Sands Hall - Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology: A Memoir

Praise for Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology

Named a Best Book in Religion and Spirituality by Publishers Weekly

Long-listed for NCIBAs Golden Poppy Book Award in Nonfiction

A finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction

Hall reflects with brutal honesty on her decisions throughout this meticulously crafted book, which explores her negative experiences with Scientology and how her desire to please led her to believe in the unbelievable.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An early candidate for memoir of the year, this is a thrilling story of one womans search for truth and her place in the world.

Library Journal (starred review)

An intriguing, beautifully written memoir... She toggles between her family and the church, digging deeply into the dynamics of power and control, love and compassion, before coming to a surprising resolution.

JANE CIABATTARI, Literary Hub

Serves as a significant behind-the-scenes look at this cultlike religion. Frank and edifying... A good complement to Lawrence Wrights Going Clear.

Kirkus Reviews

[Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology] is unique in its luminous and keen exploration of how a cult gains an unlikely member and what it takes to find ones way out again. The most revealing aspect of [the book] might be the authors relationship with her own vernacular. Hall is a true wordsmith, a verbal lapidarist for whom language is a laboratory, a factory, and an audit process in its own right. The result is a piercing emotional honesty and adamant clarity, giving readers more than simply a memoir or a look into a corner of American culture thats usually concealed from the uninitiated. This book, generous and penetrating, is a rather profound act of psychological inquiry.

Northern California Book Awards

Hall is honest about the insidious ways [Scientology] can capture and isolate its adherents. Its a memoir of a life filled with joy and tragedy, and readers will appreciate the authors candor.

Booklist

This transcendent memoir describes, with precise and utterly absorbing detail, her experience in the world of Scientology. But this is also a story that explores so many issueshow language is used to both illuminate and obscure, how we long for connection and meaning; its also a vivid portrait of how we find a place in our family and find a path through chaos. I could not put down this bookit is a triumph, a work of great honesty and insight. It is a necessary book for our time.

KAREN E. BENDER, author of Refund

It is a great strength of Sands Halls clear-eyed and compelling memoir that she shows what she found authentic and rewarding in the Church of Scientology, not merely its corruption and imprisoning dogma.

JOHN DANIEL, author of Gifted and Rogue River Journal

By turns endearing and alarming, this story describes the hazards involved in having to choose between a strong, loving family and a demanding, seductive churchbetween one sort of belonging and another.

LYNN FREED, author of The Romance of Elsewhere and The Last Laugh

In this unflinching and nuanced self-portrait, Sands Hall examines a decade of entanglement with the cult of Scientology and her circuitous process of liberation. Interweaving the backstory of a tragic accident that left a hole in her legendary family, Hall takes readers on a profound journey of loss, longing, and recovery.

ELIZABETH ROSNER, author of Survivor Caf

A raw and moving account of her personal journey through the Church of Scientology. Sands shares her uniquely Californian coming-of-age tale with grace and courage.

JULIA FLYNN SILER, author of The House of Mondavi and Lost Kingdom

How Scientology used [Halls] youthful fears to rope her into one of the greatest mind-control hustles of all time is a cautionary tale not only for our religious life, but especially now, for our political one.

JORDAN FISHER SMITH, author of Engineering Eden and Nature Noir

RECLAIMING MY DECADE LOST IN SCIENTOLOGY

Copyright 2018 by Sands Hall

First hardcover edition: 2018

First paperback edition: 2019

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Excerpts from Nohow On, copyright 1983 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic. Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Excerpts from Waiting for Godot, copyright 1954 by Grove Press, Inc; copyright renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

Names: Hall, Sands, author.

Title: Flunk, start : reclaiming my decade lost in scientology : a memoir / Sands Hall.

Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038728 | ISBN 9781619021785

Subjects: LCSH: Hall, Sands. | Exchurch membersUnited StatesBiography. | ScientologistsUnited StatesBiography. | Scientology.

Classification: LCC BP605.S2 H345 2018 | DDC 299/.936092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038728

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-193-1

Cover design by Sarah Brody

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a memoir. The events, locales, and people described are as the author remembers them. In order to maintain anonymity and preserve privacy, she has changed the names and identifying characteristics of certain locales and individuals.

For Tom

who lived so much of it with me

Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.

isaac newton , A Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture

... later he believed he had learned the truth of Pauls words where he said that Gods Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was, but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference.

harlan , in Unassigned Territory by Kem Nunn

contents

foreword

knowledge report

F or a decade, I pretended that a decade of my life hadnt happened. Those lost years included the seven I was involved with the Church of Scientology and the three it took to be certain I wouldnt, again, return. Eventually, I began to peer and prod and then write about those years, and just as Id completed a shaggy draft of this memoir, I found out that Jamie, the man whod introduced me to the Church, had died. A memorial was planned for him in Los Angeles, a city Id fled decades before and since visited just onceand then only because a book tour took me there. Because Id been examining what had come of meeting and then marrying Jamie, it seemed imperative to attend his memorial, even though it meant putting myself back in the maw of what Id found first scary, then intriguing and even engrossing, and then, during the awful time of leaving, terrifying.