IN THE SHADOW OF ENLIGHTENMENT

A young girl and her mother are swept up by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s movement in this coming-of-age memoir.

From the beginning, Carroll’s life was unusual: Her parents were a New York City beatnik father who suffered from addiction and couldn’t keep a job and an artist mother who rejected her more conservative Jewish upbringing. Eventually, the author’s father’s instability led her and her mother to leave New York, and the memoir follows their lives on the road, settling in New Mexico and then Hawaii as they tried to find a lasting community with like-minded, free-spirited people. The young Carroll and her mother didn’t have much, just the clothes on their backs and, occasionally, a vehicle; they salvaged furniture from the dump and, in Hawaii, picked guavas to pay rent. Everything changed when the author’s mother grew interested in the teachings of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—she started wearing orange and making plans to go to India. In the summer after Carroll’s third grade year, the two embarked for India, where they joined the community in Rajneesh’s ashram. The mother became more absorbed in Rajneesh’s teachings, and they moved again from India to Antelope, Oregon, home of the infamous Rajneeshpuram, subject of the documentary series Wild Wild Country. The book chronicles Carroll’s unorthodox upbringing in the cult and the related sexual predation she experienced as a child. Her story includes some of the sensational events that anyone who’s familiar with the docuseries will remember—there’s the bombing and the guns and the “fleet of ninety-six Rolls-Royces”—but at its core, this memoir is a record of the experiences of a young girl whose memories are textured by horribly abusive structures: most of the underage girls in Rajneeshpuram lost their virginity to adult men. Told in plain, unvarnished prose, Carroll’s memoir adds a harrowing chapter to the story of the Osho movement—this book will be appreciated by fans of Jeannette Walls and Tara Westover, or by anyone interested in extreme religious movements.

A searing look at a rootless childhood growing up in Rajneeshpuram.