Serve : My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland’s Opus Dei

Anne Marie Allen was fifteen when she was accepted onto a cookery school course that promised real qualifications and a future in the career of her dreams.

Seeking a better life, she moved to the calm and peaceful countryside of the west of Ireland.

Her happiness was short-lived as it became clear she had been tricked instead into a life of domestic servitude to the members of Opus Dei. Before long she was whisked away to Rome where she signed her life away with vows to serve.

What followed were years of misery in slavery, forced celibacy and traumatic physical suffering under an ambitious and tyrannical institution that demanded perfection, humiliation and pain. Her family eventually managed to coerce a visit home where they refused to let her return to the Order, and where they began the long process of deprogramming Anne Marie – a task that has been a life-long struggle.

Serve is Anne Marie’s remarkable story of strength and resilience in the face of religious zealotry.  ‘As the book shows, you were caught between two worlds ... it’s a remarkable book’.  interview with Dearbhail Mac Donald, The Brendan O’Connor Show ‘An urgent, powerful memoir’ Andrew Lynch, Irish Times ‘She lifts the veil on the domestic servitude which young Irish girls like her were lured into ...

It reads like a novel’.  Sarah Mac Donald, Irish Independent ‘Absolutely fascinating ... an extraordinary story, and extraordinary book’. Matt Cooper, Today FM