A CULT OF ONE

Grannon offers a highly autobiographical look at abusive relationships and how to escape from them safely.

In this dense, daring book, the author declares that most people in today’s society have “no moral sense of how we should act, what to embrace, and what to reject.” He likens people to amoebas whose cell walls have been ruptured, so that “instead of only absorbing nutrients and letting out waste, we start letting out nutrients and letting in waste.” But he doesn’t merely blame society in this book; Grannon also interrogates his own past, which forms the bulk of the narrative. Specifically, he looks at his early childhood living outside Liverpool, England, and his youth growing up in Portugal, reading great piles of science fiction and fantasy and working hard to become proficient in martial arts. He also tells of experiencing sexual abuse during his childhood, which would cast a long shadow over the rest of his life. The author examines more general patterns of abuse throughout this book, addressing the ways in which one may internalize abuse to such a degree that it leads to a state of self-destruction. Along the way, he reveals himself as a passionate, ruthlessly honest assessor of what he sees as his own weaknesses; this sometimes leads him to dark pronouncements, such as that “there is no such thing as a neutral state of codependency” but rather just a spectrum of “toxicity and manipulation.” This work’s stark assertions will be bracing for many readers, especially those accustomed to the lighter tones of abuse-recovery narratives. “The past is gone,” Grannon writes, “beating up a bully in a bar today because you were abused many years ago has no therapeutic benefit whatsoever. I know. I’ve run the experiment many, many times.” Overall, readers will marvel at the author’s bare-knuckled honesty.

A deft and powerful account of surviving and overcoming personal trauma.