Review of Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford

Comedian Maria Bamford's memoir is unflinching in examining her own base impulses and personal challenges such as mental illness and loss. I needed to acclimate to her tone in order to appreciate her sometimes funny, often chaotic reflections and explorations.

In Sure, I'll Join Your Cult, comedian Maria Bamford mines the ups and downs of her childhood (as a child in the 1980s, she struggled with an eating disorder) and her adulthood (she's frank and funny about her own mental illness--and how she and her husband cope with various challenges surrounding mental health) to illustrate her desperate willingness to belong.

Bamford evaluates her ongoing search for and her innate need to find a group where she might focus her energy and satisfy her yearning for connection. She is frank about the complementary, possibly enabling roles she and her husband play in their collective mental-health journeys, and early in the book she shares the ways in which they messily trudge forward at times.

The book begins in fairly zany fashion, but this doesn't hold. Bamford doesn't shy away from addressing potentially weighty issues, such as her time in mental health facilities, the loss of a parent, and her least generous internal impulses like jealousy, and she does so without sentimentality, which required me to adjust to her tone. Reading Sure, I'll Join Your Cult requires diving in on her voice and unflinching, examining point of view.

Her openness is refreshing and disarmingly charming. I cringed some and I laughed at times, but I appreciated her candid sharing more than I felt immersed within it; despite her brutal honesty about many parts of her life, I felt somewhat at a distance from her story throughout.

I received an audiobook version of this title, which will be released September 5, courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio and Libro.fm.

More Bamford and Other Memoirs

Maria Bamford is also the author of Weakness Is the Brand, Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome, Ask Me About My New God, You Are (A Comedy) Special, and other works.

You might also want to check out these Bossy reviews of memoirs I've read.