I begin the year hunting through my very long TBR looking for books for the various Read Harder Challenge tasks. Some of those tasks are easier than others, and some I think will be easy to pick out a book for from my TBR and find that I don’t have any that fit… or maybe only one. That was the case with reading a book about cults – I thought for sure I had plenty of options for it but in fact only The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook fit the bill (it didn’t stop me from adding some other books to my list, but we’ll see if they make it over to the official TBR).
I’m not going to argue the point about QAnon being a cult, it is. The exemplars of cultish goings-on are there, but it’s also part of the change of how those things are happening. Cook breaks down, through the story of five families, what conditions might lead someone to become a follower, what that did to their lives, and in some cases, what has happened as they recover from being in the cult. Cook doesn’t come out and explicitly state anything in the core of the book. Instead, she focuses on weaving together the various narratives through the book’s three sections and lets the reader see the evidence right in front of them. It is a relatively quick and easy read – Cook’s narrative style lends itself to readability – but it is also a heavy one, particularly if you are someone who has gone no contact with family members for any number of reasons. There isn’t a lot that can be done on the micro level for people sucked into the particular type of cult that QAnon is (although there are some), but at the end Cook lays out the societal things that should be done.
