UNCULTURED

 

Dear Reader,
A few days after I woke up blind from a brain tumor pressing on my left eye, made only more intense because I was a soldier deployed to Afghanistan, my commander said to me, "Write it all down. Find the thread in the story of your life."
              Until then, I hadn't thought of myself as a writer, only a voracious reader. After a life of being trafficked and abused throughout Asia and Latin America as a child born into the third generation of the religious sex cult, the Children of God, everything I knew about the outside world was through select Disney movies and surreptitious reading. I longed for the life of the typical American teenager, but when I got excommunicated and enrolled myself in a Houston high school, I felt like I was from another planet. Books saved my life then, and I read my way into college, into an honors degree in literature, into learning how to approach the world with a mind open to diverse viewpoints, rather than the extremist perspectives under which I'd been raised.
              As a kid who'd been denied books, I wanted to read—everything. As a kid who'd been beaten for asking questions, I wanted to analyze arguments, understand the phrases chosen, and question—everything. And when I commissioned into the Army, in a time of war, it was to do just that. To study the world and groups of people in it, analyze the intelligence, and attempt to help predict what the bad guys would do next.
              But a woman in the Army is never the good guy no matter how hard we play the game, and I carried my experience as a cult survivor along with the heavy duffel bag I hoisted toward the sky for hours while the drill sergeants yelled. I noticed the similarities to my earlier life from the first moment I boarded the Army bus that would take me to my new life.
              I just joined another cult.
              What I came to understand, through writing, is that the military and the cult had a lot more in common than I ever wanted to admit—more than any of us strong, proud Americans would like to admit. And in both of those worlds, trying to fit myself into the mold of what was expected of women nearly killed me.  
              But I survived.  
              UNCULTURED is a memoir; the almost-unbelievable story of my life in closed-off groups operating in secrecy throughout the world. But I hope UNCULTURED is more than that, and gives you a new perspective from which to examine the groups you love and see how you might be contorting and defining yourself by the group's rules, ones that aren't your own.
              Groups can be a prison, but they can also be a place for our liberation. The difference is freedom.             
              UNCULTURED tells the story of my life in groups, and of my attempt to find that thread...toward freedom.
Sincerely, Daniella Mestyanek Young

Daniella Mestyanek Young (2022) Uncultured: A Memoir. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press. Hardcover. 352 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1250280114