My Dad Grew Up in a Cult. Now He’s a Famous Scientist.

The story of how he wound up in a dangerous compound—and how he escaped

My dad and his sisters, in the 1960s and 1980s, just before and after Synanon.

I was so young when my dad started telling me his cult stories that I don’t think I even knew what a cult was. In a way, I still don’t. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how unique it was to have a father who regaled his young daughter with vivid narratives from his early life, much less one who survived an adolescence as gripping and gut-wrenching as his.

Now 65, my dad doesn’t look like the stereotype of a traumatized ex-cultist who came of age under the baleful reign of a charismatic leader. Today, Dr. Craig Montell is a world-renowned neuroscientist with a litany of awards, honorary doctorates, and publications across prestigious journals like Science and Cell. He wears argyle pullovers and rimless glasses when he teaches his undergrads and plugs away at his grants from a corner office, where he runs an oceanfront research laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You would never guess to look at him that my dad spent his teenage years in a notorious cult called Synanon.

My dad never told me his Synanon stories in chronological order—after all, he was just piecing together all that had happened himself. Later, I’d gather that I was probably the first person ever to hear those stories, on long car rides to the beach or in waiting rooms to pass the time. Speaking them aloud, even to an elementary schooler, probably felt like a form of therapy for him, or at least a catharsis, and I was a consistently rapt audience, always ready with follow-up questions: “And then what happened?” “Why couldn’t you just run away?” “Where was Grandpa through all this?” It was good practice for my future career as a journalist and undoubtedly what drove me to write a book on the social science of cults, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which comes out this June.

I’ve pieced together that the story starts in 1969—the same year as the Manson Family murders. My father was 14 when he was forced to pack up his few belongings and move onto a remote socialist…