One genre of books I enjoy is that of people who have escaped the Church of Scientology, a cult designed to drain money and free labor from its victims via a gradual process of brainwashing and cutting off all ties to non-Scientologists. There's a peril to reading these, which is that Scientology uses a huge amount of jargon, to the point where even people who have escaped from the Church and have been living outside for years will pepper a sentence with enough mysterious words and phrases to make it unintelligible. For that reason, this - and future - reviews of such books will contain a Scientology Jargon-O-Meter, a simple way to gauge how readable the book is without keeping a pocket dictionary of what the hell getting RPF'd for sec checking a SP squirrel means. The book will be graded on a 1 to 10 scale, 1 containing no or always well explained jargon, and 10 being a Palin-esque word salad of puzzling acronyms and phrases.
And now our feature presesntation...
My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist (Nancy Many)
Nancy Many's story is not dissimilar to may Scientology survivors: As a curious young college student she was sucked in with the organization's sales pitch, not realizing what was happening as she was fleeced of her money and freedom until she found herself working feverishly for pennies hard-selling the organization's products. One of the lowest points actually comes very early on in the book as she is assigned the dreaded RPF, or Rehabilitation Task Force, a kind of hard-labor prison program where she has to sleep in a hastily constructed shed in a parking garage and is only allowed to eat leftovers. This occurs while she is five months pregnant.
Not surprisingly, she decides to get out, or "blow", and escapes not only the RPF but Scientology completely. Imagine my surprise to note that all of this occurs about a third of the way through the book. So what's the rest, you ask? Kind of a confused mess, I hate to say. Nancy escapes actually having to live in the Scientology centers, but she stays affiliated with Scientology, even doing undercover spy work for the OSA (Office of Special Affairs, basically the dirty tricks division). The first third of the book is tightly written and easy to understand, but the last two thirds is kind of a mess; I went from thinking she'd just escaped Scientology entirely to her working as a sales rep and spying for the OSA. Eventually during a "Security check", what sounds like basically going into a small room and having someone yell at you for hours on end, she has a complete mental break. This is harrowingly written and genuinely scary. After this she kind of just rambles for a while until the book ends.
This isn't a bad book, but I feel like the author got more from writing it than you may from reading it, if you get my drift. I don't know if it was really that disjoined and muddled or if it seemed that way because I was reading it on my ipod. Either way, I don't feel like reading the book was a waste of time, but unless you're really interested in the genre you may want to take a pass on this one.
Grade: C
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 2 (occasional phrases without explanation; Vast majority of terms explained when they first appear)
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