by Riley, Peggy
Copyright © 2013 Peggy Riley. Originally published on http://peggyriley.com/2013/05/09/an-interview-with-lori-lansens/. All rights reserved.
What Is a Cult?
Why People Join and Why They Stay
My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults, formed by charismatic leaders who hoped to build utopia—or its evil twin. In creating the faith at the heart of my first novel, Amity & Sorrow, I was less interested in its leader and more in its followers. Growing up watching the parole hearings of Charles Manson and his Family, as well as the bodies of Jonestown believers strewn across the jungle floor, I have always wondered—why do people join cults, what makes them stay, and why are so few able to leave?
The hangover of the Summer of Love left many a hippie lost and alone, estranged from postwar families who didn’t understand this rite of passage. Gurus emerged from everywhere: Fathers Yod and Berg, Sun Myung Moon, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Reverend Jim Jones. Communities sprang up throughout California, making homes and families for people with no one, called to change the world or to find a new world through the liberating of political ideals, drugs, meditation, violence, philosophy. With their minds opened in the full throes of ecstatic and free love, anything seemed possible—until the leaders began to turn.
Charismatic leaders draw believers in with words of honey and visions of apocalypse, making them feel special through the limiting and rewarding of access, cutting ties between followers and their families, challenging their behaviors and beliefs to erode their identities, their sense of self. The leader seems appointed and anointed by God. Once he is duly revered, he proclaims himself the next messiah and then it is the beginning of the end. Nearly one thousand died at Jonestown; only a handful escaped before the “revolutionary suicide” of Jones’s poison punch. Why so few—was it because their passports had been removed? Or was it because their families were split? Seventy-six died in the fiery finale to the siege of Waco. During the standoff, David Koresh sent twenty-one children and two dozen adults out, all of them followers prepared for the end of the world, ready to die in a battle with “Babylon,” the evil government. The freed adults continue to mourn the loss of their prophet. Traumatized children watched their family burn on television, some of them young wives of Koresh’s who told of sexual encounters that left them feeling “scared” and “privileged.”
Through an oily combination of influence and control, charm and fear, leaders hold their cults together, apart from the world. Followers are taught to deny their instincts—all doubts come from Satan—and to forget their lives before. They are told there is no other world—that this is the end—and they find they would rather die with the ones they love than face a life, alone. But in Amity & Sorrow, the first wife of fifty makes a different choice. When their church catches fire, as the Branch Davidians’ did, she takes her children and runs them from their faith and their father. That is where the book begins.
There are a number of fascinating books about cults, both fiction and nonfiction. On Charles Manson, you can’t beat the original: Helter Skelter, by Manson’s prosecuting attorney, Vincent Bugliosi. My Life in Orange recounts Tim Guest’s motherless ashram childhood under Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Rapture of Canaan, by Sheri Reynolds, is an Oprah book from 1997, about a teenaged mother in a strict Christian faith—the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind—who may have given birth to a messiah.
Copyright © 2013 Peggy Riley. Originally published on Bookish.com. All rights reserved.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. How are names used as metaphors in Amity & Sorrow?
2. What is the meaning behind how names are given (i.e., attribute names for the children and the family name shared by the Bradleys of Oklahoma), and do you think they serve a purpose?
3. How does Peggy Riley explore the bond between Sorrow and Amity? In what ways is their relationship typical of the bond between sisters?
4. The children in the polygamous community were illiterate. What are the implications and impact of that type of enforced ignorance? Is a faith that is designed to keep its believers ignorant and isolated a “true” faith?
5. How can blind faith be dangerous? Was Sorrow brainwashed or devout?
6. Who defines what makes a family, and is there a true definition of family? Do you think these polygamous marriages can make a “true” family?
7. Is there a scenario that can justify a polygamous lifestyle? What are the benefits of a polygamous community to the wives in Amity & Sorrow? Do you think Amity will be drawn to live a polygamous lifestyle?
8. What role did drugs play in the story? What did that add to the plot or reveal about the community?
9. Is it a fair exchange to join a faith and a family to “get clean”? Who gets more out of the exchange—the individual women or the family in total? Does a faith that offers a safe place of healing appeal to you, or is it a kind of con?
10. One of the hardest decisions a mother can make is to turn against her child. How does Amaranth struggle with this decision? Do you think she makes the right choice?
11. To what extent was Sorrow a victim? Or did she become a willing participant when she returned “home”? At what age should children be responsible for their actions?
12. What do you think happens to Sorrow next?
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Two Sisters…
Part I: May 1: The Red Country
2: Marriage Bed
3: The Bluebottles
4: Chickasaw Plum
Before: The Leaving
5: Stitches
6: The Day of Washing
7: Weight of Faith
8: The Car
9: Rules
10: The Spinning
Before: The Fiftieth Wife
11: The Gas Station Oracle
12: Home Preserves
13: The Map of the Panhandle
14: Paper
Before: The Banishing
15: The Key
Before: The Daughter of Waco
Part II: June 16: The Devil in the House
17: The Switch
Before: The Wife Who Wasn’t
18: The Sacrifice
19: Seedbed
20: The Scar
21: Ghosts
Before: The Raising of the Temple
22: The Field
23: Harvest
24: The Living and the Dead
Before: Eve and Sorrow
Part III: July 25: The Grain Elevator
26: The Tiny Prophet
27: The Plastic Box Oracle
Before: The Second Wife
28: News
29: The Devil’s Box
30: Sheets
31: The Slip
32: Do Drop Inn and the Mesa
33: The Sunday Preachermen
34: Buds
35: Shattercane
Before: The First Wife
Part IV: September 36: Driving Back
37: Ash
38: Goodwill Industries
39: The Temple
40: Spinning
41: The Room Below
42: Home
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Peggy Riley’s Amity & Sorrow
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with Peggy Riley
What Is a Cult? Why People Join and Why They Stay
Questions and Topics for
Discussion
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Peggy Riley
Reading group guide copyright © 2014 by Peggy Riley
An interview with Lori Lansens, copyright © 2013 by Peggy Riley. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“What Is a Cult? Why People Join and Why They Stay,” copyright © 2013 by Peggy Riley. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover photographs: girls © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images; background © Rekha Garton / Getty Images
Cover © 2104 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: April 2013
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ISBN 978-0-316-22089-7
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