Author Description

<p>Inspired by visionaries such as Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, San Francisco-based writer Dodie Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. In the present volume, her TV Sutras and their commentaries are but the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities,or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. It's a commingling of memoir, fiction, collage, and essay that makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.</p>