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Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?
  • Published: 14 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761357909
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 24 min
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?

She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
14 July 2026
EBook
14 July 2026
Audiobook
14 July 2026
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Growing up, marrying in and ultimately abandoning an Australian cult.
Then learning how to make friends, live, love and thrive.

We all grew up under constant instruction: from the pulpit, from our parents, from each other. The Ten Commandments. Obedience. Submission. Purity. Fear God. Honour your leaders. Hell for the wicked. There was no space for questions because we already had the answers. If something felt unclear, that was our spiritual flaw.
Pray harder.

In a sleepy Canberra suburb, Bek Condello was raised in a strict patriarchal Pentecostal movement. The influence of the Geelong Revival Centre extended deeply into the lives of the congregation, promoting discipline and dictating how girls and women behaved, who they socialised with and who they would marry.

After enduring a tumultuous marriage, Bek Condello made the courageous decision to start her life again. Anyone who leaves the GRC is cut off, from family, identity, history.

Can You Handle A Girl Like Me? chronicles Bek’s journey of challenges and transformation as she navigates dating and friendships. With little experience, she is rebuffed and exploited.

Through embracing healing and self-empowerment, Bek is now embarking on a second life of adventure and joy.
  • Published: 14 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781761357909
  • Imprint: Penguin Random House Australia Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 24 min
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Bek Condello

Bek Condello grew up in Australia inside a closed-off doomsday Pentecostal church that controlled every aspect of her life. Leaving meant losing her family, her community and the identity she had been told was hers since she was a young girl. By her early thirties she had broken free from both the church and the marriage she had been pressured into within it, reclaiming her life and discovering who she truly was. Today Bek lives with unapologetic joy, deep bravery and a commitment to freedom, inspiring others to rebuild and thrive after deep loss.
portrait photo of Bek Condello

Praise for Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?

Condello writes with verve and pin-point clarity about a hidden part of Australian life. What she reveals about the pressures and dangers felt by young women raised in closed off and repressive religious groups is truly frightening. Despite it all, A Girl Like Me, manages to inspire with its unconquerable spirit.

Richard Baker

Author Bek Condello is generous and insightful; hers is the kind of storytelling that changes lives. Fascinating as the cult aspects are, it’s her work on ­gender and trauma that shines. Can You Handle a Girl Like Me? is a bone-rattling ­account of one woman’s long road to freedom. The secretive cult she escaped still operates in Australia today, yet her memoir does more than just illuminate its extreme practices alone. Condello has written a treatise on the war for women’s bodies, and the multifaceted harms stitched into the oppression of a soul.

Cadance Bell, The Australian