My life is divided into two parts: before I left the cult I was involved in during my 20s, and after. Leaving the cult created a reckoning in my life unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. It was both the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and the best. As a result, I connect deeply with others’ stories of grief, loss, and the challenging times in life that make us. As an author, I have carried these themes into my mystery novels. I hope you experience as much resonance from the books on this list as I have.
I wrote...
Cult, A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery
This book parallels my own journey of leaving a spiritual group, which is no doubt why this memoir is so precious to me. I’ve probably read this book six times. The author writes with confidence, humility, and humor that I find both deeply touching and inspirational.
Beck grew up in a family where her father was an apologist for the Latter Day Saints (Mormons). Her personal reckoning with that religion and her journey to finding her own version of faith is one that everyone with an interest in the human experience will be able to relate to.
As “Mormon royalty” within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Martha Beck was raised in a home frequented by the Church’s high elders in an existence framed by the strictest code of conduct. As an adult, she moved to the east coast, outside of her Mormon enclave for the first time in her life. When her son was born with Down syndrome, Martha and her husband left their graduate programs at Harvard to return to Utah, where they knew the supportive Mormon community would embrace them.
But when she was hired to teach at Brigham Young University, Martha…
The curiosities we have about life can be deeply mysterious, and I’ve learned to love that about it. So, it seems, has Jane Christmas; her memoir recounts her exploration of the possibility of living a cloistered life. She feels compelled to take this journey and is willing to follow her instincts even if they lead to some unusual places.
I loved that this writer and human were open to exploring a deeply spiritual existence and then sharing what that experience was like. It’s not every day we get to go behind the scenes on what may be one of the most personal journeys of a human life.
With humor and opinions aplenty, a woman embarks on an unconventional quest to see if she is meant to be a nun.
Just as Jane Christmas decides to enter a convent in mid-life to find out whether she is nun material”, her long-term partner Colin, suddenly springs a marriage proposal on her. Determined not to let her monastic dreams be sidelined, Christmas puts her engagement on hold and embarks on an extraordinary year long adventure to four conventsone in Canada and three in the UK. In these communities of cloistered nuns and monks, she sharesand at times chafes and rails…
What if the worst possible thing that happened to you was the best possible thing? After a cataclysmic injury to her brain, author Bolte Taylor walks us through what she learned about being human because of this event. ‘Everything is energy’ is the message I walked away from this book with, and I remember that message weekly.
Somehow, this neuroscientist is able to discuss our spiritual nature by explaining what happened to her when her ‘brain went offline.’ It is a beautiful and affecting book that, as I say, has stuck with me for years.
"Transformative...[Taylor's] experience...will shatter [your] own perception of the world."-ABC News
The astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment
On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life-all within four hours-Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and…
Grief and loss will touch us all; there’s no escaping it. How we deal with those experiences can inform how we live the rest of our lives. After my own experience of tremendous loss and resultant grief, I turned to books like this one to understand what I was going through. Author Neil Peart, from the Canadian band Rush, encounters losses no one should ever have to experience.
He deals with that by taking to the road on his motorcycle. I didn’t choose to deal with grief that way, but I deeply appreciate Peart’s honesty and vulnerability in this memoir about his epic journey around North America and through the dark valleys of his grief.
Within a ten-month period, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. This memoir tells of the sense of personal devastation that led him on a 55,000-mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again.
Peart chronicles his personal odyssey and includes stories of reuniting with friends and family, grieving, and reminiscing. He recorded with dazzling artistry the enormous range of his travel adventures, from the mountains to…
This last recommendation is a bit of a cheat as it doesn’t deal with a challenging journey as much as an exploratory one. But I couldn’t leave it out. Part memoir, part exploration of the relationship between humans and our beloved dogs, my experience of this book was that it is all heart.
I was so deeply touched by author Ted Keresote’s commitment to letting his adopted dog, Merle, really be a dog and not just be forced to fold himself entirely into his human’s life. I found Merle’s story to be deeply touching and revelatory. This is the book I give to friends when they get a new dog.
A moving, insightful love story about the vast possiblities of the relationship between humans and dogs.
While on a camping trip, Ted Kerasote meets a Labrador mix living on his own in the wild. They become attached to each other, and Kerasote decides to bring the dog, who he names Merle, home. There, after realizing that Merle's native intelligence would be diminished by living exclusively in the human world, he installs a dog door in his house, allowing Merle to live both outside and in.
Merle shows Kerasote how dogs might live if they were allowed to make more of…
Currently, cults are a common topic of conversation and the subject of documentaries and podcasts. In 1989, they were not, so at the tender age of 21, Alexandra Amor got swept up into one by a charismatic, manipulative spiritual medium who aimed to control the lives and money of those who followed her.
Ten years later, Alexandra managed to escape the group, although not without enduring serious trauma, disenfranchised grief, and the loss of a sense of self, which took years to rebuild. This is a personal story that also aims to educate readers about what cults are, how they work, and why even smart people can get caught up in them.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
