Want to listen to the article? Great–listen here! Uncultured, Daniella Mestyanek Young’s powerful debut memoir, is perhaps the next runaway sensation, the succession to Educated (2018) by Tara Westover. Both memoirs are stories of triumph, resiliency, and audacity. Both girls blaze from the confines of their fundamentalist Christian upbringings to shelter identities separate from their groups. They […]
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 alleged to have encouraged sex with children as a way to get closer to God. I grew up in a Sufi cult in the eighties in Texas, and although our cult was not a sex cult, our girls were sexually assaulted. I was married at age twelve in an Islamic temporary marriage called a mut’ah, and most of the girls I grew up with were married off at age fourteen to men much older than them and usually in plural marriages. So, although we grew up in different places with different religions, our experiences mirror each other in many significant ways.
Want to listen to the article? Great–listen here! 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 […]