San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Forager’ tills mind, heart of a cult survivor
The publishing industry has always had a soft spot for what I like to call “Come to Jesus” memoirs.
These books usually involve a person struggling to overcome a difficult background, abusive family member or addiction. The person goes through a series of ordeals before a final-straw experience changes their perspective. They break free, do the work to find their true selves and maybe wind up at Harvard (or the equivalent).
It’s a winning formula that rewards the writer for their strength and agency in determining their own future and gives the voyeuristic public a peek into what real suffering looks like.
Michelle Dowd’s uneven but still affecting memoir, “Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult,” falls squarely into this category. What’s more, it involves another fascinating and ever-popular topic: a cult.
The story goes that Dowd’s grandfather founded the religious (misogynist) cult the Field on a 16-acre plot of undeveloped land near the Angeles National Forest in Southern California in 1931. During the 1970s and ’80s, she and her siblings joined other Field disciples in preparing for the Apocalypse.
“We memorized scripture, put on the armor of God, and bowed to the mercurial tyranny of Grandpa, to whom we belonged,” she writes.
Dowd and other Field followers also learned emergency survival tips like foraging for food and using plants for medicinal purposes, ran through military-style drills to build up their physical stamina, endured pain-endurance tests like hiking through deep snow in tennis shoes, “repudiated pleasure in all forms” and shunned
“Outsiders” (nonbelievers) whenever possible.
To make money, Dowd proselytized outside of banks for 12-hour shifts, six days a week. She sold tickets for various shows Field members put on around the country as part of a monthslong tour called “the Trip,” including a full-blown circus. (Think of it like a traveling theatrical caravan, but featuring King James Bible
thumpers instead of troubadours.)
For the first half of the book, Dowd’s disorienting, cherrypicked accounts of these types of events make her childhood seem a little … odd, sure. But it didn’t strike me as anything outside the realm of what a cult upbringing might entail — that is, until Dowd lets slip that she almost died from an undiagnosed (read: ignored-by-everyone) autoimmune disorder called idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura when she was 10. It’s only after a Field disciple notices red splotches on Dowd’s overly skinny legs and body that Dowd’s mother reluctantly takes her to the “untrustworthy” hospital for treatment.
This revelation unleashes a torrent of more gruesome details, including reports of long periods of abandonment and frequent physical abuse by her parents, a propensity for starving herself so she’ll go unnoticed, and sexual abuse by her peers. (“Girls have to do what boys say at the Field. That’s God’s will. It’s part of being a virtuous woman, learning to be a vessel for a man’s seed,” she writes.)
It isn’t until Dowd gets shunned by the community at 16 for writing love letters to a boy — a “crime of seduction” — and later excommunicated for going to a movie with another boy that she’s finally able to see all of these punishments for what they are: cruel methods of mind and body control used on a naive, affection-starved girl who just doesn’t know any different.
Like many books of its ilk, “Forager” might not be the best
pick for the impatient, rationalminded reader. For example, by the time I closed the back cover, I wished I had more specifics sooner about the people in Dowd’s immediate orbit — her mother and father, especially — so I could better understand the Field’s communal frame of mind and the motivations that led to Dowd’s choices.
The long passages of quoted scripture, though used to provide context, might cause some eyes to glaze over, too.
But ultimately, Dowd’s tell-all about coming of age, overcoming her past and embracing a new path forward succeeds in what it sets out to do: remind readers that it is indeed possible to transcend a bad situation in order to find one’s own version of truth.
In the end, Dowd does reach her proverbial Harvard — she gets married and has children, becomes a journalism professor and lands a book deal, and continues to reckon with her decisions and experiences while trying to enjoy some semblance of peace.
As she so aptly puts it (in my favorite passage from the book), “I am every girl I have ever been: The believer. The invalid. The victim. The fighter. The heretic. Uncivilized. Ravenous. Angry. Wicked. Wild. These girls all sing inside me like a choir.”