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WORK TITLE: Mating in Captivitiy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://helenzuman.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Stat
NATIONALITY:
Lives with her husband in Beacon, NY and Black Mountain, NC.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; Attended Hunter College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Helen Zuman’s main passions lie in nature. As an undergraduate, she studied Visual and Environmental Studies. She also spent a period at Hunter College, studying how to craft memoirs.
The events Zuman describes in Mating in Captivity: A Memoir take place just after Zuman ended her undergraduate studies. As suggested by the title, the book is a memoir detailing the time she spent living with and following a cult. At the beginning of the book, Zuman is young and eager to explore her identity, having just earned her undergraduate degree. After obtaining a grant from her alma mater, Zuman heads to a commune known as Zendik for the purpose of conducting a study on its members and culture. However, Zuman quickly finds herself intrigued by Zendik. She soon goes native, pouring her grant money into the cult and becoming its newest member. Zuman views Zendik as the perfect means to explore her sexuality as well as craft a sense of self. However, she soon realizes her spot in Zendik comes with consequences she never wanted or anticipated.
By the time Zuman joins Zendik, the commune has undergone radical changes. Firstly, its original leader, Wulf, is no longer alive. Wulf has been replaced by another leader, Arol, who wants to stamp out any inklings of individuality within the commune’s members. Zuman fails to recognize that the commune she has joined is actually a cult until it is too late. Rather than experiencing life on her own terms and figure out who she is, Zendik now has to deal with Zendik’s rules, act as a salesperson for Zendik’s products, and try to navigate Zendik’s sexual mores. Zuman comes to enjoy the latter, as it allows her to explore her personal fetishes and enjoy copious amounts of sex and romantic hookups. At the same time, she struggles against Zendik’s rules, insisting on remaining her own person rather than submitting to Arol’s ideals. Zuman eventually leaves Zendik for the sake of settling down after having to end all of her relationships within the commune. However, her life outside of the commune is even more dissatisfying, pushing her to return to Zendik some time later. Zuman recounts not just her experiences with Zendik, but also how these events came to shape her into the person she is now. On the Reading Envy blog, Jenny Colvin felt the book is an “interesting, if frustrating, read.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Mating in Captivity “an engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe–and sometimes liberate.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Mating in Captivity: A Memoir.
ONLINE
Helen Zuman website, http://helenzuman.com (August 7, 2018), author profile.
Reading Envy, http://readingenvy.blogspot.com (May 13, 2018), review of Mating in Captivity.
Helen Zuman is a tree-hugging dirt worshipper devoted to turning waste into food, and the stinky guck of experience into fertile, fragrant prose. She holds a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and a Half-FA in memoir from Hunter College. Raised in Brooklyn, she lives with her husband in Beacon, NY and Black Mountain, NC. For more on her memoir, Mating in Captivity, and life at and after Zendik, visit helenzuman.com.
Helen Zuman is a tree-hugging dirt worshipper devoted to turning waste into food and the stinky guck of experience into fertile, fragrant prose. She holds a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and a Half-FA in memoir from Hunter College. Raised in Brooklyn, she lives with her husband in Beacon, NY and Black Mountain, NC.
Zuman, Helen: MATING IN CAPTIVITY
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Zuman, Helen MATING IN CAPTIVITY She Writes Press (Indie Nonfiction) $16.95 5, 8 ISBN: 978-1-63152-337-3
A young woman experiences a sexual awakening--and romantic frustration--in a kooky cult in this debut coming-of-age memoir.
After her graduation from Harvard in 1999, Zuman's search for herself took her to the Zendik Farm commune in North Carolina. Founded in the 1960s on countercultural blather, Zendik preached back-to-the-land living, contempt for the "Deathculture" of competitive capitalism, and psycho-motivational aphorisms--"Dare to demand the impossible and it becomes possible"--from deceased guru Wulf Zendik's The Affirmative Life. In Zuman's telling, Zendik's reality is strange and crass. Members supported the commune by hawking its magazine, music CDs, and bumper stickers--"Stop Bitching Start a Revolution"--on the streets, which made maniacal salesmanship a Zendik must. Meanwhile, sex on the farm was rigidly bureaucratized. Members proposed "walks" (dates) or "dates" (sex appointments) with other Zendiks by lodging requests with administrators, who acted as go-betweens in scheduling assignations; women were denied dates if group gynecological exams indicated they were in a fertile phase. (The guru, who had bedded most female Zendiks, disliked condoms.) Zuman, a shy but yearning virgin, appreciated this protocol because it obviated her awkwardness at courtship; soon she had an active sex life and got to act out her rape fantasy (in a graphic description, it's a painful, bloody fiasco ending in herpes). Unfortunately, Zendik thought monogamy undermined the group, and Zuman was repeatedly pressured into wrenching breakups with long-term boyfriends; but when she left the farm to hitchhike to Idaho and find permanent love, predatory men sent her running back. Zuman's vivid portrait renders Zendik as a pressure cooker of jealousy and exploitation under the manipulative leadership of Arol, Wulf's consort. Zendiks were exhorted to take personal responsibility for their dysfunctions, yet the supreme sin was "running your own show" in defiance of the collective--read Arol's--will. Yet Zuman never makes herself a victim: She retains her sense of agency (and humor) as she weighs Zendik's weird creed and power plays against the sense of righteousness and belonging that drew her in. Her whip-smart prose--on her selling shifts, she "hit up mostly single men, zeroing in on the disheveled, disaffected, afraid, and misshapen...if they paired superhero trucker caps with Coke-bottle glasses...so much the better"--conveys the squalid exuberance of Zendik's blend of idealism and fraud.
An engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe--and sometimes liberate.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Zuman, Helen: MATING IN CAPTIVITY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bcda9b7c. Accessed 28 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959699
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Review: Mating in Captivity: A Memoir
Mating in Captivity: A Memoir by Helen Zuman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Zendik is a communal organization, you might use the word cult, that I'm surprised I hadn't heard of before, particularly since it was housed in Hendersonville, NC, just 30-40 minutes from where I live, up until 2003. At that point it moved to West Virginia, to a large homestead. It got some press a few years back when that farm went up for sale, after the remaining founder of Zendik, Arol, passed away. It seems like Zendik more or less finished dissolving at that point, although you can still find their Facebook page.
The author of this memoir went looking for a communal society to join after graduating from Harvard, and landed on Zendik. She was funded by some kind of grant where she had agree to do research on this kind of society, but that was kind of a lie, as she really wanted to embrace it for herself. I found myself asking on a somewhat frequent basis if Harvard teaches anything like ethics or critical thinking, because the author does not seem to employ either in her decision making. Using grant money, over $10k, for something other than what you received it for, is surely against all terms of service! (She outright donates the entire sum to Zendik very soon after moving in as an apprentice, when they weren't even asking her for anything yet.) She also doesn't seem to be able to see the organization from the outside, which even if she was pretending to be the scholar receiving the grant, it seems like some baseline level of an understanding of fieldwork practices would have been employed.
Instead, she just... jumps in. Eager to have a different kind of life and to lose her virginity, a communal society where sex is arranged between multiple partners as long as both consent, and no property or body belongs to everyone seems kind of perfect to Helen. She embraces it but it does not take long before she finds out that actually, a lot of people pair off, and actually, she's going to have to sell stuff on street corners, and actually, there is a well-developed hierachy, and actually, the remaining leader employs a lot of crazy tactics that are common in fundamentalism and cults. It feels like she entered Zendik after its peak, after the founder Wulf, with his esoteric philosophies and rules, passes away. The group has picked up and relocated several times, but she didn't see this as a warning sign. From the memoir, I did get a sense that she has some trauma in her past, so perhaps that made her more susceptible, but I definitely found myself asking why! I think the author wanted to know why as well, and that's why she wrote this.
I know I sound critical, but a lot of people who get stuck in cults enter them as babies or after severe trauma or complete helplessness (drug addiction, homelessness)... Zuman is an educated person who just seems to make bad decisions. But I suppose it can be an interesting, if frustrating, read in that regard. (It's almost worse on the occasions where she leaves, hitchhiking without any awareness of personal safety.)
But I almost want to bump up the star rating because I enjoyed deep diving into this story on the internet. To that end, I bring you:
-The author's LiveJournal, where she had been writing her experiences and connecting with others from the same and similar backgrounds. This entry has a lot of the lingo and timeline associated with her time at Zendik.
-A Huffington Post article about the 2013 sale of the WV farm, with pictures of the space. The author was still a part of Zendik when they made the move to this location, but it almost felt like it was part of the reason she finally had to leave.
-Zendik Farm Arts Foundation on Facebook, not active in the last few years, but great photos of the founders, Wulf and Carol. They led the group from the 1960s on.
Thanks to the publisher for giving me early access through Edelweiss. They also published another leaving-religion title that I read last month, Shunned: How I Lost My Religion and Found Myself. This title came out May 8, 2018.