So, I don’t want this book to be only the story of my family.

I’m writing what I know. The structure, the backbone, will be a mostly chronological narrative of my life as a Jehovah’s Witness, and how we left the organisation. But my dream is that if another ex-JW were to open any page, they could read a scene and be able to point at the paper and say, “yes! I recognise that! I know those weird ways! That happened to me!” Then they’d run around excitedly, showing that scene to anyone in their life who isn’t an ex-JW and saying “look at this bullshit. This. This is the weird shit.”

To that end, I need to interview some ex-JWs. I’d like to know what was common to many, and what were specific to my family. Today, I did my first interview with a guy called Dave (whose excellent blog is here: https://davetrash.wordpress.com/) He grew up as a JW, and left in his twenties. He has some great material on his blog, and in 2012 he shared a scan of a letter (here: https://davetrash.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/the-letter/) which his mother sent him in order to excommunicate him. It’s shocking, emotional, and strange stuff.

Some topics covered today:

– How the weird language used in the disassociating letter isn’t what a normal human would write, but it is very familiar to us. Their language is like doublespeak. Manipulative, cloying, projecting nonsense. They call themselves The Truth, and everyone else is The World. They are separate from The World; separate, and better.

– How much JWs encourage their members to not think. Don’t think, just don’t think, don’t question, nope, don’t do it. Their whole aura is to project themselves as biblical scholars, but all of their materials are as unscholarly as possible: purposefully misquoting someone, selectively ignoring sources, taking things out of context, completely making things up.

– How similar our ideas of Armageddon were. We both imagined something similar: the sky cracking open into blood red, writhing serpents riding amongst the doomed souls of The World, sinners being trampled into dirt by the hooves of dread horses, and all the world aflame except for the lucky few of The Truth.

I’ll be doing more interviews of ex-JWs to try to build a cohesive picture of what it was like to be in this cult, for more than only my family. Thanks very much to Dave for being the first.