Summer Girls Summer #1: We Want to be Free of the Self

Thinking about cults & belief & why sometimes I'm jealous of people who seek to annihilate the self through love or god or both

(Hey, psssss, you can pre-order my novel about sisterhood, cults, crime, coming of age, and a dreamy summer of 1999 here. )

I’ve written before about cults, which I think of as the most extreme edge of some pretty natural human desires and anxieties. Many people want to finally have “the answer” to life’s difficulties, to have the ultimate mother or father fiture to guide them, to have an interdependent relationship with a community and avoid isolation, and, maybe most importantly, to have a transformative, transcendental experience of freedom from the self. In a cult, you often change your appearance, you eating habits, your relationships, even your name. What a relief it would be, sometimes, to give it all up and hand it to somebody else, to become less self-centered but also more free.

What if I didn’t have to be Letitia Trent, therapist and d-list writer, carrying all of these small but heavy hopes even as my life passes the halfway point, but instead a part of a greater whole with a specific role, a place in a movement that will get me to some ultimate bliss or understanding or togetherness that doesn’t depend on my performance in this role? In the abstract, I see the appeal. In reality, I find the idea of joining, blending, of becoming the drop of water in the ocean, completely and utterly terrifying. As I’ve probably written before, seeing a group of people together enthusiastically agreeing with the same thing makes me feel uncomfortable, even if I agree, too. I deeply distrust the urge to let mommy and daddy take care of things that seems like the root of the desire for a charismatic leader. Beyond that, on a more personal level, I like to hold my little hopes tightly, even as I don’t expect to achieve them. I am fond of my various neuroses and ego illusions and am not willing to hand them over to somebody else to exorcise from me. And yet, wouldn’t it be nice to truly believe that another person has the answer or a direct line of communication to the transcendent? Wouldn’t it be nice, actually, to believe that such pure communication is even possible, that mystery could even be translated properly through the sad little radio of the human mind?

In my novel Summer Girls, I try to understand how a person might come to a place where they seek out the obliteration of the self. In my novel, a summer of a teenager gettng what she believes is her first taste of love and acceptance, a love that asks for completely dissolved boundaries, leads to a life of trying to duplicate that feeling through various religious, spiritual, and psychological means. What spurs Mariah, who we first meet at 15 and then 30, is that she had a taste of what felt like true union and dissolving of the self into a family unit. That dissolving of the self felt like home, like truth, like bliss.

I was thinking of poor boundaries and consequences when I watched Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult on Netflix, a show that focuses on one family attempting to make contact with their daughter Miranda, a dance social media influencer who starts to attend a church in LA that is connected to the 7M talent agency. The documentary is about the gradual estrangement of Miranda, even as she becomes a more prominent member of the talent agency on Tik Tok and even marries another fellow “cult” member. I’m putting cult here in quotations because of of right now (I haven’t finished the series yet) I’m not completely conviced that this organization is a cult versus a pretty classic evengelical church with a focus on “dying to yourself.” In this case, the dying to yourself seems to require cutting off contact with family and devoting yourself completely to the church/business. That’s where the cult part comes in, but truthfully, that isn’t so different from any big megachurch that says the exactly same thing. It’s tired, prosperity gospel stuff mixed with the arts, a surefire way to make your art shit and your religion shit, too.

This is one of the more off-putting cult documentaries for me, since it’s hard for me to see the appeal of the rise & grind Capitalism elements of this. Seeing all of these clean-cut, extremely normie young people dancing to the most mid choeography you’ve ever seen in your life doesn’t exactly speak to the passion I usually associate with tanking your life for a cult. I didn’t finish the doc, but what I came away with is that Miranda went from one controlling group (her very-involved family) to another. I almost felt more sympathy for the Mother God cult members: at least they were rejecting social norms in some real, radical ways. It takes some serious cognitive work to get yourself to cart around a blue corpse for several weeks, fully believing a spaceship would arrive to take her away. It takes only a touch of delusion to think you’ll become a famous dancer if you give up everything to your local church/business group and post dance videos to a soundtrack of boomer classics.

It’s hard for me to worry much about these shiny, happy, very Mormon-coded LA dancing Christians, but the cult does feel like a very contemporary version of what everybody who joins a cult seems to want: that joyful loss of self. I was recently talking to a friend about a piece of writing she was working on that explores that blurring of the self, that dissolving in romantic love as well a spiritual, and I admit, I devour stories about dissolving into another, even as in real life, somebody coming at me with either the promise of eternal life or some romantic gesture makes me want to head in the opposite direction.

Some people want to touch that big, powerful mystery, without the guardrails, and I love stories about those people. I hope y’all do too. Here’s another Summer Girls pre-order link just in case you do.