UC Riverside

An Un-American Childhood is my memoir about growing up unconventionally in a religious sex cult with my parents and eleven siblings until I was a teenager. We lived in Thailand because Father David, our leader, didn't want us in the west when the world ended in 1993. When Father David died suddenly, the cult broke apart, and we found ourselves alone in the world with no money, food, very little clothing, and no direction.

An Un-American Childhood takes the reader on a journey from the Children of God's beginnings on the shores of Huntington Beach in 1968 through my childhood in Thailand to my family's integration into American society beginning in 1996. An Un-American Childhood invites the reader to join Father's David's followers through a gripping first person narrative--the mind of a child--who, once controlled by a charismatic pedophile cult leader, slowly gained the freedom to think on her own.