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

Synopsis

A father-daughter story that tells of the author’s experience growing up in a fundamentalist, separatist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk Rebecca Stott both adored and feared her father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking minister in the Brighton, England, branch of the Exclusive Brethren, a separatist fundamentalist Christian sect. A man of contradictions, he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, which was ruled by Satan, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and read Shakespeare and Yeats. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult’s leader, Roger became an actor 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 happened 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 called 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.Advance praise for In the Days of Rain “In this compelling memoir, Stott peers deeply into her family history in order to uncover the reasons her family, particularly her father, were immersed in the Exclusive Brethren, a branch of the Christian evangelical movement Plymouth Brethren that shuns books and mainstream culture.”—Publishers Weekly“Stott’s look into her father’s misguidedness offers readers a simultaneous warning and empathic embrace.”—Booklist“A compelling story of childhood deprivation, liberation, and, ultimately, hope.”—Kirkus Reviews “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

Copyright:

2017

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780812989090

Related ISBNs:

9780812989083

Publisher:

Random House Publishing Group

Date of Addition:

06/04/20

Copyrighted By:

Rebecca Stott

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Religion and Spirituality

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.