nevanna | Tuesday Top Five: True Tales

flo_nelja asked about my top five nonfiction books. I admit that I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction, and most of my recent favorites in the latter category are either a) analyses of literature or pop culture, or b) memoirs by survivors of cults or cult-like environments. Here are some examples from the past few years.

1. Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss (2018)

I’m grateful for a text that recognizes mass-market series as having equal cultural importance to Newbery Medal winners, while also acknowledging some of the long-standing biases inherent to writing and publishing for young people. The book is beautifully laid out and packaged, too.

2. Slonim Woods 9 by Daniel Barban Levin (2021)

Levin’s recollection of how a friend’s father manipulated his reality, and that of several other college students, is bizarre and horrifying, but allows the reader to understand how a charismatic authority figure can build a cult that is just as dangerous as a group with the scope and resources of a Peoples Temple or a Scientology. (I can’t remember whether or not I first heard this story from one of the bloggers who covered Andy Blake’s activities, but there are some similarities between the two.)

3. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Impostor Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (2022)

To jump from true accounts to accounts of the questionably true…

Go Ask Alice, first published in 1971 and marketed as the writing of a real teenager who lost her life to drugs, was the first in a long line of sensationalist “diaries” of at-risk youth. By 2022, it was no secret that Beatrice Sparks, who supposedly discovered and edited these diaries, actually fabricated them all, either partially or entirely. Emerson’s book, which examines the culture that allowed titles like Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal to gain popularity and influence, combines several of my interests: hoaxes, moral panics, and trends in young adult literature. It’s a remarkably engaging read, if an occasionally upsetting one. (Although most of the events in Jay's Journal were very likely Sparks' own creation, the central figure actually is based on a real teenager who took his own life, and while I think that Emerson's descriptions of that tragedy and its aftermath are tasteful, they are also intimate and emotionally harrowing.)

4. Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Lynn Paulson (2023)

Multilevel marketing schemes fascinate me for a lot of the same reasons that cults do. Paulson’s reflection on her ascendancy through the ranks of Rejuvinat (the name that she invented for the real MLM company that employed her) exposes the predatory nature of an industry whose promises of success, self-fulfilment, and belonging seem too good to be true because they actually are.

5. Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris (2023)

“Ebony and Ivory” (which unpacks the “Black Friend” archetype in media) and “This Is The IP That Never Ends” (which is about Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, remakes, and reboots) are my favorite essays in this collection, but all of them are funny and insightful.

Honorable Mention: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000)

I haven’t revisited this writing guide in years, and I don’t know if I’d recommend it now, but it meant a lot to me as a teenage writer who couldn’t get enough of King’s fiction. I liked seeing one of my favorite authors (at the time) break down his process, and the line “What writing is… telepathy, of course” tickled me so much that I used it as a summer camp yearbook quote.