Michelle Dowd has written a mesmeric memoir about growing up in an ultra-religious family-run organization founded by her magnetic maternal grandfather. To say that Forager Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult is a coming-of-age story is an understatement. Michelle’s book tells a simple but in-depth story of how three generations of women in her family learned to live according to foundational religious beliefs and how those fundamental beliefs controlled and affected every aspect of their lives. In Forager, readers experience the author’s story, which is in affect her mother’s story, which in turn is her grandmother’s story. Michelle’s narrative voice is free of anger, resentment, and blame and she does not portray herself as a victim. She tells us the truth about what her life experiences, beginning at age seven, with a clarity that is devoid of overwrought emotion. This must have been a very painful story for the author to tell, but as she says, “what we bury grows.” The title of the book clued me in on adventure and exploration. Or so I thought. I cracked the book opened and read the loving dedication to her mother, the author’s note, and then I read the first page of the introduction. I had to put the book down. Michelle, as an innocent child, had the weight of the sinful world rolled upon her small shoulders. Imagine the subjective pressure she must have felt as a messenger who “inherited the divine right it to lead” the young and the old to God. But to fulfill that overarching duty, she first had to learn how to forage.
I pick the book up, I open it and read, and learn how women learn to survive on the substructure of another’s vision; We learn to sacrifice. Everything. As I continue, the author’s words became my words. Her voice became my voice and the voice of hundreds of millions of girls know what it feels like to be unprotected and left alone to figure out an external male-dominate world through the internal lens of gender and what it means to be a girl, especially when a man has you in his sights. This memoir is an example of how females push back against a world that holds us in patterns, never really allowing us to find a safe place to land, but we forage until we find that safety within ourselves. I recommend that every fan of memoirs buy three copies of Forager Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult. Give one copy to a friend. Use one copy to beat against the kitchen counter and keep one copy to hold close to your heart. The author writes, “there is hope in revealing the truth.” And we all know that the truth is what sets us free.
Cathy M
Kelevilin Kimathi
Gerald Weaver