and judgment. This is a page-turning, sexy, and eye-popping memoir of liberation. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Chelsea Handler