Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult that Bound My Life
Sarah Edmondson
How does one find themselves in a cult? How does one wake up from a dozen years of brainwashing and closed circuit logic and reasoning? How does one slip from searching for personal growth to becoming a personal slave? This is Sarah Edmondson’s story.
This is also a book, a la “Friends”, that should have wound up in the freezer. It is not a light read, nor wholly revolutionary in its writing, but my goodness the story is so compelling I had to keep reading despite the stress dreams it induced. I’d argue, given the psychology elements used to explain the cult mentality, it even fits one of the categories for the 2020 Read Harder Challenge I’m participating in.
It’s hard to try and pick apart a memoir for plot reasons – this is actually how someone’s life unfolded, it’s not exactly a manufactured experience. As a reviewer, I can’t quite the author them to skip certain parts or polish others into the realms of the fictional. Thankfully, I don’t want to do that with Scarred. The first chapter, one could argue, might be the climax of the book, but rather than leading up to the great horror, it gets it out of the way first so instead of reading for “what’s going to happen”, the reader is placed into the mentality of “why did this happen?”
In some ways, this book could have been a modern version of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and towards the end Edmondson does put in some emotional work on identifying the ways she hurt people and inadvertently lured them into such nefarious situations. However, for most of it, Edmondson uses the book to try and explain herself. She does not beg for forgiveness, nor expect it, merely hope that one day the people she hurt will be okay.
Her manner of explaining what happened, and sinking the reader into the world of NXIVM’s coded language, forced me to adopt in incremental moments the mentality of a NXIVM member in order to understand her story. I found it simultaneously confusing and effective. In some ways, the practices and community of NXIVM reminded me of things I had experienced in my own life because of how these types of cults prey on the deep need of some people to belong to a community. It’s more than a little alarming how easy it might be for me or someone I care about to fall into a cult simply for want of belonging.
This book appeals to the morbid curiosity we all have about what we don’t understand. The seemingly hardest portion of the book is tackled immediately in the first chapter so readers can spend the rest of the book really figuring out the “why” of it all. It is the most graphic portion of the story, in my opinion, and still worth the risk of being triggered to read.
In some ways, Sarah Edmondson’s story is, as she calls it, the tip of the proverbial ice berg. She acknowledges there are darker, more harrowing accounts of what happened that have yet to come to proper light. Only brief snippets mentioned of them from the trial, almost whetting the palate in a sinister way. Knowing they exist might make some people feel like Sarah’s book is a cop out for what could have been grittier, but ultimately this book isn’t about shocking the audience. By focusing on the “how” and “why,” I found this book to be more satisfactory than any serial killer Wikipedia article or Netflix true crime documentary.
I highly recommend readers pick up this compelling book!
The Little Book Witch 