Book: Going Clear

This may be the creepiest book I have ever read. It is also totally riveting and one of the best books I have read this year.

It covers L. Rob Hubbard's life, how he created Scientology, various scandals related to the church, the rise of current church head David Miscavage, and the relationships of various celebrities with Scientology. Lawrence Wright covers all the angles thoroughly. He conducted interviews with over 200 current and former Scientologists as part of his research, and he focuses heavily on the story of Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis' experience in the church. Haggis joined the church as a young man in the 70s and was a devoted member for 35 years before leaving in 2009. Lawrence Wright wrote an article for the New Yorker about Haggis' experience, in which Haggis called the church "a cult," and that article inspired Wright to write a book on the subject.

I saw The Master last year, which was rumored to be kinda/sorta based on L. Ron Hubbard's life, but not officially about Scientology. Now the movie makes a lot more sense because 1. a lot of the stuff in the film very closely mirrors L. Ron Hubbard's life and early events in Scientology history, and 2. I can see why the backers denied it being a film about Scientology, because church members love to harass anyone they deem threatening. I'm sure the principles involved still got their fair share of grief, even though they tried to distance themselves from any connection between the film and Scientology.

Large swaths of the tale told in this book are hard to believe. The extent to which Hubbard could manipulate others defies logic. There are a lot of heartbreaking stories about people who gave up their relationships with their loved ones in exchange, only to be later abused by the church. Hubbard himself alienated many of his close family members.

My dad once (jokingly) told me that "all you have to do to be a teacher is stay just one lesson ahead of your students." L. Ron Hubbard took that farce to the extreme. He had a gift for making up stories on the fly and writing quickly. He spun that into a career for himself and, ultimately, one of the greatest scams in history.

This book is a must read. Not just for the story it tells, but also for Lawrence Wright's journalistic prowess. I've added his earlier book The Looming Tower to my reading list.

Books: Beautiful Boy

I've read a string of really great books in the past few weeks. I finished this one most recently and it was the one that made the most impact on me, because my brother has a history of drug abuse and has been using for most of my life. Until now I have never gone out of my way to try and understand what it all means.

I originally ran across David Sheff's new book Clean while perusing an airport bookstore and put it on my reading list. But in doing some more research, I found that Clean was a follow-up to Sheff's earlier book Beautiful Boy, and I vaguely remembered reading some positive reviews of that book when it came out. I decided to start from the beginning of the story and picked up Beautiful Boy from the library.

I read it over the course of a few days and it got so intense in some parts that I had to stop and take breaks because the story made my eyes well up with tears. It resurrected some memories from my childhood I had not thought about in a long time, but remember vividly. There's a reason I haven't thought about in a while. They are some of the most painful memories I have. It also helped me make sense of a lot of the emotions I remember feeling back then, the helplessness, the hurt, the confusion over why my brother did things that made no sense at all when he seemed like a naturally smart kid.

It's just now hitting me that I really don't know my brother at all and I never have. Maybe I have known this for a while but couldn't verbalize it until now. He started using drugs when I was so young that I have only a few fuzzy memories of him before the drugs. All I know about his early years is borrowed from what my parents have told me. It's like in Blade Runner where the replicant Rachel insists she's a human because she has memories of her childhood and Deckard tells her they are implanted memories, taken from someone else. I'm just now realizing I never refer to my mom and dad as our parents and I don't think of them that way. They're my parents, they have always been there, while he has been in and out and had kind of a phantom presence.

And now I fully understand how much people change when they start using drugs. This is one of the hardest parts of drug addiction for families to cope with. The child they know vanishes and is replaced with a person who lies and steals. My brother became that when I was so young that I've never known what he is really like. We watched an old home video at a relative's house recently, and my cousins and I looked and acted like younger versions of ourselves. Seeing my brother felt like seeing a ghost, and impression of a person.

The timing of my finding this book feels like fate, if you believe in that sort of thing. I'd been wanting to spend time with my parents this summer and talk about certain things; for whatever reason, I feel ready right now to process big stuff like this. They did their best to shield me from what went on with my brother, but 20 years of near-constant worry and stress inevitably took its toll on them and me.

I got into the habit of not talking about my brother a long time ago because it seemed like opening up to people caused them to say things like "well why don't you just send him to rehab?" "Why don't you do [x]?" They made it sound like there was an easy solution to the problem and my family just wasn't trying hard enough. I used to wonder, why doesn't anything work? Why isn't he fixed yet? We did everything we could do. You just can't save a drug addict with love. There are tons of people out there just like us.

Why did I never take the time to learn about my brother's condition until now?? Maybe I just didn't want to think about it, it was too painful. My parents wanted me to be OK and I focused on making it to adulthood and creating a stable environment for myself. Now I'm ready to think about it all.