PSYCHEDELIC WILD CHILD

Hurwitz tells of her years as a member of the Source Family commune in the 1970s.

The author grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. She writes that her parents allowed her plenty of space (“Mother let me run. She knew I’d come home”), and she started experimenting with drugs in her early teens. By 1972, she writes, she was 16 and “not interested in doing anything other than getting high, going to concerts, and having sex with handsome, older longhairs. And it all left me feeling empty.” She traveled to the inaugural Rainbow Gathering in Colorado, and later to Los Angeles, where she worked at a vegetarian restaurant operated by the Source Family commune. Its leader, Jim Baker—known as Father Yod, and later Yahowha—renamed her Bonadea (and later Galaxy), but when police discovered that she was underage, they returned her to Chicago. Hurwitz writes that her mother was impressed with the commune, which is often characterized as a cult, and sent her back. At 17, she became one of Father Yod’s wives. The commune, she says, was what she’d been searching for; there, she discovered her talent for clothing design. She moved with the group to Hawaii in 1974, but she left after Father Yod died in 1975. She did sex work to support herself and another former Source Family member until she left him and returned to Chicago in 1979. Hurwitz ably portrays herself as a “wild child,” and she writes about her wandering younger years convincingly. She reveals intriguing details about her Source Family life but downplays any harm that the experience may have caused her; for example, she writes about Father Yod putting her and others on weight-loss diets and notes the resulting self-esteem issues, but she doesn’t note how they affected her later life. Hurwitz argues that the Source Family was a “good cult,” demonstrating how to live without antiquated ideas such as personal possessions and monogamy; she reprints its commandments, but she doesn’t comment on its first rule: to do whatever Father Yod commanded.

Engaging and sometimes-frightening observations of life in a controversial commune.