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    In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult
    In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult
    In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult
    Audiobook9 hours

    In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult

    Written by Rebecca Stott

    Narrated by Rebecca Stott

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A father-daughter story that tells of the author’s experience growing up in a separatist fundamentalist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk

    Rebecca Stott grew up in in Brighton, England, as a fourth-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren, a cult that believed the world is ruled by Satan. In this closed community, books that didn’t conform to the sect’s rules were banned, women were subservient to men and were made to dress modestly and cover their heads, and those who disobeyed the rules were punished and shamed. Yet Rebecca’s father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking Brethren minister, was a man of contradictions: he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and hid copies of Yeats and Shakespeare behind the Brethren ministries. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult’s leader, Roger became an actor, filmmaker, and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail.
     
    A curious child, Rebecca spent her insular childhood asking questions about the world and trying to glean the answers from forbidden library books. Only when she was an adult and her father was dying of cancer did she begin to understand all that had occurred during those harrowing years. It was then that Roger Stott handed her the memoir he had begun writing about the period leading up to what he referred to as the traumatic “Nazi decade,” the years in the 1960s in which he and other Brethren leaders enforced coercive codes of behavior that led to the breaking apart of families, the shunning of members, even suicides. Now he was trying to examine that time, and his complicity in it, and he asked Rebecca to write about it, to expose all that was kept hidden.
     
    In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott’s attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father’s role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family and the power of self-invention.

    Praise for In the Days of Rain

    “A marvelous, strange, terrifying book, somehow finding words both for the intensity of a childhood locked in a tyrannical secret world, and for the lifelong aftershocks of being liberated from it.”—Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill

    “Writers are forged in strange fires, but none stranger than Rebecca Stott’s. By rights, her memoir of her father and her early childhood inside a closed fundamentalist sect obsessed by the Rapture ought to be a horror story. But while the historian in her is merciless in exposing the cruelties and corruption involved, Rebecca the child also lights up the book, existing in a world of vivid play, dreams, even nightmares, so passionate and imaginative that it helps explain how she survived, and—even more miraculous—found the compassion and understanding to do justice to the story of her father and the painful family life he created.”—Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9781524775360
    Author

    Rebecca Stott

    Rebecca Stott is a novelist, broadcaster, historian and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is Professor Emeritus at UEA. Her books include Darwin’s Ghosts and Darwin and the Barnacle, the novels Ghostwalk (a New York Times bestseller), The Coral Thief, and the Costa Award-winning memoir In the Days of Rain. She lives in Norwich.

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    Reviews for In the Days of Rain

    3.5/5

    48 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Such an interesting view into a cult. A group of people were are not living off in the wilderness on their own, or acting in a manner that would bring attention.

      Instead, they seemed to blend into their surroundings, almost intentionally becoming invisible to English society around them. In their minds, they were "separate." But they shared a common theme with so many cults - power-hungry and unaccountable leaders.

      The isolation, shame, and abuse described in this book are truly heartbreaking.
    • 4/5
      Rebecca Stott wrote this book because she promised her father (Roger) she would complete his memoirs after he died. She did much more than that: she made the book her own story as well.

      Rebecca was born into a cult, the Exclusive Brethren. So was her father, who became a high-level official in the cult. There were strict rules about dress, and isolating from worldly things like television, radio and non-cult members. Women were not allowed to speak during services (called Meetings) and were expected to cover their heads and not cut their hair.

      Rebecca's family left the Brethren when she was around10 years old. What I found particularly interesting was something other memoirs I've read didn't speak to -- the way a child, who'd been told one thing for her whole life was now expected to believe differently. Watching TV and listening to music was more of a scary undertaking than an entertaining one at first.

      Roger knew he was dying and wanted to write his memoirs, but found himself unable to write about his years as a Brethren priest when he forced members to confess to impure deeds or thoughts and enforced isolation from family and friends until the person was "cleansed".

      The book provides a look at living in a cult, leaving one, and an honest look at the father-daughter relationship, both the good and the more challenging aspects.
    • 3/5
      Rebecca Stott’s father had been wanting to write a memoir about his family life. For generations, his family had been members of a Christian sect that had steadily got more fundamentalist. He could only brush the surface of the past though as every time he ventured deeper into his memories the mental anguish meant that he could not carry on. When he was dying, he tried to persuade her to help him.

      Rebecca had grown up in this Brethren sect too, with its draconian rules about what the members could and mostly couldn’t do, she was constrained in almost every activity that a normal child would have taken part in. They attended school but were not allowed to participate in any activities other than the learning. It was cruel too, with long term members being ‘denounced’ for the most arbitrary of reasons. The sect imploded to a certain extent after a sex scandal involving the American leader of the sect, JT Junior.

      Her family dropped out too after this event, but because the cult had been so suffocating the family so much, they all struggled to re-connect with the normal world. The messages and culture that the cult had delivered had permeated her entire being. They began to rebuild their lives in their own way, she rebelled a little, had a child, dabbled in drugs and even managed to go to university, shoplifted and was afraid of the dark, but couldn’t even begin to tell people why this was.

      The book is divided into rough thirds, “Before,” “During” and “Aftermath”, which were the piles of files and effects that she sorted through of her fathers at the time. It is pretty horrific reading at times, in particular about the levels of control that were exercised over the members, and the utter trust they had in the leaders of the cult. Just decompressing from the grip of the cult took a staggering amount of effort for them all. It is a deeply personal book, thankfully Stott writes with integrity and doesn’t try to blame anyone for her earlier life. Well worth reading for those that want a very different biography and to get some insight as to when does faith become a cult?
    • 5/5
      Mesmerising
    • 3/5
      Rebecca Stott was born into a cult. So was her father. He was a high ranking official in the church called the Exclusive Brethren. An End of Times cult, they felt they had to purify themselves so they would be bodily taken up when the Rapture occurred. The rules became more restrictive through the years; not only did they restrict all information sources to the Bible and their own publications, but they limited contact with outsiders to almost nothing. Women were to be seen and not heard. Then they started attacking their own members, trying to force confessions of sin from them; they removed the victim’s family members from the house and isolated them. Some committed suicide. Businesses and jobs were lost.

      Growing up in this cult, Stott lived a life of fear, which seems to have been common among members. Fear that she could not live up to the strict standards of the cult- which of course she equated with the strict standards of God. But when things got too bad (the church leader, J.T. Junior, who was instituting all these rules, emerged as an alcoholic and blatant womanizer, going so far as to be fondling women’s breasts in front of others), her father broke with the church. He was the last member to have been allowed to go to college and had read ‘worldly’ books. Sadly, his education did not save him from folly; he became a chronic gambler and womanizer and left his wife trying to provide for the family.

      The idea for the book began when her father, Roger, found out he was dying. He wanted help in finishing his autobiography, which he had started years before. Rebecca set out to record their talking sessions, and found that while he could talk about his early life, her father could not get past the years when he, as part of the Brethren, had led interrogations of members. Something in his mind could never get past what he had done, no matter how he tried to reconcile the person who had done that with the person who had sought to do the right thing.

      One part of the book tells us about the Brethren movement itself; another about her family’s part in it. Then there is her father’s life; and then her own, as she sought to outgrow the philosophy she’d grown up with. While a lot of the writing is very good, it is in places disjointed, switching between her father’s life and hers. I found myself confused in places. I also found myself getting bored with the details of the Brethren’s history. While I feel this book is important to understanding how cults work and how people become coerced and dependent in them, I feel it could have used a lot more editing. 3.5 stars out of five.
    • 4/5
      I received a copy of this memoir from the publisher via NetGalley. I requested it after reading a review in the Guardian and am glad I did so.

      The author tells the story of her childhood growing up in the Exclusive Brethren church, where her father (and her grandfather) was a preacher and a priest. As a result of the increasingly extreme teachings of the leader of the worldwide Exclusive Brethren during the 1960s, the denomination became more or less a cult. Then, after scandalous sexual behaviour and alcoholism on the part of the leader, the church imploded and Rebecca's father took them out of the Brethren church altogether.

      The memoir is written after the death of Rebecca's father. He has been unable to finish his planned memoir and Rebecca has felt obliged to take over the task. For the most part I found this an interesting read, and at times it was fascinating. The author manages to portray her father with affection, but without glossing over his (sometimes appalling) behaviour.

      I learnt a lot about Brethren theology and the position of women in the church. It is astonishing to me that, even when more or less everything was forbidden, alcohol was still allowed. The author was very good at describing how confused and adrift she felt after the adults in her life turned away from what she had been told was absolute truth.

      On the other hand, I was frustrated by the limits of what the memoir revealed. I really wanted to hear Rebecca's mother's side of the story and how what happened affected her siblings. What was the stepmother's story? What had her father truly believed? Had he never believed? If so, what about the "Mere Christianity" conversion experience? If he had once believed, was it merely in the specific teachings of the leader? Why did he never join another church, as Rebecca's mother did?

      The section dealing with the downfall of the church leader was told partly in a transcript of a portion of a mad drunken speech and partly by witness statements. Although I had no sympathy for him or his behaviour, including the transcript seemed underhand in some way - it made me feel uneasy. The witness accounts about Mrs Ker, on the other hand were so sterile as to be unenlightening. What were the witnesses thinking? What was their plan?

      My ARC has several typos etc, which I hope will be picked up.