A Conversation on Cults: Sarah Flocken & Blair Glaser

How do smart, skeptical people get pulled into cults and near-cults? What is the line between true spiritual growth and harmful groupthink? The answer is more complex than we think, and could contain some uncomfortable truths.

Authors Sarah Flocken and Blair Glaser will discuss their recent books that both touch on how easy it is to believe in something unquestioningly when your life is in transition. Flocken's debut novel Be Well and Glaser's memoir This Incredible Longing both focus on young women searching in high-control groups for the answer to one question: where do I belong?

About the authors:

Sarah Flocken is an author who writes unhinged fiction for the silently enraged. Be Well is her first novel. She is also a public relations professional, comedian, improviser, and pun contest host (yes, it’s a thing) with performance credits worldwide. Los Angeles will always hold a piece of her heart and blood pressure, but San Diego is the place she calls home.

Blair Glaser is a writer and leadership consultant whose essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, People, Longreads, Oldster, and others, as well as in literary magazines such as Brevity, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, In Short, and The Mantlepiece. She’s read stories live at events such as Writer’s Read, Generation Women, and The Woodstock Bookfest. She lives with her husband and dog-ter, Vanna White, in Venice Beach, CA. More can be found at www.blairglaser.com.

About Be Well:

Fresh out of college and faced with the Great Recession of 2009, Ann Ward takes increasingly desperate measures to avoid moving back home while being drawn into a maybe-cult. What could go wrong?

Summer 2009: Brand-new college graduate Ann Ward has sent out nearly three hundred job applications, but nobody will employ her. The last thing she wants to do is leave Los Angeles, return to her desert hometown, and live in the shadow of her fame-hungry televangelist father–and it's starting to look like that's her fate. Thankfully, Ann's luck turns after a humiliating failed job interview, when she meets the magnetic founder of upscale holistic wellness collective Sagebrush. She's quickly drawn deep into the privileged, demanding world of Sagebrush, inventing Anneliese - a dubious new persona - to fit in.

But when her funds run out and her lies blow up, Ann must choose between facing reality or doing whatever she has to do in order to get the future she wants. Both a "funny ha-ha-" and a "funny oh no" read for anyone who survived the Great Recession, Be Well explores just how easy it is to believe in something unquestioningly–and lie to ourselves and others–when everything feels uncertain and the future isn't guaranteed.

About This Incredible Longing:

A cross between Glennon Doyle's Love Warrior and the classic Yogananda Paramahansa's Autobiography of a Yogi, This Incredible Longing: Finding My Self in a Near-Cult Experience is a memoir about devotion, discernment, and the complicated beauty of spiritual seeking.

Blair Glaser thoughtfully stepped onto a path promising peace and purpose when she found Siddha Yoga, a movement led by a charismatic Indian guru and shaped by a community that would later be called a high-control group. What she found there wasn't exploitation: it was healing. Within the ashram's structure, she discovered confidence, calm, and belonging she'd never known.

But when the guru returned to India, cracks began to show. Blair's depression resurfaced. Hypocrisies emerged. A looming exposé of the heinous truths about Gurumayi and her teacher, her parents' intervention, and a flicker of envy sparked by a Friends episode created a reckoning she could no longer ignore.

This Incredible Longing is a story about the willingness to seek, and how looking for oneself by idealizing another human is simultaneously thrilling and dangerous. It is a story of awakening without bitterness that explores the fine line between transformation and entrapment, and the strength it takes to walk away with both eyes open.

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Host or Publisher Village Well Books & Coffee