Facebook Twitter Instagram

Jessica Wakeman

NonfictionEssays

Burn It Down

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Women’s anger is having a moment in publishing. Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her for another book on the subject: Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger.

Twenty-two women writers contributed essays about their anger. That number seemed excessive at first; how original could each piece really be? But there is so much to be angry about. Burn It Down features essays about sexual abuse, chronic pain, transphobia, disability, religious persecution, gun violence, racism, sizeism, rape. The list goes on.

Leslie Jamison’s standout essay, “Lungs Full of Burning,” addresses her inclination toward sadness in a society that’s inhospitable to women’s anger. “In what I had always understood as self-awareness—I don’t get angry. I get sad—I came to see my own complicity in the same logic that has trained women to bury their anger or perform its absence,” she writes.

Another memorable piece is “Homegrown Anger” by Lisa Factora-Borchers. Being a woman of color in a Trump-voting area of Ohio led her to “befriend” anger, she writes, and to rely on it as a source of strength.

Like Jamison, I am a woman inclined toward sadness over anger—or perhaps I should say, was inclined. The essays in Burn It Down illustrate how patriarchal society benefits from women stifling their anger, even if suppression feels like our best chance at survival. To that end, the angry authors in this anthology are inspirational. In fact, why are all of us women not furious all the time? Burn It Down asserts that there is no panacea for women’s anger, save for widespread political and social change.

Whether you are coming into your own anger, or anger is your daily fuel, there is something for everyone to draw from in this anthology. It is time to light a match.

Women’s anger is having a moment in publishing. Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her for another book on the subject: Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger. Twenty-two women writers contributed essays about their anger. That number seemed excessive […]
Nonfiction

Gender Mosaic

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The 1990s and 2000s were awash in books telling us there is something fundamentally, biologically different about the way men and women think. Bestsellers claimed that the differences between men and women were, literally, all in our heads. But it turns out the science wasn’t so cut and dried. In their new book, Gender Mosaic, neuro-scientist Daphna Joel and science journalist Luba Vikhanski demolish the warped science and faulty reporting that claimed to have located the gender binary inside our skulls, showing evidence for a much more nuanced and egalitarian picture of human cognitive capabilities.

Joel is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Tel Aviv University, and her research underpins Gender Mosaic. She argues that classifying brains as either “male” or “female” is meaningless. Instead, all brains are a patchwork of both masculine and feminine attributes—the mosaic. “If we do persist in applying to brains the same terminology we apply to genitals, we are bound to conclude that most brains are neither male nor female—they are intersex,” the authors write.

But aren’t there measurable distinctions in how girls and boys behave, the subjects they are good at, the ways they interact? Gender Mosaic posits that these differences aren’t primarily biological but social, the result of how children are raised, educational systems, religious ideologies and other sociological forces.

The authors offer an approachable overview of the basics of brain anatomy and neuro-science, and readers will ponder the reasons for the cultural insistence on what the authors call the “binary illusion.” The book follows accounts of scientific research with reasoned arguments for gender equality—as if the authors anticipate a backlash.

Gender Mosaic is an excellent science book for gender studies scholars and an excellent gender studies book for scientists, but anyone looking for a deeper, more expansive examination of the science of gender could glean something from this book. 

The 1990s and 2000s were awash in books telling us there is something fundamentally, biologically different about the way men and women think. Bestsellers claimed that the differences between men and women were, literally, all in our heads. But it turns out the science wasn’t so cut and dried. In their new book, Gender Mosaic, […]
NonfictionMemoir

The Education of an Idealist

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Winning the Pulitizer Prize in 2003 for her book about genocide made Samantha Power a public figure. But joining Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, becoming his White House advisor on human rights and serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations made her career front-page news. Power’s new memoir is a record of this impressive life.

Readers need not be foreign policy wonks to read The Education of an Idealist, but wonks will find the most to chew on here. Power writes in-depth about her attempts to influence foreign policy from both the outside and the inside—first covering the Balkan war as a journalist, then as a government official during the crises in Darfur, Libya and Syria. Much of what she has seen is heartbreaking.

Born in Ireland, Power immigrated to the United States as a child after her parents’ divorce. She writes of the lifelong emotional toll of her father’s alcoholism and young death, of her panic attacks and seeking help at Al-Anon meetings and in therapy. Candor from someone of her stature regarding such personal matters is refreshing, and Power draws directly from her own journals throughout the memoir.

She reveals how campaigns, governments and diplomacy operate behind closed doors—the pale, male upper echelons of how the world works. In her political work, Power is often the only woman in the room, and she doesn’t sugarcoat her experiences with sexism at both the White House and the U.N.

But neither does Power gloss over any professional mistakes and regrets, or any missteps made by President Obama. Perhaps because she has no political ambitions of her own, she is free to write what she really thinks (diplomatically, of course).

The Education of an Idealist is Power’s life story, but it also feels like peering through a time capsule into a period when America showed more compassion for refugees and the disadvantaged. But, ever the idealist, Power also clearly hopes that this book will convince readers that, when there is injustice in the world, America has the moral imperative to do something.

Winning the Pulitizer Prize in 2003 for her book about genocide made Samantha Power a public figure. But joining Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, becoming his White House advisor on human rights and serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations made her career front-page news. Power’s new memoir is a record of this impressive […]
NonfictionEssays

Trick Mirror

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The past decade witnessed a publishing boom of essay collections by a certain type of woman: a coastal 20- or 30-something, witty and “famous”—on Twitter as well as for her actual career as an actress, comedian or writer.

Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer with more than 100K Twitter followers, fits this profile exactly. She is likely the most popular millennial writer working today—so one could be forgiven for anticipating that, like other books in this genre, her debut essay collection would contain mainly forgettable buffers to one or two standouts.

Instead, every single essay in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion is a standout; in fact, “The I in the Internet” and “We Come From Old Virginia” should be taught in journalism schools. Tolentino’s overarching project is to cast aside comforting illusions and gain the necessary clarity to construct a moral life. And as each essay finds Tolentino interrogating her beliefs about society, American womanhood and online feminism, it’s refreshing to see subjects so often reduced to 280-character sloganeering receive 30 pages of thoughtful analysis in her hands.

The subjects are wide-ranging, and nothing is too frivolous to unpack and examine. She writes about her stint as an evangelical Christian 16-year-old on a hormonally charged reality show (“Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico”) with the same seriousness she brings to rape culture, pop-feminist celebrity and virtue signaling on social media.

Tolentino sets the bar higher for every other essay writer. Social media may be part of the reason she is so well-known, but Trick Mirror is a strong case for less tweeting and more long-form writing—for everyone.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror.

Every single essay in Jia Tolentino’s debut collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, is a standout.
NonfictionEssays

Jia Tolentino

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

Christian megachurches. Scammers. Barre classes. Hashtag activism. Difficult women. Literary heroines. Frats. Weddings. A 2004 reality show that dropped eight teenagers in Puerto Rico and filmed what happened.

Jia Tolentino describes the essays in Trick Mirror as “nine terrible children.” It’s the first book for this Extremely Online (that is, extremely plugged into the internet) writer, who cut her teeth at women’s website The Hairpin before heading to Jezebel and finally The New Yorker. 

Trick Mirror coalesced in the winter of 2017. Tolentino sought subjects that were “not simplistic . . . not easy . . . sufficiently complicated and multidimensional in terms of possible research that it would be fun to work on for this long.” And each essay is long—longer than the meatiest New Yorker profile, even—weighing in at 30 to 40 pages. “I want to say they’re all a little too long,” Tolentino laughs. She says she wanted to “just see where it ended.”

This allowed her to follow her own “meandering” thoughts. “Some of the essays, I think, are very meandering,” she confesses. (That’s true—“Always Be Optimizing,” about the popularity of barre fitness classes, contains digressions on the salad chain Sweetgreen and on Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.”) In that way, Tolentino wrote her book with the freedom of an online essay, where word counts are less constrained and form is less structured—which is the opposite of how many writers approach the print/digital divide. 

“One of the most fun things about writing is [that] you get to go down all of these various miscellaneous rabbit holes,” Tolentino explains. Driven by her own emotional and intellectual fascinations, she chose topics “where I could draw widely from other people’s expertise, kind of voraciously and promiscuously from other people.” (These deep dives were powered, she says, by being “a lifetime insomniac.”)

“One of the most fun things about writing is [that] you get to go down all of these various miscellaneous rabbit holes.”

A standout is “We Come from Old Virginia,” her essay about a 2014 article in Rolling Stone. The article told the story of a young woman named Jackie, who alleged she had been gang-raped by members of the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi frat. The journalist who wrote the piece and her editor later confirmed that they had not spoken with any of the alleged attackers; one character in the story may not have existed.

At the time of this exposé-that-wasn’t, Tolentino had graduated from UVA only a few years earlier and had just started at Jezebel. It would have been easy to write an essay that took a hard line, defending or bashing either Rolling Stone or the college. The emotional nuance she brings instead is, in a word, breathtaking. “I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist and the college student who capsized in it,” Tolentino writes in the piece. The essay is not a treatise on journalistic ethics but a thoughtful analysis of the boozy pleasures of the school’s Greek culture, the entrapment of being female in a sexually violent world and the potential malfunctions where activism and journalism intersect. 

Tolentino is “always afraid of being unfair or ungenerous” in her writing, she says, and is intentional about “not getting too heavy about things where heaviness is only part of it.” A lot of writing by progressives can border on scolding, but not hers. “You have to understand what the pleasure is in those systems in order to understand why they persist,” she says. “You have to understand why frats feel so good.”

Tolentino’s background as a middle-class young woman of color who had a religious upbringing in the South informs her relationship to feminism, and to all of her writing in this book. A piece about scams, for instance, challenges the “feminist scammer,” which allows Tolentino to unpack her reluctant relationship to the “commercial viability of feminism.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Trick Mirror.

As a writer who got her start in feminist blogs, she’s baldly honest that “market-friendly feminism,” as she calls it in the essay, is something “I’ve benefited from immensely and wouldn’t have a career if not for.” The struggle in a #GIRLBOSS world, she says, is that “I’m wary about anything that becomes about the performance of ideals. . . . I’m afraid of all of the incentives to [become] more of, like, a ‘personality.’ ” 

Conscious of her place in the digital media ecosystem and of her large platform, Tolentino chooses not to perform the role of prominent Twitter feminist, as some of her peers have. “I think there’s just so many systems, particularly for young women, for your persona or your ‘self’ to feel more important than the literal words that you’re writing,” she says. “We love to turn a young woman writer into just, like, a panel figurehead.” She’s uncomfortable with “the feeling of ‘come speak on an event sponsored by this skincare company,’ and all this cross-branding about feminism.”

Instead, she wants to focus on the writing. “If it’s in the realm of work, the work has to be the most important thing,” she says. “Trying to avoid persona-first spaces is how I do that.”

As for future books, Tolentino would love to put her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan to work. “My secret dream is to write a really weird novel next,” she says.

No matter what happens, she says, “I find writing itself really pleasurable and really amazing and kind of a miracle that I can do it for a living.”

 

Author photo by © Elena Mudd

Christian megachurches. Scammers. Barre classes. Hashtag activism. Difficult women. Literary heroines. Frats. Weddings. A 2004 reality show that dropped eight teenagers in Puerto Rico and filmed what happened. Jia Tolentino describes the essays in Trick Mirror as “nine terrible children.” It’s the first book for this Extremely Online (that is, extremely plugged into the internet) writer, who cut her teeth at women’s website The Hairpin before heading to Jezebel and finally The New Yorker.
NonfictionMemoir

Adrienne Brodeur

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

After a lifetime as her family’s secret keeper, Adrienne Brodeur faces the truth, finds compassion for her mother and breaks a generations-long pattern of dysfunction.

The best memoirs can resonate with readers who are the furthest removed from the book’s events. These stories gently tug on knotty threads and unspool to reveal a common humanity. For most readers, what happens to Adrienne Brodeur in her memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is incomprehensible. But in Brodeur’s talented hands, every reader who has ever had an unhappy mother can relate. 

First, the story: One night, when Brodeur is 14 years old, her mother, Malabar, wakes her up. Malabar was a divorced journalist and cookbook author who moved her children to Massachusetts to live with her wealthy new husband, a man who became ill not long after their marriage. On this life-altering night, Malabar gleefully shares with her daughter that a charismatic family friend, Ben—also married to someone who is not well—had kissed her. 

Behind their spouses’ backs, Ben keeps kissing Malabar, and then some. A giddy Malabar updates her adolescent daughter about every twist and turn as the affair unfolds, from the beaches of Cape Cod to hotels in New York City. Together, the three keep the affair a secret from both families. The deception seems to eat away only at Brodeur. 

Still, Brodeur is pleased to be let into her enigmatic mother’s secret world. She counsels Malabar on how to hide the affair and even provides cover stories—uneasily, of course, but Brodeur had been manipulated into believing that “this affair was being conducted with everyone’s best interests at heart.” Throughout high school, college and young adulthood, her mom’s forbidden romance consumes Brodeur. She dreads the day it might become known and hurt people she loves. (No spoilers, but what happens to both families is more complicated than the reader could ever imagine.)

The book is causing a stir in both the publishing industry and Hollywood. Fourteen publishing houses bid for Wild Game at auction, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paid a seven-figure advance. Brodeur sold the film rights to Chernin Entertainment, and filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) is helming the adaptation. Like any memoirist, Brodeur is nervous about how such a personal story will be depicted on screen. But she’s read a first draft of a screenplay “that managed to capture all the emotional truth and essence and yet be very much its own thing,” she says.

“For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

Now 53, Brodeur says there wasn’t a specific moment when she knew her life story could be a memoir. (She had a long history of shepherding other writers’ stories into existence, first as co-founder of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with director Francis Ford Coppola, and now as executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words.) A turning point came 14 years ago, she says, when she became a parent and experienced the mother-child bond from the other side. 

“It dawned on me that I really needed to reckon with my past and that I didn’t want to repeat these—it’s sort of catchphrase-y—but inherited traumas, these things that had happened to me that seemed to have happened to generations of my family,” she says.

The “things” to which Brodeur refers are infidelity, violence, narcissism and alcoholism. Additionally, Malabar suffered the death of her first child, Christopher, who choked to death at age 2, and an ensuing acrimonious divorce from Brodeur’s father, New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur. Adrienne acknowledges, “[My mother] had a much, much more difficult childhood and life than I ever did.”

But does a difficult life absolve Malabar of her mistakes? Brodeur says, “The surprising thing that took place in exploring what was a complicated part of my life was how . . . the need to forgive [my mother], on some level, took a back seat to the need to understand her.” While researching for the book, Brodeur returned to her own journals from this time, and she read through her mother’s copious notes on recipes and articles. “As I researched her life and put myself in her shoes, it became a path to forgiveness,” she says. “My heart expanded from going through this process. I truly believe that my mother did the best job she could, and obviously, she made enormous mistakes.”

It would be easy to dismiss Wild Game as shocking family drama. But Brodeur weaves together the story of her parentified childhood, the burdens of secret-keeping and her mother’s traumatic life such that we learn from her bottomless compassion. 

“It’s a story of resilience and breaking patterns,” she says. “For all of us people in the world who do have difficult childhoods or hold some secret, I hope the book demonstrates that, by facing them, we can all get out from under them.”

As Brodeur faces her family’s secrets in Wild Game, she reveals the beauty in humanity’s messiness—most of all her own. And as with only the best memoirs, we the readers are better for it.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Wild Game.

After a lifetime as her family’s secret keeper, Adrienne Brodeur faces the truth, finds compassion for her mother and breaks a generations-long pattern of dysfunction.
NonfictionMemoir

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s father came from a generation of men who didn’t cry in front of others. That’s why the anecdote in her new memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, about seeing her father cry for the first time is especially poignant.

Her father was watching a TV show, and in one of the episodes, a pet bloodhound dies. The Boylans had raised many dogs themselves by this point and were no strangers to difficult goodbyes with beloved pets. Still, this death was entirely fictional. It was happening on screen, not in real life.

And yet. 

“When I turned to look at my father when the show was over, I was shocked to see that tears had rolled down his cheeks and that he was silently crying,” Boylan writes. “I had never seen my father cry before. He wiped his eyes.

“ ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s sad.’ ”

Dogs, Boylan realized, were ideal avatars for explorations of love throughout her life.

This kind of emotional display was uncommon among men not only in Boylan’s family but also in the suburban 1960s and ’70s culture in which she was raised. At the time, Boylan—many decades away from coming out as transgender—looked to the family patriarch for instructions on how to be a man. The emotional strictures of maleness that she saw all around her were already a concern. 

“When you were a kid like me, who is female at heart but no one knows that . . . you’re wondering if your father is the person who’s going to be able to show you how to be in the world,” says Boylan, now 61, from the apartment in New York City where she lives for part of the year. “The idea of being in a world where I couldn’t express emotion more effusively was going to be a challenge for me.”

The Boylans were not a touchy-feely family, she says, but a lot of love existed between them. In adulthood, Boylan has come to realize that one of the ways her family could express love and loss—and one of the ways she could express love and loss—was through their pet dogs. For example, it may be too difficult to say to an older sister who has left for college that her absence hurts. But the family dog, who is also mourning the sister’s absence, intuitively understands. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Good Boy.

Dogs, Boylan realized, were ideal avatars for explorations of love throughout her life. Good Boy begins with Boylan’s childhood as a boy in rural Pennsylvania and ends in the present day, when she is a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, married to her wife, Deedie, and the mother of two 20-somethings. Along the way, Boylan explores how dogs can teach us about all kinds of love: romantic love, familial love, love between friends and, most importantly, self-love. 

“It’s hard to talk about love without people rolling their eyes, which is just funny if you think about it, because we all know that there is probably nothing more important in the world then loving each other and expressing the love that we feel,” says Boylan. “And yet it’s the thing that we’re probably the worst at.”

Through every section of Good Boy, Boylan shares one life lesson from each of her seven dogs. Playboy, Sausage, Matt the Mutt and others taught Boylan about coping with unrequited love, learning self-respect, reconciling a lifetime of struggle with her gender identity and accepting herself in the face of widespread cultural bigotry.

“Dogs accept you for who you are, no matter who you are, when you can’t accept yourself.”

“Dogs accept you for who you are, no matter who you are, when you can’t accept yourself,” she says. That particular lesson is crucial for Boylan, who unveiled herself (a more fitting phrase than “came out,” she thinks) as transgender at age 40.

Boylan has written about her gender journey in several other memoirs, most notably 2013’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders—the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Good Boy is not exclusively about transgender issues but rather the transformative journey every human goes through in a lifetime. However, Boylan’s experiences as a trans woman, and as the parent of a trans child, are woven throughout. 

Chloe is the family’s only dog at present; she lives in Maine with Deedie while Boylan teaches at Barnard. The family adopted Chloe in 2017, at age 12, when her previous owner became ill. Eventually, it will be time to say goodbye to Chloe, too. 

“Sooner than you know, there’s this thing with a gray face that’s looking at you, saying, ‘You promised to take care of me when the time comes,’ ” Boylan says. “And then you lose the dog, and you weep your brains out.”

In fact, it’s not so different from losing the humans we love in life. “That, in miniature,” she says, “is the process that we go through again and again and again.”

Author photo © Dan Haar

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s dogs taught her about more than mere puppy love. It’s that healing, sustaining love that gets us through life’s letdowns and losses.
YA FictionYA

Allan Wolf

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

In his new novel in verse, critically acclaimed author Allan Wolf revisits a grisly chapter of westward expansion with a fresh and thought-provoking look at the doomed travelers of the Donner Party, a group of 89 pioneers who became trapped in the Sierra Nevada and infamously resorted to eating their dead to survive. We spoke to Wolf about the unique narrator of The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep, some of the unexpected ways he researched the book and why cannibalism wasn't the hardest part of the book to write.

Tell us about the choice you made to have Hunger play the role of the book’s Greek chorus. Did you consider other emotions or ideas for the role Hunger occupies? Was the choice inspired by any other works of art or literature?
As I recall, I had “cast” Hunger for the part from the very beginning. Sometimes an idea just resonates. Hunger, as you shrewdly note, is a de facto Greek chorus, in that Hunger adds narrative glue to the varied voices of the other characters. Hunger gives the reader context, much as a sports commentator does, or like a knowledgeable docent escorting you through a historic home.

My choice of Hunger was not inspired by any one work but many. I’m a huge fan of allegory, from 15th-century morality plays to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. But I suspect I was also inspired by mythology. There’s a god or goddess of just about everything, from Limos (Hunger) to Lethe (Forgetfulness). Life, Death, Love, Lust, Hope, Hunger, Good and Evil—capitalize these words, and they take on a sentient presence, maybe even flesh and bone. They become incarnations of the incarnate.

I was definitely encouraged by Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which is narrated by Death. Zusak’s Death and my Hunger share a common impotence. Neither is the engine of the story’s action. They are primarily passive narrative devices who relate the facts and add a bit of historically informed commentary. The human subjects of the stories must still make their own choices. Otherwise there would be no tension.

The majority of the book's scenes have a singular narrator, but a few take the form of conversations. Why? How did you decide which scenes would take this form?
Conversations are compelling because they aren’t constrained by the author’s narrative gobbledygook. The reader stops reading and just listens. Maybe there are two opposing groups facing off in an argument. Or maybe two loved ones, separated by physical distance, can carry on a conversation of the heart. Or maybe it’s a single character having a “conversation” with God. How do I decide when a conversation is in order? Instinct maybe. During a long story, you need a little o’ this and a little o’ that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep.

Of all the animals in the group, Buck and Bright, two of the oxen, are the only ones who have voices. Why them?
Buck and Bright (generic oxen names—think Fido and Spot) are the symbolic voice of the thousands of working animals that made westward expansion possible. The sturdy oxen were the engines that made wagon travel possible. They were beasts of burden. At home, they helped us plow our fields. On the road, they got us where we were going. And as an added bonus, they were “rations on the hoof,” meaning that, in a pinch, we could eat them.

Oxen typically work in pairs, side by side, connected by a wooden yoke. So it easily followed to treat them as a duet. I call this two-voice character a “pair-acter.” (Think Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Fred and George Weasley, Adam and Eve). Careful readers might note my comparison of Buck and Bright to the book’s other pair-acter, Salvador and Luis, the two Miwok guides who, in the end, are treated as “rations on the hoof” themselves.

Was there one loss or death that was especially difficult for you to write?
Oh, yes. The murder of Luis and Salvador was as difficult to depict as it was necessary. It was upsetting on a personal level, of course, because I had come to love them. But well beyond my personal feelings, their violent murders are a very real taste of the enslavement and genocide systematically inflicted upon all native inhabitants of the American continent. The callous injustice of these white pioneers, who murdered the very men who had come to rescue them, offends me to my core. No matter how you rationalize this double murder, in the end it was a vile act of blatant white supremacy.

Which brings me to my second difficulty. How can I, as a white man, depict these two Miwok men at all, without stealing their humanity? Is it even possible to tell their story without usurping it? I did not want Luis and Salvador to be superficial caricatures, so I tried to give them emotional depth. Yet that sort of intimate depiction required that I give voice to someone outside of my culture. Writers of historical fiction must walk this dialectic balance beam.

"How do I include a character’s opinion if I find it abhorrent? And how can I expose my young readers to these abhorrent ideals and attitudes without endorsing or glorifying them?"

I felt it was vital to include the voices of Luis and Salvador because the white voices of the Donner Party story have so often been prominent—both because of historic racism and because of an imbalance in written materials (stemming from that racism). Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America should be required reading for all, especially in light of the present-day Black Lives Matter movement and discussions of reparations.

In popular culture, the story of the Donner Party is a story of cannibalism. To survive, they chose to eat their own dead. Repulsive perhaps, but understandable. But once these white pioneers chose to murder Luis and Salvador (as well as an unnamed Washoe boy, shot in the back near Truckee Meadows) in order to survive, the Donner Party story became a metaphor for the cannibalism of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. The Indigenous people who had been inhabiting the land for thousands of years were treated as an obstacle to be removed or a resource to be exploited and devoured.

As you wrote, how did you balance the characters’ beliefs and attitudes about westward expansion and Manifest Destiny with our contemporary perspectives on these events and ideas?
Historical truth emerges through the inclusion of many points of view. Until all points of view have been given the honor of inclusion, you cannot know the full truth. But as an author of historical fiction, how do I include a character’s opinion if I find it abhorrent? And how can I expose my young readers to these abhorrent ideals and attitudes without endorsing or glorifying them?

For starters, I can speak my mind and counter repugnant opinions through the words and deeds of my characters. And I can be mindful of my language and depictions, listening with care to flag my own microaggressions and prejudices. I have also included extensive backmatter, to add more historical facts, context and nuance. For example, I’ve included a segment titled “Native Americans and the Donner Party.” I’ve also included a biography of Luis and Salvador that shines a light on the abusive, coercive and exploitative environment in and around Sutter’s Fort in 1846. Throughout the novel, as well as in my short biography of him, I’ve tried to depict John Sutter as the despot and slaver that he certainly was in real life.

I imagine that researching certain aspects of this book were quite challenging, both logistically and emotionally. How did the historical research process compare to the work you’ve done for other historical books (for example, on the Titanic disaster for The Watch That Ends the Night, or the Lewis and Clark expedition for New Found Land)? What kinds of nonhistorical research did you do to be able to tell this story?
As I mentioned, Andrés Reséndez’s book The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America helped me to see the story of the Donner Party in the greater context of Native American exploitation. And the mind-blowing book Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion by Robert Morgan is a wonderfully exhaustive look at the ins and outs of how the West was really won.

"To my way of thinking, empathy is the key to compassion. And compassion changes a person. Imagine if we all had that sort of connectedness to history and humanity."

But the nonhistorical research for Three Graves Deep was also fascinating. During winter months, I forced myself to go coatless to better experience the cold. I built a lot of campfires. I read about the physical effects of hunger and starvation. I interviewed a man about his experience of near self-starvation. I researched many facets of cannibalism. And I had to get up to speed on the sacraments, wafers and wine.

To date, The Watch That Ends the Night was my most difficult book to research because I began that project knowing nothing about the Titanic disaster or the Edwardian era or anything nautical. Three Graves Deep took much less time to research. There was simply less material to consider. Plus I had an enormous head start due to my research for New Found Land (about Lewis and Clark), Zane’s Trace (about the Ohio frontier wars) and another novel (never published) about the Mormon Battalion and the Mexican-American War.

At one point, Hunger asks, “What separates the survivors from the quitters?” How would you answer Hunger’s question?
Hunger poses many questions that have no pat answers. I’m not even sure which one, survivor or quitter, I am myself. Sometimes even quitters survive. Sometimes we receive clarity only after we give up. Consider those pioneers who did not quit yet perished anyway. Consider the ones who did quit and yet survived. Whether they survive or perish, it is the people with hope who usually hold the advantage, even in death. So maybe Hope is the thing that separates the survivors from the quitters.

When the time comes for the members of the party to consider eating the dead, Hunger implores readers, “Do not judge them.” When did you know Hunger was going to make this request of readers? Do you feel you were able to accomplish this as you wrote—not judging these characters, who, after all, were real people?
From the very beginning, I knew that Hunger would make this (impossible) request. Hunger is asking readers not to pass judgment before considering what they might do if given the same hard choice. Since my characters were, as you say, real people, I have to judge them to some extent. But Hunger is a trickster. Whenever Hunger asks a question, you can pretty much guarantee the search for an answer will lead you in circles.

In your author’s note, you urge readers who “cannot sympathize” with the members of the Donner Party to “try to empathize” with them. What do you hope readers who are able to empathize will gain from doing so?
Compared to sympathy, empathy requires more direct connection and active engagement. I want readers to imagine themselves in the shoes of my characters, experiencing all the heroism, cowardice, even villainy. I want my readers to discover common connections. To my way of thinking, empathy is the key to compassion. And compassion changes a person. Imagine if we all had that sort of connectedness to history and humanity. Imagine transforming a world of “us and them” into a world of just “us.” See what I did there?

Author Allan Wolf discusses the unique narrator of his new novel in verse, The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep, shares some of the unexpected ways he researched the ill-fated Donner Party and explains why cannibalism wasn't the hardest part of the book to write.
FictionThriller

Rumaan Alam

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

Failing technology and an unknown disaster loom over the events in Rumaan Alam’s smart and terrifying novel.

There’s a stranger at the door. The phone doesn’t work. We’re trapped here. These are some of the many thriller elements that writer Rumaan Alam incorporates into his new novel, Leave the World Behind. Yet despite the familiarity of these tropes, the 43-year-old novelist has written a wholly unique story that feels of the moment for all the darkest reasons.

Leave the World Behind features Clay and Amanda, white parents from Brooklyn who have rented a summer home in an isolated part of Long Island. Their vacation has just begun when the house’s owners, George and Ruth, a wealthy Black couple, arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the night. George and Ruth apologize for interrupting the family’s vacation, but there has been a strange blackout in New York City.

A blackout doesn’t seem like such a big deal, Amanda thinks. She’s not entirely convinced that George and Ruth are who they say they are and wishes they would leave. But the homeowners explain that they sensed they would be safer outside the city. Safer from what, no one can be sure.

“That parental fear is really a primal fear.”

Alam wrote the first draft of Leave the World Behind in only three weeks, during what he describes as a “fevered state.” The novel is a true departure for the author, whose previous books, Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother, stick to the intimate realms of family drama and women’s relationships. They certainly aren’t quite so creepy.

“I wanted to write a book that appeared to be very domestic but actually was talking about the whole world,” Alam explains during a call to his home in Brooklyn. The novel’s inspiration came from a summer vacation taken by Alam with his husband, the photographer David A. Land, and their 8- and 11-year-old boys. George and Ruth’s luxurious second house is based on one the author rented via Airbnb.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Leave the World Behind.

Leave the World Behind unfolds over just a few days, and the momentum of the increasing dread is masterful. “I hoped that the book would have the sense of a ticking clock,” Alam says, “that once you’re in the world of the book, time is mirroring your experience of reading it.” He describes that kind of page-turning, stay-up-all-night reading experience as “sticky.”

In this, Alam undoubtedly succeeds. However, the book isn’t trying to be a mystery for the reader to decipher. “There’s a lot the book does not answer, in part because I don’t know the answers to those things,” Alam says. “The book raises 30 questions, and I think it answers, like, 12 of them.” Throughout the novel, snippets of explanations provoke more questions—scarier questions—a few pages later. And amid the mounting horror, the book’s messages about privilege, safety and comfort—as well as gender and race—slowly but deliberately sharpen into focus.

Unsurprisingly, Alam was influenced by Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, another tale in which a seemingly benign excursion careens into pure terror. Alam also sought to conjure the “psychological menace” of the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, based on the 1962 Edward Albee play. Other influences include Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary and Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel, The Sellout.

Leave the World BehindMuch of the dread, confusion and fear in Leave the World Behind comes down to technology: The internet is down, and the radio and TV aren’t working. Alam knew that readers would relate to the experience of having a bad Wi-Fi connection or their cellphone being out of range. But we also trust these devices to eventually reconnect. What if they didn’t? For the characters in Leave the World Behind, frustration at the lack of concrete information soon turns to panic. Speculation replaces fact. The terror lies in the unknown.

These fears will resonate with readers, Alam thinks, due to not only the pandemic but also political malaise. “It’s clear to me that the book is born of a feeling of dread [that] has been in politics, or in the culture, for a couple of years now,” he says.

Like many authors, Alam mined his own fears for his novel, and his concerns come down to a feeling of powerlessness. Writing, he jokes, would be essentially useless toward keeping his children alive during a disaster. “I have nothing to offer my children in the event of a calamity,” he says.

After all, there’s almost nothing scarier in a book than what you fear will happen to your children. “That parental fear is really a primal fear,” Alam says, and Leave the World Behind holds nothing back in exploring how far that fear can go.

 

Author photo by David A. Land

Failing technology and an unknown disaster loom over the events in Rumaan Alam’s smart and terrifying novel.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Becky Cooper

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

In We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper uncovers the true story of Jane Britton, a graduate student in Harvard’s anthropology department who was found dead in her apartment in 1969. This 10-year investigation straddles the line between memoir and mystery, and the result is unlike any true crime book you've read.

We chatted with Cooper about her kinship with Jane, her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.

What is the significance of the book's title, We Keep the Dead Close?
When I first heard the story about Jane Britton’s murder, the rumor was that she had been murdered by her adviser with whom she was allegedly having an affair. Though that rumor would eventually prove false, that professor was a real person who still taught at Harvard. I decided to audit his class, and during one of his lessons, he said, in reference to the people of ’Ain Mallaha, “They kept the dead close.” The people of that settlement had buried their loved ones under the living areas in their houses. In fact, archaeologists believe that the population’s beliefs and ritual behavior were the reasons people settled there, rather than agriculture.

Even in that moment, back in 2012, I knew the quote would play a significant role in Jane’s story. It encapsulated so many things. I loved the idea that remembering the dead was maybe one of the earliest marks of our humanity. I also loved how ambiguous the nature of “keeping something close” is. Are you hiding it? Are you defending yourself with it? Is it an act of nostalgia? A tribute?

Over the course of working on the book, the ambiguity of that closeness mirrored the myriad ways people relate to the past, and to the dead specifically. How does someone grieve? How does someone honor what came before? Is it through telling and retelling the story of that person? Or is it by refusing to talk about it and, in that way, refusing to wield that story for your own purposes? The stories of our past and the stories of our dead can be molded, as that same professor said in class, to suit the demands of the present. I wanted the book to be an exploration of the ways in which we—as individuals, historians, detectives and archaeologists—keep our dead close, and what that reveals about who we are and what society we live in.

“I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent—when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community.”

Your kinship with Jane Britton is woven throughout the book. Now that the mystery of her murder is seemingly solved and your book is complete, do you still feel that closeness?
Jane still feels like a very dear friend (if you can say that without knowing if the other person would have liked you at all), but I don’t feel the same hallucinatory blurring I did at the height of researching and writing the book. When I was retyping the cache of Jane’s letters, for example, Jane felt as real to me as my own past did. It didn’t help that I was still adjusting to life at Harvard, and I felt surrounded by the ghosts of what had come before. But the new distance between us feels less like a loss than like she’s let me be at peace.

I think part of it is the resolution I feel from finishing her story, but another part of it is that the book captures me at a slightly younger stage of life. One reason I was able to channel Jane was that she and I shared a lot of the same essential preoccupations: a fear of being unlovable in some fundamental way, an inexplicable loneliness, a yearning to feel like I was made of a cohesive whole. I knew instinctively that I had to finish the book before I forgot those worries and that yearning, and before I fell happily in love.

In the year since finishing the first draft, I’ve felt more at peace with myself than I think Jane ever had the chance to feel. In other words, I was allowed to get older, and that fact only underlines the unfairness that Jane’s world stopped at 23.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of We Keep the Dead Close.

Intense experiences, such as those involving death, can unexpectedly bind people together. Have you developed friendships with anyone you interviewed for the book?
I feel very close to a number of the people in the book. Mike Widmer (the former journalist who was also pushing for the Middlesex records) would get coffee with me every few months or so at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square. I visited Don Mitchell (Jane’s friend and neighbor) for Labor Day weekend. Stephen Loring (Anne Abraham’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance), thank goodness, still sends me postcards.

But I’ve been hesitant to blur the line from journalist into friend completely before the book comes out. Janet Malcolm’s warning that all journalism is an act of betrayal (forgive the paraphrase) preys on my mind. I wanted to be able to write an honest book, and I didn’t want the people in the book to forget that I came into their lives first and foremost as a journalist. I also wanted to limit how bereft I would feel if and when those people were dissatisfied with my account and ended our relationship. My hope, though, is that they will read the book, we will have an honest discussion, and we’ll be able to form a friendship on a foundation that isn’t transactional in nature.

We Keep the Dead CloseYour undergraduate thesis was a biography of David Foster Wallace. What did you learn (either emotionally or practically speaking) about researching a person’s life and death from doing your thesis?
I was terrified by the idea of writing my thesis about David Foster Wallace. It felt too personal and too daunting. I toyed with the idea of writing about maps—some safe, literary-theory friendly chapters about the politics of memory and space. But the idea of writing about Wallace just wore me down through its insistence. So I guess what I learned most is that I should lean into the feeling of feverish identification, because the desire to write my way through it isn’t going to go anywhere. In fact, writing what scares and haunts me is the only way I imagine I’ll care enough about the material for the time it takes to write it.

The other thing I learned is not to allow admiration for my subject to blind me to that person’s flaws and inconsistencies. My thesis was too hagiographic; I idolized Wallace and failed to examine his treatment of women, for example. I’ve tried to correct that with Jane. My love for her was made deeper by an exploration of her complexities, and I’ve tried to convey that in the book.

Was We Keep the Dead Close your first foray into investigative journalism?
In terms of investigative journalism that I’ve actually published—yes, this book is my first foray into investigative journalism. The book is a meta kind of bildungsroman in that way, with the coming-of-age part partially about learning how to be a journalist. When I say that I shaped my life around Jane, I truly did, for about eight years, make every decision based on whether it led me closer to finishing her story.

Were there points along the way in the 10 years it took to write this book when an aspect of the research felt insurmountable and you thought about giving up? If so, how did you push past it?
The moment I think I came closest to putting the book project down was after I spoke with Jane's brother, Boyd, for the first time and he painted a picture of Jane that was at odds with who I had imagined her to be. It wasn't that I ever expected her to be a perfect victim—not that there is one—but I had so subconsciously identified with her that I was thrown off by her stubborn refusal to be me. Obviously I needed to take a moment to both get to know her on her own terms and also come to terms with the fact that I had been projecting myself onto her. I wasn't just too close; I had been blind. To do this right, I had to get to know her separately from who I wanted her to be. Would I still feel so deeply passionate about her story if that illusion of oneness was dissolved? The rupture took a few months of space and reflection to cauterize.

Was it helpful to be working at the New Yorker for a period of time, surrounded by some of the world’s best journalists, while you were writing this book? Or was researching a story of this magnitude difficult to do while working at a demanding full-time job?
When I took the job at the New Yorker, I had just started my first real round of reporting. I had spoken to Boyd, Elisabeth Handler and Ingrid Kirsch and visited the archives for the first time. I worried that taking an office job at that point was a kind of cloaked cowardice; I was walking away from the story while telling myself I was walking toward it. The job was a two-year commitment.

I'm so grateful I said yes, though. While the job did take me away from the book in some sense—I had to wait two and a half years before going on my reporting trip out west, and I had to relegate research to mornings and weekends––I don't think I could have done this book without it. The opportunity at the New Yorker was extraordinary.

Partially, I had been so exhausted trying to make ends meet in New York City that I didn’t have the energy to fully devote all my resources to Jane anyway. I felt like I needed a place to moor. Professionally, the generosity of the New Yorker staff was both unexpected and unparalleled. And finally, when I cold-called people in Jane's life, being able to say that, yes, I'm only 20-something years old, but I have the credibility of the New Yorker magazine behind me, was a complete game changer in terms of what doors were open to me.

Were you initially thinking this story could be a magazine article, or did you suspect from the beginning that We Keep the Dead Close would be a book-length narrative?
At the beginning, I wasn't thinking in terms of a writing project. Her death felt less like a mystery and more like an open secret, and it bothered me that people believed the rumor enough to repeat it but not enough to do anything about it. I wanted to be the one to take it seriously. As the story became more complex, I felt compelled to pursue it as far as it would go, even if the chances of solving the crime were increasingly slim. I hoped I would at least find peace with the project. That trail took years to follow. It started to change my identity by guiding all my decisions. Naturally then, as the narrative took shape, it blew past the outlines of anything other than a book-length story.

“No one person is the source for the authoritative version of history. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered.”

For many journalists who write about sexual violence and violence against women, the work can feel emotionally draining and despairing. Was this your experience while researching Jane Britton and Anne Abraham (another young archaeologist who disappeared in 1976)? If so, how did you cope with it?
I don't know whether it was conscious, but instead of focusing on the loss of Jane and Anne and the injustice of what their early deaths deprived them of, I focused on how lucky I felt to be spending time with women like them. I relished every moment I got to read another poetic journal entry or speak to the people with whom they had surrounded themselves. I don’t think I could have worked on this book for 10 years without the sense of hope I found in that community. The solace we felt in finding each other was extremely buoying.

You are critical of the entertainment aspect that can crop up within the true crime genre. What was your relationship to the true crime genre while working on this book?
I didn’t intentionally position the book to be a commentary on the true crime genre. It’s true that I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent, when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community or when the genre glorifies the killer. But rather than writing a book in the negative (i.e., I never said, “I don’t want to write a book that . . .”), I just set out to write one I would want to read.

The books I’m drawn to are rich character studies and philosophical explorations of moral ambiguity. The north stars for my book include In Cold Blood (though not in terms of the journalistic liberties Capote took), Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, Maggie Nelson’s Jane and The Red Parts and Melanie Thernstrom’s The Dead Girl. But my inspirations were also genre and form agnostic. The literary devices and character explorations in the book are equally indebted to "The Keepers," "Twin Peaks," Jelani Cobb’s This American Life segment “Show Me State of Mind,” Anna Burns’ Milkman, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Lolita, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and Laurent Binet’s HHhH.

It may seem odd, but I sometimes didn’t even classify We Keep the Dead Close as a true crime book in my mind. It was a biography of Jane occasioned by her death, or a portrait of her community as impacted by the crime. In fact, that shared understanding was one of the reasons I decided to work with my editor Maddie Caldwell, who, from the very first meeting, focused more on the book’s repetition of the ritual motif rather than on its entry in the true crime genre.

You went down a lot of rabbit holes in your research and mentioned in another interview that your first draft came in 30% too long. What was a rabbit hole that you found fascinating but didn’t/couldn’t delve into?
I had always been intrigued by the whispers that there was some kind of government connection to the Iranian dig that Jane participated in the summer before her death. After all, the second time I heard the story about Jane was during a discussion of how commonly archaeology had been used as a cover for espionage. This avenue of speculation wasn't helped by the fact that the CIA was the only agency I queried that gave a glomar response. (This means they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of files relating to either Jane or to Tepe Yahya.)

Research led me to a man named Ted Wertime, who was the head of metallurgical survey team at Tepe Yahya in 1968 when Jane was there. It was thanks to Wertime that the Iranian expedition secured U.S. commissary privileges. He had been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. And he was, for a time, the cultural attaché in Iran, which is about as stereotypical as you can get for a CIA cover. Finally, according to his son's memoir, when the son learned that Wertime had died, his first thought was, “You're finally safe.”

I ultimately got nowhere with that line of research; I could find no evidence that Wertime was still working in intelligence at the time of the dig, and the Harvard professor who ran Tepe Yahya vehemently denied ever working for the U.S. government. Without any of the dots connecting, I couldn’t justify putting any more than a hint of it in the main text, where it serves more as a reminder of my state of mind. A little is relegated to the source notes.

The two books you’ve written so far (Mapping Manhattan and We Keep the Dead Close) are extremely different. Do you have plans for a third book, and if so, can you tell us what it will be about?
On the surface, I completely agree that my books are very different, but I think what bonds them is the idea that no one person is the source for the authoritative version of either history or of a map. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered—or a city as it’s lived. I imagine anything I write will land close to this territory.

As for what comes next, I have a few things in mind, and I’m waiting to see if they’ll gain mass and inevitability. I’m especially curious to see if I can find something that is endlessly interesting but doesn't require what feels like soul scraping. I would love to be surprised.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover all the best new true crime.

Author headshot © Lily Erlinger

We chatted with Becky Cooper about her true crime masterpiece, We Keep the Dead Close, her kinship with Jane, her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.
FictionLiterary Fiction

In Search of a Name

Review by Jessica Wakeman

During the months when a baby is on the way, it’s often a time to think about one’s place in the bigger picture. For Marjolijn van Heemstra—the narrator of In Search of a Name, as well as its author—it’s a time look more closely at the family legend about a great uncle who heroically killed a Nazi collaborator in 1946 with a bomb disguised as a holiday package.

At least, that’s the story that’s worked its way through her family like a game of Telephone. It’s understandable—who wouldn’t want a hero in the family? Before getting pregnant, van Heemstra even promised her grandmother that she would name her future son after this man. But now with a son actually on the way, van Heemstra is looking more closely into the truth of this family legend.

Although this is not a traditional whodunit, fans of mystery and true crime may enjoy van Heemstra’s dogged investigation. Amid prenatal appointments and decorating a nursery, she sorts through government records and tracks down elders who knew her great uncle. His heroism is more complicated than she was led to believe—and so, too, are her feelings about impending motherhood.

Translated from Dutch, In Search of a Name is a unique narrative, blending what appears to be historically accurate accounts of the Dutch Resistance during World War II with elements of fabulism. The book is billed as a novel, but it’s never quite clear how much of van Heemstra’s personal story is true, and that gets a bit frustrating. Nevertheless, World War II and its aftermath can feel far removed from our modern-day concerns, and van Heemstra deftly shows how ripples of this famous Sinterklaas bombing reverberate to this day. The reader is left with a number of moral quandaries: What separates a proud vigilante from a dangerous terrorist? Are the deaths of innocents as “collateral damage” ever justified? Can any of us ever speculate on how we would act in a different historical moment?

During the months when a baby is on the way, it’s often a time to think about one’s place in the bigger picture. For Marjolijn van Heemstra—the narrator of In Search of a Name, as well as its author—it’s a time look more closely at the family legend about a great uncle who heroically killed a Nazi collaborator in 1946 with a bomb disguised as a holiday package.

NonfictionSocial Science

Amanda Montell

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

A cultish group is one that promises to improve your life if you follow its regimen, buy its products or obey its leader. In Cultish, Amanda Montell peels back the linguistic layers of these groups and demonstrates that even mainstream brands and organizations use “cultish language” to draw people in.

Your father spent part of his childhood in a cult; more recently, your close friend joined Alcoholics Anonymous. How did these two loved ones’ stories prompt your interest in how cultish groups use language?

I grew up on my dad’s absolutely riveting tales of the four years he spent in a notorious socialist “utopia” in the Bay Area called Synanon, which started out as an alternative drug rehabilitation facility and later came to accommodate “lifestylers” who just wanted in on this unique communal way of living. (My dad joined in 1969, totally against his will, thanks to his communist absentee father, who was kind of a pseudo-intellectual hippie.)

To me, the most fascinating part of my dad’s stories was the special language they used in Synanon—buzzwords, slogans and terms that would sound utterly inscrutable to an outsider (like lifestylers, for example). The language was clearly meant to separate members from the outside world in a powerful psychological way.

Years later, in early 2018, I was talking to my best friend, who had just started going to AA, and I was equally bewildered by the sheer robustness of AA’s lexicon. AA is obviously a very different kind of “cult” than Synanon was, but that conversation with my friend prompted me to wonder: How exactly does cult language work to lure people into fanatical fringe groups? How does it make them stay?

Why do you think cults are a pop culture obsession at the moment? (The Girls by Emma Cline, Godshot by Chelsea Bieker, “The Path,” the “Escaping NXIVM” podcast, etc.)

In American culture now, much like in the 1960s and ’70s (another peak cult era), we’re experiencing a great deal of social tumult and mistrust of mainstream institutions such as government, religion and health care. So we’re looking to alternative sources to fill these voids.

At the same time, since the 1970s, dangerous cults (as well as relatively harmless “cult-followed” groups) have taken on a sort of perverse vintage cool factor. Fringe groups are spooky and fascinating, but they’re also very much afoot in our culture right now, so we find ourselves falling down these culty rabbit holes, unable to look away, almost like a car accident. We’re rubbernecking, scanning these stories to tell whether or not these groups are a threat to us. My argument in the book is that to some degree, we’re all under cultish influence. The proof is in how we speak every day.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Cultish.

How many cult survivors did you interview for this book? How did you find them? 

Oh gosh, dozens and dozens. Not all of them made it into the book, but the conversations were all enrapturing and invaluable. I met them all sorts of ways. Some I came across in documentaries or in articles, some I already knew or was connected to through friends, and some I just met at parties around Los Angeles (which I think says a lot about this town). You can’t go to a dinner party without running into some dreamer who was in Scientology or Kundalini yoga or at least some sort of pyramid scheme.

Why are phrases like brainwashing or mind control insufficient to describe how people get involved in cults? Were you surprised that the experts you interviewed said they don’t find those terms useful?

This was one of my first and favorite discoveries of the book. Popular media tends to explain how people end up in cults by talking about brainwashing, but I learned from cult scholars like Eileen Barker and Rebecca Moore that brainwashing is nothing but a metaphor (no one cuts open the brain and scrubs it clean) and a pseudoscientific concept (you can’t prove brainwashing doesn’t exist). In fact, using the word brainwash often does nothing but morally divide us: “You’re brainwashed!” “No, you’re brainwashed.” Once shots like these are fired, they choke the conversation, making it impossible to figure out what actually motivates people to become involved in cultish ideology, which is a much more interesting question and the one my book aims to answer.

You were previously a beauty editor at a women’s interest website and saw firsthand how the beauty, wellness and fitness industries use cult in marketing-speak (e.g., “a cult favorite”). What’s your take on that kind of usage? 

I actually don’t think it’s harmful or offensive to use cult as a sort of hyperbolic metaphor in a marketing context like this. Linguists have found that we as speakers and listeners are generally quite good at assessing the meaning and stakes implied whenever a familiar word is used in natural conversation. So when people liken a beauty brand to a cult, few listeners are going to become concerned that there’s a manic preacher making all these lipstick consumers engage in satanic rituals or something.

The only challenge with the word cult is that it’s become so broad, judgment-loaded, sensationalized and even romanticized, and is used in so many different contexts, that it really has no official or academic definition. In fact, many of the cult scholars I spoke to for the book don’t use the word formally, favoring more specific terms like new religions or alternative religions instead. The word cult has become kind of useless when describing groups that are actually dangerous, because it’s so unspecific. I think this haziness surrounding the word cult also says something about our culture’s extremely weird relationship with community, spirituality and identity.

“How exactly does cult language work to lure people into fanatical fringe groups? How does it make them stay?”

How is elitism—wanting to be part of the in crowd—exploited by cultish groups? 

Life as a human being is extremely confounding, and most of us spend a great deal of our time searching for satisfying answers to life’s biggest questions. When a guru or leader promises that they have the answers, and that you are special and smart enough to access them, that’s a really compelling message.

It’s a stereotype that cults or cultish groups prey on the weak and needy. But in fact, research shows that cults usually exploit people who are idealistic, optimistic and hardworking—people who don’t give up when things get tough. How can someone’s idealism, optimism and good intentions become the inroad to cultish groups?

Those are the types of people that cult recruiters actively go for. They don’t want people who are liable to break down quickly or get antsy and quit right away. Being an active member of a cult is hard work, so they want the best and brightest—people who hopefully have money to spare, are service-minded enough to give it to the group, and have enough optimism and perseverance to remain loyal even after things inevitably go sour. 

As a linguist, what is the difference between a religion and a cult? Did researching Cultish make the boundary between the two seem more or less blurry? 

A Jonestown survivor I interviewed for the book said something funny to me. He said, “A cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” It’s a pithy and humorous aphorism, and it totally rings true, but in terms of actual social science, instinctive judgments like that are not how one tells if a group is dangerously culty or not.

There’s another quote I included in the book, which I think is more logically sound. It comes from the religious studies community, and it goes, “Cult + time = religion.” Cultural normativity has so much to do with whether or not a spiritual group is considered a cult, even if its tenets and behaviors are no wackier or more dangerous than a better-established religion. After all, in Catholic Belgium, Quakers are considered a deviant cult, and Quakerism is just about the chillest religion around.

“A cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.”

The word gaslighting is used frequently online and in media. What does it really mean, and what does it have to do with cults?

Gaslighting is a term that derives from the 1938 British play Gas Light, which chronicles a husband’s attempts to drive his wife to madness in part by dimming the lights in their house and then denying that anything is different when she points out the change, causing her to doubt her own sanity. Today, gaslighting is used metaphorically to describe any situation in which someone tries to force another person to question their own completely valid, grounded reality as a means of gaining and maintaining control over them. It’s a tactic employed by not only toxic romantic partners (who are more or less leaders of their own minicults) but also cult leaders, who thrive on causing followers to mistrust their own thoughts and feelings so that they depend on the leader to tell them what they need to do to feel safe. In Cultish, I talk all about how to recognize gaslighting in language. (The section on Scientology is particularly disturbing. Those folks are the ultimate linguistic gaslighters.)

Multilevel marketing (MLM) and direct sales have a long and ignominious history of targeting women, especially stay-at-home moms. How have more recent MLMs such as LuLaRoe employed phrases like boss babe and entrepreneur to their benefit? 

MLMs have always preyed on folks locked out of the labor market, especially unemployed middle-class wives and mothers. Since the dawn of the modern direct sales industry, MLM recruitment materials have employed pseudo-female empowerment language as a way to “inspire” (read: deceive) potential “affiliates.”

In midcentury America, Tupperware promised to be the “best thing to happen to women since they got the vote.” Now, in the era of Lean In commodified feminism, these insidiously nimble companies use trendy, Pinterest-y #girlboss language as a way to convince women that they’re signing up to be the SHE-E-O of their own business, as opposed to just another cog in the predatory wheel of multilevel marketing.

What are some of the features of cultish language used by Q, the supposed leader of QAnon? What was it like writing and editing this book while QAnon rose to prominence? 

The language of QAnon has now spread far beyond the terms initially used by the group’s faceless “leader,” Q. QAnon has since melded with New Age wellness communities and anti-vax/anti-mask circles, so the language has several dialects, if you will. It’s basically a weird hybrid of conspiratorial speak (“deep state,” “liberal elite,” countless code words, acronyms and hashtags) and woo-woo talk of “vibrations” and “great awakenings.” And it’s always changing, in order to accommodate new QAnon offshoots and to outrun social media algorithms, which become trained to recognize QAnon language and disable the accounts using it.

It was interesting, to say the least, to write about QAnon as it was taking root and then exploding and evolving; it required a lot of last-minute updates. Actually, the final part of my book was about something entirely different before it became clear that QAnon was becoming a big deal. I’m saving the content that got cut for a rainy day.

“None of us is above cultish influence, not even me.”

Jeff Bezos is known to use vague aphorisms such as “think big,” “dive deep” and “have backbone” as Amazon Leadership Principles. Self-help bloggers on Instagram tend to embrace similarly vague “You can do it!” messages. What sets off your alarm bells when you read these types of so-called inspiring messages?

I think fauxspiration can be more sinister than it sounds. It’s the sort of language that triggers a strong emotional response in people, but it doesn’t actually mean anything specific, and cult leaders benefit from that vagueness. When their rhetoric is lofty and nebulous, ill-intentioned gurus can hide pernicious intentions or even change their fundamental ideology whenever it’s convenient, and meanwhile, people will just project whatever they want the language to mean onto it.

One example of how this can play out in a dangerous way is in the form of the fauxspirational quotegrams that the “Pastel QAnon” community uses. A Pastel QAnon person might post a millennial pink cursive post that says something like, “You have the power to raise your own vibration,” which may not sound like a culty message to outsiders (we “sheeple” can be so “blind”), but those who are already amenable to New Age-y conspiratorial thinking might interpret that to mean “You don’t need pharmaceuticals to heal your depression or the vaccine to protect you from COVID.”

Toward the conclusion of Cultish, you say that writing this book led you to have a “stronger sense of compassion” for people who get involved in cultish groups. Why is that?

Ironically, when talking about cults and cult followers, a lot of us do the same thing that people in cults are trained to do, which is to morally and intellectually separate ourselves from those people. We like to tell ourselves that folks who wind up in cultish groups, from NXIVM to QAnon, are naive, messed up idiots and that we would never get involved in a group “like that” because we’re too smart and virtuous.

But I’ve found that oftentimes the people who are the most judgmental of cult followers (which, again, is a subjective term) are people who are involved with pretty culty groups themselves—whether it’s a startup that puts the “cult” in company culture or some all-consuming online community. None of us is above cultish influence, not even me. And in general, I find that understanding the psychological motivations underlying people’s seemingly bizarre behaviors makes you feel calmer and more compassionate. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also empathy. And that’s ultimately what I hope my book does for people.

Amanda Montell peels back the linguistic layers of these groups and demonstrates that even mainstream brands and organizations use “cultish language” to draw people in.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features