Gabrielle

I think a well-researched and thoroughly sources biography of Michael Hess could be a great book. This book is not that nor is it a story about Philomena's journey. If you picked this up wanting to know more about mother and baby homes or the abuses of the Catholic church in Ireland, I highly, highly recommend We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole. The entire book is gripping for non-fiction and very professionally researched and presented as well as including personal anecdotes, but even if you don't want to read the whole book you can check out chapters that would be relevant to imagining Philomena's life, and keep a fond memory of the movie in your mind. I understand that the story of Michael's life is relevant to telling this story, but it's told in such an off-puttingly, obviously fictional way in this book and so many things are covered in excruciating detail with imagined conversations that could surely have been summarized objectively. The author obviously had a very excited journey writing this and pulling out things that seem sensational about the life of a man who had been dead for nearly 15 years before the book was released, and who previously had not exactly been a public figure. It's weird given that there are mutliple statements from people who actually knew him that this is mostly fiction (including the top review here on goodreads!) Meanwhile the author actually knew Philomena and she seems to be an afterthought

TLDR: This book is undeniably gripping to read, and this happened to this woman, and it was reprehensible and directly made possible by the Iranian government, whether or not men in other countries are also abusive or whatever other whataboutism you can invent. That being said, the portrayal of the culture of Iran and its average, powerless citizens was obviously heavily influenced by her negative experience with a small group of weird people and should have been handled with more acknowledgement of that, although I think she tries to do so more than she's being credited for.

Reading the reviews of this book is very interesting. I'm giving it a high star score because I read it in all but one sitting and I think as something to read it's great - a fascinating story and well-written. I'm shocked reading people describing Betty as “completely unlikable” etc. What she and Mahtob experienced was undeniably a sick ordeal and yes it was abetted by the Iranian state and religious culture. To call her recounting any of that “propaganda” is crazy as this very much seems to have happened; I'm sure her story would have been debunked by now if not. However with what limited knowledge I have of Iranian culture from reading other books, watching travel shows, etc, I immediately found her sweeping statements about “Iranians” being dirty and terrible cooks and inhospitable to be very weird and hard to believe. I think her husband's family was likely uniquely strange (and, if she was telling the truth, seemingly inbred over generations) and due to her terrible circumstances she never saw much outside of their circle. She does make other, better friends and she praises many people she interacts with away from the family but if this book was written today I doubt she would have been encouraged to lean so hard on the third world stereotypes she applies to the entire country based on her awful in-laws. I also don't really think her perspective was intensely Islamaphobic. She acknowledges that she believes the Christian God and Allah are one and the same and participates in Islamic rituals with some hope and belief in her heart. Of course she criticizes the state-sponsored religious laws that oppressed her as anyone trapped in a theocracy they don't believe in would. In general, I feel you have to view the book through the lens of someone coping with something terrible that was inflicted upon them and likely not being advised particularly well on how to manage her feelings and small “fame”. It was published very shortly after this happened to her when all the wounds and trauma were raw and probably would have benefited from being drafted and then revisited even 5 years later. She also needed money at that time - this book was not written deliberately in the way it should have been.

There are a lot of more subjective things I have personal thoughts about, but what's the point of debating them? It does seem to be buried in later chapters that it was fairly obvious that Moody was becoming unstable and radicalized. When she questions the decision to go on the “vacation”, she quoted him as saying something like “you have to go” in a vicious way. He was obviously having trouble holding down a job, which she acknowledges could have been racially motivated but also seems like it could have been due to malpractice on his part. They basically had to leave Texas because he was gaining a reputation as being radicalized. He was obviously unhappy that their first child was a girl. Her reasoning for why they “had” to go on this trip is extremely weak and strange - if Mahtob went on the trip she wouldn't be forced to go in the future? But it is easy for us to judge all of this not being in her shoes and also living 40 years in the future. As a young woman in 2025, almost all of her decisions leading up to the trip are hard to sympathize with. She should have not gone to Iran with a man she felt she had to hide her birth control from, among other things, but she did and he abused her horrifically. These are things that are interesting to discuss in a book club but imo don't really affect the star rating of a non-fiction book. My main qualms in terms of the quality of the book are with the unnuanced portrayal of the Iranian people as a unwashed, severe monolith.

TLDR: Overall I think you would have to be at the very beginning of your spiritual seeking to get much from this book; any other strong held beliefs (religious or scientific) will probably win out in your rational mind over what the author presents.

I picked up this book as someone who wasn't likely to get into witchcraft but was more interested in learning about people who practice it. That being said, I consider myself open to adding new elements to my own religious path, especially elements of nature worship, herbalism, etc. I enjoyed the witty style of the book for a while, and I think the author sounds like he has a very solid analytical head on his shoulders, but the immense number of parenthetical asides made me weary after a while and I ended up returning it to the library unfinished.

I'm not sure how to comment on the content; I think for my interests, a book focusing more on history would have been more informative. I think if you come into it as a true seeker of some new spirituality, it would encourage you, especially if you feel like a spiritual person but roll your eyes at some popular ideas of witchcraft. That being said, I generally felt like the author hedged himself out of every strong argument that witchcraft is worth practicing over some other, more traditional religion, or over doing nothing or practicing mindfulness. On one hand, I suppose that really is all there is to religion - we each pick the deity or energy we want to trust and go from there, and he's offering a different path. On the other, the arguments to take that path read as extremely milquetoast to me.

I will read a memoir about basically anything and I enjoyed much of the storytelling about the author's early life, but once she went off to college and the book was halfway finished without much hint that the big “secret” was going to be revealed any time soon, I began to list. As other reviewers have pointed out, the book seems to oscillate between good and bad memories of the same people to a confusing degree - not that you can't feel multiple ways about one person, but I think perhaps more time or reflection would have made the overall tone more level and easier to work through. I wouldn't blame the “secret” heavy marketing on the author but for the title of the book, which really seems to imply we'll get a taste of SOMETHING much earlier to carry us through the exposition. Overall would probably be low on my list of memoirs to pick up, especially if you're not already a junkie for the genre like myself.

Do not start if you think you're going to learn a new way to meditate. I quickly learned the “only” way to learn TM is by attending $$$ classes; I'm not sure what the point of this book is other than to make them sound amazing and worth the price. If anything I found this to be a discouraging read since this miraculous concept is apparently only available to people who can spend several hundred dollars on classes that are taught irl. Just weird