CHILD X

Mustard chronicles his childhood within one of America’s most notoriously secretive religious movements in this memoir.

“I’ve always seen myself as an escape artist,” writes the author, who here tells his “impossible” story of overcoming childhood poverty and religious abuse to graduate from the London School of Economics, one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. (“I had been gored, yet I was handed my degree.”) Born in 1970s Los Angeles, Mustard was raised in a nursery maintained by the Church of Scientology that he refers to as “The Baby Factory.” Children, he recounts, would sit in rusted, industrial cribs for hours in a building with peeling paint, cracked linoleum, dust, and grime, cared for by inattentive nannies. “I was one of so many,” he laments, “raised in a movement that saw us as property to be kept for their purposes.” He would later live in a dormitory located on Melrose that was reserved for the children of Scientology’s most devout adherents, which he describes as the “belly of the beast.” The author joins a bevy of former Scientologists who characterize the religion (based on the beliefs of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard) as a dangerous cult—what makes this book stand out is his relentless determination to escape. An acclaimed artist and the author of multiple books on childhood trauma, Mustard is at his best here when weaving his own story into the cultural milieu of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. His evocative writing poignantly connects his own struggles with religious “slavery” as a mixed-race child to that of his Black ancestors, whose successes are juxtaposed with their own struggles against discrimination. In many ways, this is not just the story of the author’s personal resilience, but a broader commentary on the complexities of America’s racial history. With a text complemented by full-page photos, this is an intimate yet universally resonant account of surviving childhood trauma.

A powerful memoir that takes readers down the darkest corridors of Scientology.