Though ostensibly a story of escape on its surface, Daniella Mestyanek Young’s debut memoir, Uncultured, is at its core a book about belonging and identity, one that chronicles the author’s childhood as a member of the Children of God cult—known colloquially to members as the “Family”—where she was abused emotionally, physically, and sexually, and her time in the US military, where she encounters haunting echoes of those same abuses. Young examines what exactly makes a cult a cult, revealing that tendrils of cultish practices are woven throughout many of our most hallowed institutions. “I see traces of the Children of God, with all its inherent cult-think and harmful behavior, in almost every group, organization, or team I have ever joined or studied,” Young writes. “And I’m always asking myself: Where does a cult end, and a culture begin? What is the difference between a good organization and a bad cult?”

In the first section of the book, the longest, the author details the horrific treatment she endures as a child born into a global religious cult and raised in a commune in Brazil. She explains how the adults in the group—called “Aunties” and “Uncles”—condition children to harsh physical discipline and group punishments for questioning the beliefs of the Family, and how they are taught to fear “systemites”: people outside of the cult. Their alienation from broader society includes refusing medical treatment, leading to harrowing scenes of preventable illness and death. Young is a poor fit in the group, despite belonging to an important family embedded deeply in the sect’s practices—her soul yearns for education and experience, and she knows with a fiery independence that the environment she is forced to endure is inhumane.

The second part is brief and recounts her attempts to integrate into American society after leaving the cult as a teenager. Without any documentation, she has trouble enrolling in school, and the trappings of culture she encounters in her new home in Texas are often shocking and puzzling to her after a lifetime of living in the insular world of the cult. But she eventually gets to go to high school, and then to college, where her thirst for education is finally slaked and she flourishes.

The third and final section of the book, which details her time serving in the US military, is where the book truly tackles institutional health, as she compares the systemic harms of the cult in which she was raised to some of the practices of the Army. As she rises through the ranks, eventually becoming an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, the dangers only mount, both professionally and personally. Her story and reflection on it critiques the institution in numerous ways, covering the specific horrors of a woman’s experience in service in a way that is reminiscent of memoirs like Tracy Crow’s Eyes Right, or Sandra Sidi’s viral essay about sexual assault, “Get a Weapon,” while also zooming out to look at the dehumanizing practices of the war machine writ large a la Paul Crenshaw’s This We’ll Defend.

Crucially, Young forges a link in this memoir between mental and physical health, especially in the latter half of the book. Her physical prowess (especially being fleet of foot, as demonstrated in a memorable scene where she outraces all of the men in a new unit she joins) is often used as a protective measure against both tangible physical threats, including her own fellow enlisted, and also against the reflections of her past trauma that appear in new uniforms. And as the stressors of her deployment mount—singularly compounded by being a woman in a military sluggish to adapt to having women in combat—she finds herself embroiled in a harassment scandal, with her body breaking down and manifesting her internal anguish in debilitating ways.

Young’s writing is propulsive and energetic. She describes unspeakable acts with a candid, intimate voice, and the frequent questioning that fills her reflections on the experiences of her life invites us into both her lived experiences and her ruminations on their significance for not only her own life, but our society more broadly.

Narrating one especially awful experience that cements the idea of leaving the Family in her mind, Young writes, “I wanted him to stop. I wanted to kick and punch and bite him. I wanted to draw blood. I hated every single thing I was feeling in my body, everything nice and everything painful. It was all wrong. But as he started touching other places, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him. My body was a tool given for the glorification of God.”

Her spare, direct style aligns well with subject matter that is often overly sensationalized in some other media. There’s none of that here; though Young doesn’t shy away from making the extent of the depravity visited upon her in childhood clear, she doesn’t dwell on the details or attempt to shock the reader, only to help them understand her experiences and consider their significance.

This isn’t to say that Young’s writing is without some writerly flair. For instance, Young details how she came to be on a juggernaut chess team during college despite not having much experience with the game, and how she found belonging among an international group of students. From that point on, throughout the book, Young makes use of chess as a metaphor in describing future conflicts, such as her divorce from her first husband or tricky combat situations in the deserts of Afghanistan: “I’d been ‘forked,’” she explains, “forced into taking one of two paths, neither of them good.”

Though the content can be disturbing, the story is enthralling, and it’s a pleasure to read something so riveting that also has so much to say. The comparisons Young draws between the cult and the military, and the implications of those connections for organizations writ large, are ultimately the crux of the memoir and the most intriguing thread (which is perhaps why the second section is a bit brief) and the author smartly spends most of her time teasing out those mirror images of each other, especially monstrous in the faces of men in power.

Young’s unique experiences—in diverse locales, with such a breadth of humanity—imbue her conclusions with a special power. “After my thirty-five years of studying leaders, living in cults and cultures across the globe, my intelligence training, and my graduate work on group behavior, here’s what I’ve noticed: ‘Good’ people who do terrible things are often supported, protected, and, sometimes, empowered by organizations we love and respect,” she observes. “And almost always, it isn’t merely a case of one or two bad apples, but the tree that has rotted from within. As a society, it is incumbent on us to ask: Where are the toxins coming from?”