Just to be clear: comedian Maria Bamford never joined a cult cult. But her decades-long reliance on organizations with "Anonymous" at the ends of their names, and her attraction to "Unitarianism, Marie Kondo, and anything that will get me going in a fresh way," do suggest a susceptibility to the allure of new belief systems. Bamford explains all in her bracingly honest, brazenly funny first book, Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere.
Bamford, who grew up comfortably middle class in Duluth, Minn., loves her family ("I LOVE MY FAMILY"), but she's open to the possibility that her parents contributed to her shaky mental health. As a child, Bamford exhibited OCD behaviors, and her weight issues eventually led her to Overeaters Anonymous--"my first twelve-step group--or, as I like to think of it, my first live-action role-playing game." It occurs to Bamford that her problems may have had something to do with not getting enough attention at home: "It was the '70s! Lord of the Flies parenting! The kids will work it out on their own!"
Bamford may not have honed her comedy chops during the decade that she was tethered to her Suzuki violin, but thanks to her mom-mandated lessons, she recognized her first recital for what it was: "the gateway drug to a lifetime of performance-induced oxytocin." Bamford's taste for performing, which included a "violin/character-based show that may or may not have been comedy," brought her to Los Angeles, where her star's gradual rise corresponded with heightened anxiety, heavy debt, increased dependence on support networks, and finally a trio of psychiatric hospitalizations.
Sure, I'll Join Your Cult is a survivor's tale with at least some of the uplift contractually obligated by the genre. But the book's greatest utility may be Bamford's insider's report on how someone with "the mentals" can get by at work, especially in a field whose demands clash with a need to prioritize sleep and other means of sanity preservation. (One could find Bamford chilling out in her special on-set tent during her downtime while making her Netflix series, Lady Dynamite.) Sure, I'll Join Your Cult is a wry, blunt, service-y, sometimes cranky, and largely exuberant stroll through the modern self-help and support-group scene. If she hadn't written this book, Bamford would have run out and bought it, and she would have loved it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Comedian Maria Bamford offers a wry, blunt, service-y, sometimes cranky, and largely exuberant stroll through the modern self-help and support-group scene.