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Be a Cactus Podcast
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Being a Person: Sorrow & Santa Ana Winds
Nov 10, 202400:19:24Tap to summarizeBeing a personWhile it would be too strange to come back for the first time after the election without saying anything about it, I imagine you are a bit weary of the repetition of the same few messages. You’ve read them by now. I’m pretty sure everyone I know has shared this quote from Toni Morrison:And it’s a good one. But a thought hums in me: haven’t we been going to work on this, for nearly a decade now? I’ve been writing about book bans and patriarchy. There’s also the financial contributions and the numerous letter writing campaigns. And I have friends, much better than I, who have canvassed for progressive candidates in and out of our state. Yet, here I am, a flesh and blood person—lots of flesh and enough blood that I can donate a pint of it every three months to someone who needs it—feeling the aftereffects of last week. As it happened, the Santa Ana winds began to blow as we awaited election results. If you aren’t in Southern California, you may still know about the ‘devil winds’ through Joan Didion’s famous description from her essay “Los Angeles Notebook.”There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake."On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."While the Santa Anas have never caused me to throw myself off a cliff, they do give me migraine headaches that begin a day or so before the wind actually arrives and that last for days afterward. Sometimes, in connection with these headaches, I smell something akin to caustic fuel (but unidentifiable). It’s pretty awful, and I can’t escape it although it exists for no one else around me. It’s just my body going haywire. It’s Saturday, and I’m still hoping all this goes away soon.Plan BMy original plan for today was to post an email interview with Mary Camarillo (Life With Riley) , author of Those People Behind Us and The Lockhart Women, about her experience with SheWrites Press. But I’m afraid people are too downhearted for advice right now, and I don’t want you to miss it. She has done what Toni Morrison tells us to do: she’s gone to work writing about contemporary issues. And when the gatekeepers stood guard, she found another path for her voice. For today, I have this:If you are trying to connect with others through reading and writing, you might find some insights from Evan Gow’s (indie developer of StoryOrigin) interview with Jane Friedman. Like everyone else in the author sphere, I’ve recommended Jane Friedman before. What I particularly liked about this interview was the discussion on being our authentic selves, the permission (or perhaps the directive) to include ourselves in our newsletters and Substacks because people want that human connection. When we share about ourselves, share links to what we’ve read, and comments on books we’ve enjoyed, we are making that connection. Please feel free to share in the comments anything that’s helped you this past week. Spin CycleAs to anything new I can add to what others on this and other platforms have said about the election:The New York Review has an interview of Joseph O’Neill by Daniel Drake . It says some things I haven’t seen from all the talking heads looking to lay blame in the ‘what went wrong’ cycle. The interview isn’t long; I encourage you to read it in its entirety. Meanwhile, here are a few takeaways that resonated for me:[T]he DNC should finally do what it should have done years ago: set up a political operations unit to devise and coordinate anti-GOP actions nationwide. (Fox News performs this function, and others, for the GOP.)The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed.Harris lost, yes—but let’s not overegg the pudding. Trump’s margin of victory was humdrum. His final vote tally will fall millions short of the votes won by Biden in 2020. The opposition to him is huge and intense and in the right. So let’s be clear: this malicious criminal does not have the barbaric mandate he claims for himself. On the contrary, it is the opposition that has a mandate, derived from centuries of democratic tradition.And here’s something from the Washington Post’s Ron Charles’ Book Club email, which I’ve recommended in the past, is free and doesn’t require subscribing to the Washington Post. (Read it every week by clicking here.)It’s the thinnest of silver linings, but I take some comfort in the words of legal scholar Eric Posner. Speaking on the Freakonomics podcast, Posner said, “It’s actually pretty hard to be a dictator. You have to be kind of smart. You have to be tough. You have to be brave.” For better or worse, America’s new Felon-Elect is none of those things. Posner, author of “The Demagogue’s Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump,” went on to say, “I think we’ll have another four years that are a lot like Trump’s previous term, but are not going to spell the end of democracy. If all of our presidents are like him, I think eventually we’d be in big trouble. But a huge institution like the U.S. government … I think it takes more than a bad president to destroy an empire.”And if you have the resiliency for a truly hard look at reality, you can watch this interview between the always astute Heather Cox Richardson and Jon Stewart. What I’m readingI’m reading so slowly right now, I’m a bit ashamed. Also—I’ve been catching up on some magazines, making my book input even less.I decided to listen to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act again in the hope of inspiration. Plus, I can listen while lying in bed, waiting for Excedrin to work.I’m still reading a few pages each night of Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird. This past week I read a 50-page short story (novella?) “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. It has what I'm looking for: a creepy, chill-inducing atmosphere of dread. In it, two male friends are taking a canoe trip down the Danube River when they come to an isolated region of shifting ground and tiny islands. They set up camp on an island that is washing away. There they are accosted by a supernatural force embodied in the nature around them (including the willow trees, which are abundant). They are the intruders who have awakened this malevolent force. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe...
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Weary of This Escape Room
Nov 3, 202400:20:46Tap to summarizeHello friends!The Catholic Church’s “synod on synodality”—summit on the future of the church—ended without allowing women to be deacons. (Pope Francis on CBS’s 60 Minutes in May: “Women are of great service as women, not as ministers”). Halloween is just behind us. The US presidential election is just in front of us. And I’ve been experiencing persistent, chronic anxiety. Worry about malignant narcissism. Authoritarian patriarchy. Fascism. Stuff like that. As it happens, lots of people I’m connected to are thinking about the same things. (Not all—many people I know are 180 degrees from me.) A subgroup of my like-minded people are considering the influence of authoritarian religion on the current political landscape. This helps me in the ‘you are not alone’ way. Here are some of this week’s reminders that we are not alone in our thoughts.This week’s must read, must watchThis week Cait West, a woman who escaped the ‘stay-at-home daughter movement’ in 2013, pointed out that since she was finally allowed to vote, every presidential election has had Donald Trump in it as a candidate. How strange that must be, to have only had that experience. West wrote a memoir (Rift) about her experience in Christian patriarchy. I recently discussed that book here on Be a Cactus. It’s very good. West was interviewed for a short film, For Our Daughters. It makes the connection between Christian patriarchy and fascist tendencies. It’s free to watch, takes about a half-hour, and is well worth your while.Tia Levings also wrote about her experience in authoritarian Christianity in her memoir A Well-trained Wife. I discussed that here as well. I also read Lyz Lenz’s An American Ex-wife and thought I’d reviewed it but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I can’t find those words. However, I do see a few lines I wrote: “I was cheering her all the way. She’s right to have left over the lack of balance in her marriage.” All three of these books resonated with me:Here’s John Halbrooks this week looking at literature that confronts malignant narcissism. He sees a pretty straight line between the personality of Henry VIII and Donald Trump.The parallels between Henry VIII and Trump are all too clear, though there are, of course, some important differences. The nature and scale of Henry's power allowed him to rid himself of his enemies through execution—or judicial murder. Trump was not able to do this, though his recent remarks about General Milley deserving execution for his criticism of the former president show us that he longs for this kind of power. His indifference to the murder by Saudi agents of journalist Jamal Khashoggi during his presidency demonstrates that he thinks that those who speak truth to power simply get what's coming to them if they are murdered.I’ve previously mentioned the Substack STRONGWILLED, about Religious Authoritative Parenting, with its criticism of James Dobson and Focus on the Family at its center. They posted “Focus on the Fascist Family” this week in which they draw a straight line between RAP and fascist tendencies. They discuss corporal punishment and its fallout. Part of that fallout is that kids who’ve had their will smacked out of them have no boundaries (Hello, that’s me!)—can’t say no to a predator because adult hands on their bodies is their normal situation. More fallout of RAP is needing a strong ‘daddy’ leader even into adulthood. (I don’t suppose you missed Tucker Carlson’s weird and sexualized anecdote about Trump as the spanking daddy, coming home to dole out discipline to a misbehaving girl. It fits right in with this whole RAP model.) The post also mentions Alice Miller’s work on the effects of corporal punishment. My husband has her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence, one of only a handful he kept from his counseling psychology program. I looked for it, but it’s probably buried under a hundred other books. I should give it a read. Maybe it will help me understand my own way of walking through the world. Here’s Strongwilled making the connection between RAP and fascism. It would come to no surprise to students of history like Alice Miller to hear the crowd cheering wildly as Tucker Carlson ranted about the punishment of an allegedly delinquent society. She would see it as the most likely outcome of a society predicated on the abuse of children in order to get them to comply in patriarchal and hierarchical families. Because a society that prioritizes breaking the wills of children instead of nurturing safety, is a society that is creating citizens who are easy to control.And here’s one more someone shared with me this week—a pastor (apparently a Nazarene) telling the congregation that Christian Nationalism is fascism.Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf? Billionaires.This week my friends and I were also wondering what to do about our subscriptions to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times after the billionaire owners pulled editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. Ultimately, I kept both subscriptions, thinking about the journalists themselves. I do wonder why billionaires cower before the possibility of Trump’s disfavor. Yes, if elected, he can mess with their government contracts (I remember the JEDI scandal). But when someone has billions of dollars, how much can that hurt? These are exactly the few people in the world who can take a stand without it causing them any real damage. Somehow, last year, I was getting a lot of ads for Trump-themed products. I’m not sure how I got on the list, but I think of them now. Isn’t this the way a billionaire would see Trump? Just like this elf on the shelf with his hands in his lap?Looking forwardFor good or for bad, the election will finally be over next week. I’ll see how my anxiety plays out. I already have several good things lined up for Be a Cactus posts! An interview with author Mary Camarillo about her experience with SheWrites Press. Discussions of several titles from Ali Velshi’s Banned Books Club. Some great recommended reading. Plus, we are Dodger fans—happiness there. And we picked the book cover for my upcoming novel on escape from a polygamist cult. I love it! So, friends—onward and upward!Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Part 2: Library and book challenge/ban newsState Senate passes bill intended to halt book bans, protect librarians from the New Jersey MonitorA bill aimed at limiting book bans in public schools and libraries and protecting librarians from lawsuits and criminal charges is now on the [New Jersey] governor’s desk. Titled the “Freedom to Read Act,” the legislation would require the state’s education commissioner to develop policies on how library materials are selected and how challenges to books on library shelves should be evaluated. Local school boards and library boards would then adopt their own policies using this model. …The bill would also provide librarians and library staff with immunity from civil and criminal liability for “good faith actions.” Researchers at Steinhardt examine the effect of book bans on public education from Washington Square NewsThe study — a collaboration between NYU and the University of California, San Diego — analyzed the impact of Florida’s numerous policies restricting content like books and in-class instruction by conducting interviews and surveys with 86 people, primarily teachers and parents. The team of eight researchers found a “climate of compliance, fear and stress” that threatens students’ academic performance and the well-being of both teachers and students. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com
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Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
Oct 20, 202400:11:45Tap to summarizeHello Friends!I think this is the last post I am creating in advance so I can take a few weeks off to work on my next novel project. As my novel about a girl hoping to escape a polygamist cult (Keep Sweet) comes together for its launch in June 2025, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at cults and cultish behavior here on Be a Cactus. I do wonder, though, if my dive into cults, religious extremism, and spiritual abuse gives people the impression that I am anti-religion. And the answer to that is no.I believe everyone is on a spiritual journey. And I think people who take advantage of others’ spiritual yearnings are the worst sort of people. So what I’m looking at is the harm brought to people through control of their spiritual lives with threats of eternal damnation, etc. This is why ‘exvangelicals’ and other ‘ex’s’ interest me. They managed to escape a high-control environment, to escape the worst sort of abuse.Since I’d been reading a lot of books about exvangelicals, I wanted to take a break and read about people who feel an honest spiritual calling and work to help others as a result. Circle of Hope by Eliza Griswold is just such a book. While I wish things would have ended better for the Circle, there still is a lot of good will among its leaders. It’s the sort of thing that makes me hopeful about humankind.I wrote a review and posted it on School Library Lady. However, I think most of the people here are not subscribers over there. And I thought it’s a book you might also enjoy. As I write this, it was just announced that Circle of Hope is a National Book Award finalist.Circle of Hope by Eliza GriswoldA church whose mission is to ‘love one another as Christ loves us’ is called to do the nearly impossible. The Circle of Hope was just such a church in Philadelphia, a descendant of the Jesus movement of 1970s America. An older person might remember the words of Bernie Taupin/Elton John in the song “Tiny Dancer”: “Jesus freaks/Out in the street/Handing tickets out for God.” At that time, to see ‘Jesus Freaks’ was common, their ebullient conduct, on fire with the Spirit. The Circle of Hope is an updated version of this, with a desire and mission to bring the message of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the radical call of Christ’s love, into action. This means caring for the neighborhoods where the circles meets as well as for the peoples who reside in them.Author and journalist Eliza Griswold embeds herself with the Circle’s four pastors: Ben White (a son of founders Gwen and Rod White), Julie Hoke, Jonny Rashid and Rachel Sensenig. The Circle leaders are a welcome reprieve from the megachurch/ mega millions pastors that feel more like con men than spiritual leaders. They live humble lives in service to the community. They start two thrift shops, profits from which enable them to help others. They plant community gardens and help undocumented people. To Circle leaders, ‘the least of these’ matters.While Griswold maintains her narrative distance in this tale and gives each of the main players equal time and a narrative voice, I felt that the self-regard of one particular person made it impossible for the ministers to continue to hold the church together. Nevertheless, there is some element of blame—and of grace as well—in each of them.What happens? During the pandemic, as meetings move online, the Circle leaders feel they must deal with the important issue of racism. What does it mean for a church to be anti-racist? Is it simply to follow the example of Christ as founder Rod White believed? Is it to explicitly work against racism by protesting police brutality (this is the period of George Floyd’s murder) and exploring the reasons behind the largely White makeup of the congregation?By exploring who they are and what they are called to do, the leaders bring up other issues that are bothering them: the male pastors often dominate discussions and there is a sense of sexism. In the congregation at large, parishioners begin to feel they’ve failed LGBT+ community members even though the leadership professes (and desires) to be welcoming. As a part of the larger Anabaptist Church that does not approve of gay marriage, they try to stay silent on the subject. To endorse or preside over gay marriage would mean that they would be kicked out of the Anabaptist Church. And that larger church owned their buildings, so they would need to surrender their assets, have what they had worked to establish stripped away.Some well-intentioned efforts go awry (i.e., Church leaders move into the poor neighborhoods where they serve, but this drives up property costs). The more the leaders dig into the importance of social justice to the mission of the church, the more the center cannot hold. Ultimately, their differences about how to live out the message of Jesus pulls them apart. Attendance in the church is down. Circle of Hope finally decides to separate from the Anabaptists and perform gay marriage. This causes monetary contributions to plummet as members are unsure that their money won’t land in the greater Anabaptist Church while the separation is being worked out. In early 2024, the Circle disbands. I was sorry to see this happen although the four pastors seem to move on to lives that serve in other ways. But it left me to worry about how we can live in service to one another when even these goodhearted people can’t agree. Everything they had hoped for and worked to do resonates with current social and justice issues. The end of the book leaves the reader with the larger questions: How do we move forward in radical acts of love? How do we care for one another? At the same time, it’s a comfort to see that people are trying, that the work moves into other forms. That the grace and hope of the Circle continues. High school housekeepingFor those looking to add updated books on religion to their collection, this is a good choice. Eliza Griswold is a journalist (New Yorker) and originally intended to write a book about a church that practiced the opposite of Christian Nationalism. (She had written about that in the past.) This is a very even handed look at the Circle, without any proselytizing, so it works for public schools. For Christian religious/parochial schools it feels like a must purchase. The four pastors each have strong narrative voices and there are also some church members who comment on the action. The narrative feels very close and personal, but the author stays above the fray, leaving the reader to evaluate the issues. A primary reason this is a good choice for all high schools is that it confronts important social issues and issues of justice that are in the forefront of today’s world. It’s great food for thought.CultsThis article has a clickbait title, but it’s a look at a few cults and at why people join them.The most chilling cults you’ve never heard of… and why YOU could be the next unwitting memberOf InterestSince I had many comments a few weeks ago when I wrote about Between the World and Me, I thought you’d enjoy this NPR interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates from Oct. 13.Library NewsI’ve mentioned the California Freedom to Read Act in the past. It was signed into law. Governor signs California Freedom to Read Act into law protecting public access and librarians from KEYT news.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com
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Spiritual Abuse: The Stay-at-Home Daughter Movement
Oct 13, 202400:14:21Tap to summarizeHello Friends!I mentioned in my last post that I’m scheduling a few posts early so that I can take a break for a three weeks and fully concentrate on starting a new project, a middle grade novel. So, I won’t have a lot of up-to-date book challenge news on these.My YA novel Keep Sweet is launching in June 2025. As I write this, I’m deciding on the book cover. The artist has provided five great choices, so I have a hard decision, but how lucky is it to have that choice? Keep Sweet is about a teen, her twin brother and older sister, and her two friends, all of whom want to escape from their polygamist cult in the American Southwest desert. One of the things I focused on while working on this novel and have continued to read about is spiritual abuse, which is often tied with sexual abuse. There are a lot of good nonfiction books about cults, including some very recent memoirs. Judging by the number of ‘religious abuse’ docuseries streaming lately, I know I’m not alone in my interest. Not long ago, I wrote in Be a Cactus about Tia Levings’ A Well-trained Wife. This week, let’s look at the memoir Rift by Cait West. Rift by Cait WestThe title Rift is a nod to the author’s break from Christian patriarchy’s stay-at-home daughter movement, but it also refers to the meditations throughout the memoir about the geology of the land she lives on in the Midwest, West, and Hawai’i. The author wishes to show that the land forms the individual. Ultimately though, this is a story of: …loss and separation.This is a story of chaos, of fragmentation, hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. This is a story of escape and risk and making it all worth it. This is a story of psychological, emotional, financial, and spiritual abuse. This is my story of survival.Christian Patriarchy and the Stay-at-Home Daughter MovementWest is raised in Christian patriarchy, and her father joins more and more repressive churches. He becomes an adherent of the stay-at-home daughter movement. In this movement, there is no dating. Men decide who their daughters will spend time with and whether those men will ultimately make good husbands. Ironically, Mr. West and his wife met, immediately became engaged and married. That is, they controlled their own lives, futures, and marriage. Yet, he decides to oversee and have a hand in all the decisions his children make about their futures. At five years old, West is told her two piece swimsuit is too revealing. “I didn’t know what modesty meant. I only knew I had done something wrong, that something must be wrong with the small band of skin showing at my middle. I remember feeling ashamed. I remember trying to put the guilt into the swimsuit, as if it were evil somehow, as if it had tainted me, those flimsy pieces of stretchy fabric.”During family worship, West’s father reminds his children that all human beings are “born depraved and deserving of hell. … ‘What are people who aren’t saved?’ He would say. ‘Dead,’ we’d respond with confidence.”Reading is ThinkingAn interesting structural element of the memoir is the frequent placement of quotes from various literature that affected West’s formation. These include ads from Patriarch magazine, didactic Christian novels for children, adult books about how to be a subservient Christian wife, but also (less frequently) books like The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, which shows a girl breaking the rules of a restrictive society. Patriarch magazine (tagline: equipping men to be godly leaders in family, church, and society) has an outsized influence over the way West is raised. West notes some article titles such as “The Loving Art of Spanking” and “My Child Does Not Belong to the State.”Patriarch magazine also has a series of articles called “God’s Design for Scriptural Romance.” The author, John Thompson, gives detailed instructions for a father-controlled courtship process. These include “five fundamental principles of scriptural romance.” These are piety, patriarchy, purity, preparedness and patience. The four stages to marriage are friendship, courtship, betrothal, and wedding. None of these include falling in love. Having any sort of romantic feelings (much less any physical contact, including holding hands) before betrothal is considered a sin and a failure. West’s father will follow this courtship process in selecting mates for his kids. Ignorance Doesn’t Result in BlissWest’s parents hope to keep her from sex, drugs, and non-Christian media. She doesn't have an email account. She learns general knowledge in homeschool (not evolution, of course) as well as sewing and cooking. She is more isolated than protected. A fellow homeschooler sets up activities to help her get out of the house, seeing how unhealthy her life is. At one point, West’s father conducts ‘church’ at home because he is unhappy about his elder daughter almost eloping with a man she worked with. After the period of home church, the family attends Reformation Church (an Orthodox Presbyterian Church) under the direction of Kevin Swanson. He said women who didn’t submit to their husbands were disobeying God. He said homosexuality was an abomination. He said women’s calling was to be helpers to their husbands, that self-serving careers would be sinful. He said the ‘homosexuals’ were on the march with an aggressive agenda. He said it was okay for children to be bruised during spanking because bruises don’t last forever.West’s worry that she is not a real Christian and her fear of displeasing her father leads to an obsessive-compulsive disorder and an eating disorder. She worries about how her dress and actions might appear to men. She is raised to consider one future: wife and mother. Thus, she needn’t go to college. While she and her brother (who is a closeted gay young man) express doubts about their belief, when they come of age, they join the church. Out of Control Controlling BehaviorWhen she is an adult, West’s father reads her letters and emails to and from potential future husbands to make sure there’s nothing romantic or overly emotional in them. In fact, West is not allowed to feel any kind of love or affection for potential mates as they are auditioning (the best way I can describe it). Her father picks and then decides against more than one guy. One is too Baptist and doesn’t believe in infant baptism, but West has no feelings for him anyway. One is a closeted gay man that West feels love for. Her father tells her it’s disobedient to allow her emotions to be out of control. The young man moves away and the courtship is ended. It appears to West that her father will never find her the right mate. It appears to the reader that he is only playing a game and that his real intention is to keep her in his home permanently as a cook and house cleaner, as a caretaker. The only thing that West is allowed to do to make her own money is teach piano lessons. She is an adult with no more authority over herself than a small child.Eventually, West decides to take action and asks David, a man she sees in church, to hang out. David asks West’s father if he may court her. At first the answer is yes and then it is no. But West is smitten. She finally defies her father, creating her own happiness. At that point, she is 25 years old. (Yes—yikes!!)This, of course, isn’t the end of West’s troubles. Her father is angry and they become estranged. Her own mental health issues, now including PTSD, are ongoing. The memoir continues to detail how she manages a life on her own, outside of the church. High school housekeepingThere’s a good deal in Rift that would benefit any student who has experienced trauma through high-control situations, especially high-control religions. However, the beginning of the book might be off-putting for some as it discusses the geology of West’s landscape. This gives the book a literary feel, but it’s a slow opening for a teen (nice for adults). If students want to read about escape from Christian patriarchy and the ‘stay-at-home daughter’ movement, librarians could give them a little background on the geology-author’s life connection during reader’s advisory. Something avid readers will love are the discussions of books that are interspersed with West’s Story. They show how her parents were controlling her reading in order to control her thinking. But when she has the chance to read books with female protagonists escaping their confining environments, she takes lessons for her own life. Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is one of the first to help her imagine freedom. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Part 2Cult IssuesAs my book launch gets closer, I’ll be including news about cults and cult-like groups (‘cultish’ a...
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