Forager
Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult: a Memoir
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A moving, heartbreaking, and inspiring true story of the author’s escape from an apocalyptic cult—and the deep understanding of the natural world that helped her find freedom.
My family prepared me for the end of the world, but I know how to survive on what the earth yields.
Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest, born into an ultra-religious cult—the Field, as members called it—run by her grandfather, who believed that his chosen followers must prepare themselves to survive doomsday. Bound by the group’s patriarchal rules and literal interpretation of the Bible, Michelle and her siblings lived a life of deprivation, isolated from Outsiders and starved for both love and food. She was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learned to trust animals more than humans; and most important, she learned how to survive by foraging for what she needed. And as Michelle got older, she realized she had the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain, not satiate you, she would tell herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land like the intricacies of your body. And so she did.
With haunting and stark language, and illustrations of edible plants and their uses opening each chapter, Forager is a fierce and empowering coming-of-age story and a timely meditation on the ways in which harnessing nature’s gifts can lead to our freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this surprisingly plucky debut, journalism professor and essayist Dowd details her childhood in an apocalyptic Christian cult founded by her grandfather. On a mountain in California's Angeles National Forest, Dowd and her family survived off the land, read only the Bible, and performed in a traveling circus for the little money they needed to support themselves. For Dowd, however, God's love was less an embrace and more "like rounds of chemotherapy." When an autoimmune disorder shuffled her in and out of the hospital as a teenager, the outside world started to creep in, and cleaning jobs for clients on the outside further awakened her to the concept of home and the possibility that she might go to college. After going on a date to her first-ever movie with a former cult member, Dowd was excommunicated at age 17 and struck out on her own. Her choice to begin each chapter with field notes about the plant species that kept her alive during her childhood rises above gimmick, but her prose can be overwrought, and her too-general engagement with the cult's inner workings is frustrating. Still, this is an undeniably powerful saga of personal survival.