I first encountered the writer Molly Aitken on her Instagram. I enjoyed her musings along with her playful and practical advice to writers. I soon read her historical novel Bright I Burn, a fictionalization of the first person in Ireland condemned as a witch. Taking place in the 13th century, it’s an examination of a woman’s life and her mounting of power and identity. The book is festooned with personal relationship navigation, hedonistic joy, and the difficulty of building your own life. You also feel a pressure in the book, as the main character moves throughout her years. You feel the coils and rain clouds of gossip and culture cajoling in the atmosphere.
After having Molly on a local Wisconsin radio show as a producer, I opened a New Yorker on a cold winter night and, to my surprise, there was a short story from Molly: “This is How it Happens” follows a twenty-six-year-old Scottish man in the early 1980s who joins the religious movement, Rajneesh (now called Osho, governed by the Osho International Foundation, and perhaps best known most to Americans in Netflix’s 2018 documentary Wild Wild Country).
Months later, after I decided to make my own literature-focused podcast, I knew I wanted invite Molly to talk about that short story. I wanted to talk about what it means to fall into a cult. And perhaps cult is the wrong word because Molly doesn’t make the Rajneesh the focal point; she doesn’t use the word cult in the story, even if by all measures, most people would call it a cult—a cult with not-good occurrences and a well-tracked history of missteps.
Even with missteps, the Rajneesh had its gravity. People joined it for a reason. So we follow Malcom; the young Scottish man who finds something he needs in this group and calls it “magic.” He feels transformed and bigger, taking “up more space.” He feels alive and loved, like never before. He has sex like never before.
To me, the story is about the conditions of vulnerability that lead to joining a group, even if that group has misgivings or is strange—even if that group takes you far and away from home. I think this story speaks to our desire for change and how a group, a radical way of living, can offer that change, no matter how misguided. It can offer a rocket ship to a new life. After living in a lonely apartment with a hungry cat, stuck in a life where “nothing much has happened,” and having kissed too few people, with skin peeling eczema, grieving a mother gone too soon, I can’t blame Malcom for wanting a change.
There’s a powerful moment that’s in the short story where Malcom and his father touch hands. That image of their palms touching; the warmth between them — the act of reaching out—stuck with me. I find touch as a kind of theme in Molly’s work. In “This is How it Happens,” that theme of touch comes out in heartache and understanding ways. Touch, literal, and metaphorically in attention and love can coax folks into new worlds, for better or worse. Touch, in both ways, especially between two non-romantic relationships between men, showing affection for one another, can create possibilities of connection, feeling less alone.
I was curious what the Rajneesh in Molly’s story could teach us about cults, or groups, movements, and the culture at large, today. I think of obsessions with the manosphere, maxxing on social media, political polarization, the thought leadership push for A.I. productivity. I think there are lots of ways our culture pushes us to join groups—and like Malcom, I can’t blame people for going to places that may change their life, even if, to an outsider, it might seem unsafe and unwise.
We get into those themes of writing about touch, love, romance, and sex in this episode of Book Stuff. Check out our conversation on Apple and Spotify.
