Tamara MC, PhD

Author
Activist
Journalist
Speaker
Cultural Critic

Welcome to Unicornlandia

We believe in miracles, magic, & the power of the unicorn to free all girls and women worldwide from gender-based violence and coercive control.

Hop on your unicorn and join me on a magical adventure.

You have entered Unicornlandia, a place where dreams come true.

What is a Unicorn Activist?

Someone who believes in the magical strength of all girls, women, and female-identifying humans to live free in matriarchal magnificence.

What is a Unicorn Activist?

Someone who believes in the magical strength of all girls, women, and female-identifying humans to live free in matriarchal magnificence.

Lived Experience Expert:

Dr. Tamara MC is a cult, child marriage, and human trafficking Lived Experience Expert who advocates for girls and women to live free from gender-based violence worldwide. Her Ph.D. is in Applied Linguistics, and she researches how language manipulates vulnerable populations.

Themes in her work explore coercive control, intergenerational trauma, Complex PTSD, religion/spirituality, and mothering. She researches language, culture, and identity in the Middle East and beyond, specifically her hybrid identity of growing up simultaneously Jewish and Muslim.

Tamara's a Contributor to Over 60 Outlets

ARTICLES

Read Tamara's Latest Publications

I Was Raised in a Cult. Like the Duggar Family, We Had Dark Secrets

Many are stunned after watching Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, a docuseries about the famously growing Duggar family, on Amazon Prime. How could this have happened? The Duggars looked like such good people! But for those of us who grew up in similarly repressive environments, none of this was shocking. We lived it every day. What we viewed […]

‘Uncultured’: The Intergenerational Trauma of Girls Growing up in Cults

Daniella Mestyanek Young’s powerfully immersive and exceptionally honest debut memoir Uncultured opens with a scene of Young standing in line to get spanked by Uncle Zephaniah. This man is not her blood uncle, but what the kids in the Children of God cult call the men in the community. The women are called “Aunties.” Young […]

I was in a cult. Britney was in a conservatorship. Our situations are crazy similar

Secretly behind closed doors, we’d both been held hostage, our personhood and civil liberties stolen Nov. 12 marked the historic day when after 13 years, Britney Spears finally freed herself from her father’s stranglehold, proclaiming, “I ain’t a slave 4 u!” The termination process of Britney’s conservatorship went into full effect after a court hearing, […]

I grew up in a cult and was married at 12 — in Texas

My mother was a liberal feminist; my father was a religious zealot who left the family to live by the cult leader. Two months before I married, I had my first period. I still wore a training bra. I was 12 and had never kissed a boy, never fathomed marriage. “Repeat after me: I, Habiba, […]

Jessie’s Girl: On Guinevere Turner’s “When the World Didn’t End”

ON JANUARY 5, 1975, when Guinevere Turner was seven, the world was supposed to end. She grabbed her favorite toy and donned a fancy dress, but the spaceship to take Turner to Venus never arrived. Turner’s new memoir, When the World Didn’t End, follows her life as she grows up with the Lyman Family, an apocalyptic cult […]

I was a child bride. It’s time to stop teaching young girls to stay sweet.

I was a child bride. It’s time to stop teaching young girls to stay sweet. Like the young girls in Netflix’s #2 trending true-crime docuseries, Keep Sweet: Pray and Obeyabout Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I also grew up in a religious fundamentalist community and was brought up to […]

Born to Stand Out: Daniella Mestyanek Young Interviewed by Tamara MC

A memoir about growing up in a sex cult. As soon as I heard about Daniella Mestyanek Young’s book Uncultured (St. Martin’s Press), I knew I had to interview her. Both of us are “cult babies,” children born or raised in cults. Young was born a third-generation member of the Children of God, the infamous sex cult […]

TCR Talks with Michelle Dowd, Author of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult

By Tamara MC For fans of Educated by Tara Westover, Maid by Stephanie Land, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Michelle Dowd’s debut coming-of-age memoir Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult contains echoes of all three, yet it is wholly unique unto itself. Dowd was born in the 1970s into a survivalist cult called the Field, governed by her grandfather, who […]

On Nonfiction Book Proposals, Residencies, and Her Essay Collection ‘The Loneliness Files’

Athena Dixon by Dr. Tamara MC When I read the title of Athena Dixon’s latest book, The Loneliness Files (Tin House, 2023), I knew I had to interview her. As a single empty-nester mama, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, daughter to parents who were only children, and only child to my mom, loneliness has been my unrelenting bedfellow. Loneliness […]

Tamara MC In Conversation With Athena Dixon, Author Of the Loneliness Files

What does a lifetime of loneliness look like, feel like in the body? Athena Dixon examines this question in her second book, The Loneliness Files, published by Tin House, and edited by one of my all-time favorite writers, Hanif Abduraqqib. Dixon’s debut essay collection, Incredible Shrinking Woman (2020), published by Split Lip Press, unpacks her different identities as […]

ARTICLES

Read Tamara's Latest Publications

I Was Raised in a Cult. Like the Duggar Family, We Had Dark Secrets

‘Uncultured’: The Intergenerational Trauma of Girls Growing up in Cults

I was in a cult. Britney was in a conservatorship. Our situations are crazy similar

I grew up in a cult and was married at 12 — in Texas

Jessie’s Girl: On Guinevere Turner’s “When the World Didn’t End”

I was a child bride. It’s time to stop teaching young girls to stay sweet.

Born to Stand Out: Daniella Mestyanek Young Interviewed by Tamara MC

TCR Talks with Michelle Dowd, Author of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult

On Nonfiction Book Proposals, Residencies, and Her Essay Collection ‘The Loneliness Files’

Tamara MC In Conversation With Athena Dixon, Author Of the Loneliness Files

Do You Love Rainbows...

Glitter, sunsets and sunrises, coffee, animals, bodies of water, bodies, cotton, fresh air, bamboo duvet covers, flowers, Farmer’s markets, walking and running, pink, sand, herbal teas, globe trotting, brunch, best friends, mountains, the sun, sparkly flip-flops, anklets, dancing?

Hey Beauty Lover, I see you!

Do you believe in miracles? Rainbow-colored sheep?

Do you believe in miracles?

Rainbow-colored sheep?

I’m sooo glad we found each other!

Emotionally and mentally, I feel my age because I’ve lived my life in neon yellow and hot pink-flashing colors, with zest and flare, rarely forsaking a moment, knowing what I value most in life is time, something I am very greedy with and protect fiercely. -- Dr. Tamara MC