We conclude our book club with Michelle's escape from the dungeon. The dead baby trend continues; Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Satan’s fingernails make brief appearances. Digressions include Dustin Hoffman, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and things that rhyme with Beelzebub. This episode contains references to child abuse and sexual assault.
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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
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We conclude our book club with Michelle's escape from the dungeon. The dead baby trend continues; Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Satan’s fingernails make brief appearances. Digressions include Dustin Hoffman, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and things that rhyme with Beelzebub. This episode contains references to child abuse and sexual assault.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Quarantine Book Club: “Michelle Remembers” (Week 5)
Sarah: I know, right? Like the worst, most disastrous crash you've ever had. I bet that it didn't result in an epidemic of wrongful convictions.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast that takes you to your depths but doesn't coerce you into staying there better we’re better than Dr. Pazder. We have less power.
Sarah: And we don't have any kind of a belt in judo.
Mike: We’re not as lithe.
Sarah: We're not as lithe. That's true.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic.
Mike: If you want to support the show, you can subscribe on Patreon or find us in lots of other places. Or you can not do that because times are weird and it’s quarantine.
Sarah: Times are even weirder than usual. Let's put it that way. And today we are continuing our discussion of Michelle remembers.
Mike: Finishing, even concluding the exciting conclusion.
Sarah: You are very excited to reach the conclusion.
Mike: I’m so excited.
Sarah: Which I find hilarious because I've only subjected you to like 10 hours of talking about this book. And I spent hundreds of hours thinking about it. So welcome to my nightmare, Watson.
Mike: I'm glad we could share this nightmare with all of our loyal listeners.
Sarah: Yeah. Thank you for being in the nightmare with us. So Mike, bring us up to speed. I know that we can't do that in an elaborate way, but I do feel like we've done four episodes. This is our final episode, and we're going to reach the end of the story. And to me, the driving question right now is how does Michelle escape? And I would like you to elaborate on what that means.
Mike: Well, I think the big twist that we came to last episode was basically that she, on some level, is becoming less comfortable with this therapy. And she deliberately asked Dr. Pazder, can we please stop this? I would rather cut out my tongue, then continue with this. And he basically said, no, no, you're not allowed to stop this because the Satanists have programmed you in some way that makes you want to stop. And so the fact that you don't like this is actually letting the Satanist win. And so to be like the real heroes, we have to continue with this thing that is actively causing you harm. And she agrees.
Sarah: And the more you tell me to stop, the harder we have to go. And what kinds of memories has she been allegedly recovering?
Mike: There's been some dead cats. There's been some dead babies.
Sarah: I really want to emphasize the significance of the dead babies because the satanic panic is going to be so much about dead babies. There's so many allegations. It starts off with, parents are concerned about the possibility of sexual abuse. People are hyper vigilant for signs of this, especially in daycare settings. Partly some have argued because women who were putting their children in daycare also felt significant guilt about being quote bad mothers by not taking care of their children all the time, maybe because they were working, maybe because they didn't want to parent with every one of their waking hours.
So suspicion is directed, not at the household whereby all logic, it mostly belongs, but at the daycare center and what start as suspicions of sexual abuse, especially with the kind of coercive interviewing that we see in McMartin and then another cases that follow, allegations of sexual abuse eventually lead to allegations of baby sacrificing- a lot. For the most part, like pretty quickly, and especially after McMartin, prosecutors figured out that they needed to just try people on the sexual abuse charges and ignore the satanic abuse allegations. Even if the claims about satanic abuse were like very enmeshed with the sexual abuse claims, they were like, juries don’t like the satanic abuse thing. It doesn't win trials. We're not trying out satanic abuse. They would kind of take it out from the prosecution narrative, which is interesting.
So it's not like there were a ton of people going to prison for sacrificing babies, but like, this is a big theme and I just I find it so interesting that, to me, at least it seems possible to trace that theme that defined so many lives in the ensuing decades, just maybe to just Michelle, like, is this a Michelle thing? Is this like Michelle had her own personal baggage and maybe the culture contributed to, and Dr. Pazder maybe steered her in ways that we don't know, but does this all start in Michelle's brain?
Mike: Right? Because she could have picked any outlandishly false thing to fabricate as part of these rituals and the fact that she chose a dead baby sort of set the template for other people to choose the same thing, I guess.
Sarah: In the last installment, there was a baby that was stabbed with a crucifix on a stone altar. And that actually really resonated with people, it seems because there's this theme in the literature about how to look for signs of satanic ritual abuse that like, children will have been made to sacrifice babies or to think they're sacrificing babies, so they feel guilty, which is exactly what Michelle describes happening to her. That's exactly what Lawrence Pazder cooks up as a philosophy like the sameness made you feel that you were sacrificing this baby so that you would feel guilty so that you would lose your ability to love. And it could only be reawakened by a lithe psychiatrist.
Mike: Who keeps you down into your depths, refusing to let you up until you're done describing worse and worse and worse things.
Sarah: Like Fritzl. I feel like you don't get that reference, but you're like, let's move along, Sarah.
Mike: No it’s from American Tail, I thought.
Sarah: No. Do you know who Joseph Fritzl is?
Mike: No.
Sarah: Okay. He was, I believe, an Austrian gentleman who kept his daughter in a basement for like a couple of decades and fathered children with her and stuff. I remember learning about it. And for a long time, I would just sit on a bus and look at every house we pass and be like, maybe that one has a regular old basement with a dungeon prisoner who's been there for 20 years. That was one of the things that made me start really thinking about how, like, just a little house can conceal so many terrible things, which is like one of Dr. Pazder's themes. When he's like, I believe that this all happened. He's like, well, terrible things happen. People do terrible things. And it's like, yeah, I don't disagree with that, there's something more going on here. So anyway, I hope you're all tucked in.
Mike: Yeah, we have to do this first. Yes, I am. We've got the mosquito nets. I've got some Raisinets under my pillow that you also don't know about.
Sarah: Why is it that whenever we're establishing this, you're like, this thing is happening that you also don't know about.
Mike: Because that was my experience of camp because I went to church camp, and everything had to go on underneath the knowledge of the camp counselors. I did not have a cool camp counselor.
Sarah: Okay. So let's roll with this. Let's imagine that, yeah. We're at church camp or it's not the church camp. Yeah. Right. What sort of melty snacks are you pulling out of your pillowcase to eat? As I read this book to you.
Mike: There’s a lot of Starburst and I have a huge crush on one of the other male campers, but obviously I cannot tell him or anybody else about it. And he sells used cars in Las Vegas now. We're friends on Facebook.
Sarah: Okay. So Michelle begins her regression. She's starting to describe this medical experiment stuff. This is when this appears as a theme. They attach wires to dead people and make their bodies jump. Michelle is strapped to a structure. And we learned, “they came to the little room where the doctor had sewed horns and a tail on Michelle and passed through it to the room beyond. It was larger and the smell there was intensely bad. The room was very hot, and Michelle realized that the big brick structure in the corner of the room was an open heart. She could see the flames, one bare light bulb hung from the ceiling” and it's like, well, okay. I could- tell me what you think I like about this description, or like what, what do you find interesting about it?
Mike: It's not enough for them to be Satanists. They also have to be Satanist in all of their aesthetics. So like the Satanists wouldn't have a lampshade. It has to be like a bare light bulb. Like every detail has to be suffused with evilness in a way that actual evil is not.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's like, and it wasn't a light fixture. It was a scary light fixture.
Mike: Yeah. And of course it's like, it's not a clean operating room. It's a stinky operating room and it's gross. And then it's like, well, where are we?
Sarah: I think of Lawrence Pazder going to look at like, you know, land records and be like, how many structures in the Metro area are zoned to have a basement surgery room slash pizza oven. I was reading the other day a book that was kind of a love letter to TV movies of the seventies and eighties, which used to be like a significant part of network programming. Sybil was a TV movie. I think there was a time when it seemed like Michelle Remembers could have become one. And do you want to guess who Lawrence Pazder wanted to play him?
Mike: Is it like Robert Redford or somebody?
Sarah: No, you're close though. Like that age group and that sort of moment in Hollywood, shorter though.
Mike: Dustin Hoffman? No.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: What? That's actually a weird choice for him. Because he's so egotistical. You’d think he choose a heartthrob.
Sarah: I think Dustin Hoffman’ very charismatic and I think it's actually astute casting on Lawrence Pazder's part. Imagine if this movie existed and Michelle will be played by like Amy Irving or something. And this it'd be like, Michelle Remembers, 1982. Like, doesn't that feel like a real movie?
Mike: I'm actually amazed that it wasn't converted into a movie. I always kind of like assumed that it had been.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing that it wasn't. And then we will get to why later. But yeah, like take yourself on a little mind vacation where like this movie was made, it would have like a 5.5 rating on IMDB and horror blogs would be like, this was only available on VHS for a long time. It doesn't hold together, but it has good moments. And like Dustin Hoffman would sell it.
Mike: Dustin Hoffman's high Polish cheekbones.
Sarah: And maybe actually the legal epidemic wouldn't have been as bad because I bet a lot of people couldn't make it all the way through this book, but then they would have watched the movie on like CBS and been like, huh? I don't think that happened.
Mike: Well, yeah. I mean, books don't become camp classics the way that movies do.
Sarah: That’s such a good point.
Mike: When books hit the mainstream, like 80% of people talking about a book at any given time have not read it.
Sarah: That's so true.
Mike: So people probably would have assumed that it was credible, right.
Sarah: And they wouldn't have read the final, you know, 150 pages, which is when we're really starting to cook with gas or in an open heart and a surgery. Like in a way this book was too famous, but not famous enough because if it had gotten to like Dustin Hoffman, movie fame, too many people would have been exposed to the story and wouldn't have seen it as a psychiatric text. Right. But anyway, back to Michelle, you can see how I'm also taking a lot of tangents. Cause I'm like, I don't want to keep describing this child being tortured. And yet that's the project I've chosen for myself so let’s get through it. And then it's like, the book has stopped bothering setting up scenes or introducing stuff for a while and then we just start cutting to different sessions. It's like July 19th, Michelle in her depths. “I'm supposed to go to sleep, but I won't, this doctor is still there. He's making me sleepy. He has a light or something shiny. I'm supposed to look at it. And he's saying things to me, he wants me to sleep. I'm afraid to sleep because then I'll die.” Do you understand what this is supposed to be?
Mike: What? No.
Sarah: She has to look at a shiny thing and then she'll go to sleep.
Mike: Oh, hypnotherapy, hypnosis.
Sarah: Yes. Again, this book does not say she's hypnotized. It is my personal theory that Dr. Pazder might be putting her under hypnosis, but regardless she's like in a highly vulnerable state with her therapist. And he's like, tell me about the way the Satanists tortured you. And she's given him this buffet of dead kittens and dead babies and graves and all sorts of stuff. And finally, she's like, the Satanists are torturing me by putting me in a vulnerable state and doing therapist stuff. And he's like, Hmm, fascinating.
Mike: Totally unable to see the parallels.
Sarah: This gets us into one of the internal themes of like, what do you do when you can tell that someone is just being really obtuse, cause like, if he doesn't see it, then, like that's amazing. And I, again, I don't think he would pretend to be that unable to notice anything.
Mike: I think like male cluelessness about what women are actually describing is not something that men, in his position, typically fake. Like if you have ever read any Freud, it's like, no, the cluelessness is real.
Sarah: Okay. This is a really interesting moment. She's talking about, you know, just kind of a mélange of past fears. Her mom's walking away from her. Everyone else is walking away. She's afraid of there being bugs all over her. And then the Satanists are talking about her, and she says, ”They said, I'd wasted almost the whole year for everyone. Everyone had other things to do. They’d all had have to waste their time on me”
Mike: So the guilt is even now to the point where she's guilty for wasting the Satanists time?
Sarah: Well, what I think about that is that this session, we are told, is in July of 1977, they have been doing this for almost a year.
Mike: Almost their anniversary.
Sarah: And she's afraid of having wasted the whole year for everyone. There's tension there, that, to me, sounds like it's possible that she's expressing, like I made this up, I think. That like, I'm not saying that's happening, but I'm saying that's a possibility and this guilt that she's expressing or just this feeling of like, I'm wasting your time, like. You think I am deserving of your time, but I'm not. That's one of the things that seems the most painful, this fear of abandonment. Okay. And then something interesting happens, relatively. So we go back into a vision. She's expressing all this fear of death and dying. “I thought about that fire in the round room. It's a really creepy fire and I remembered somebody in black. He was reading out of a book and the book was black.” So the man is reading from the book. Dr. Pazder wants to know more about what he's saying, and Michelle says, “I don't understand the words. They're all put together funny. So much turning, so much turning, turn around and there's no more. And Dr. Pazder says, “Try to say it.” Michelle, straining to speak, *unintelligible murmuring*, this goes on for several lines. I'm not going to do it all.
Mike: No, I know. I mean, I know this incantation. It's ‘turn around, bright eyes.’
Sarah: Every now and then-
Mike: I get a little bit lonely.
Sarah: Okay. But that song came out in 1983, I believe, which I feel like is a plausible year for our imaginary Dustin Hoffman movie to come out. Can you, I'm also kind of shazaming for myself an imaginary cultural memory where that song was like written for that movie. It feels like it has those themes. Like they really are living in a powder keg and giving off sparks. So. Okay. No. What Michelle, unfortunately, tragically says instead of a recitation of the lyrics to Total Eclipse of the Heart, is “she launches into verse and says it's black, dead white, everything is wrong way around. Everything's lost. Nothing’s ever found.” Because to jump ahead a little bit, this poem is a premonition of the fact that Satan is going to speak only in poems.
Mike: Wait what? No.
Sarah: Yes, the last third of this book is literally satanic verses.
Mike: Poor Michelle staying up late cramming for her therapy appointment the next day, thinking of like, what rhymes with Beelzebub.
Sarah: There’s a verse she starts with where the first line ends with the word equal and they're like, then she trailed off for some reason. And it's like, maybe it's because it's really hard to rhyme the word equal. And then he wrote it with his beak quill.
Mike: So she's basically freestyling on the couch. Oh my God.
Sarah: She is! And the meter doesn't line up and they're kind of awkward, but you're also like Michelle, you set up this huge challenge for yourself and you followed through with it. And I can't criticize that, really. Chapter 21, “The construction company Doug Smith worked for gave him a week at a resort hotel up island. It was just what he and Michelle needed, a chance to do nothing very complicated all day long. The psychiatric sessions were not mentioned. It was as if they had become a forbidden topic”. Michelle, after getting back from her vacation with Doug, where we did not hear a single other thing about, I’m sorry to report, heads back to the Fort Royal medical center and his colleague, Dr. Jim Patterson is there and notices a strained look on her face. “Michelle told him how hard the therapy had been and hinted that it had taken a toll on her private life, her friendships, even her marriage. Her nearly total absorption in it and the extremely long hours she was devoting to it both seem to be distancing her somewhat from the people around her.”
Mike: So it's like a cry for help.
Sarah: “Well said, Dr. Patterson, you know what they say? Therapy is a little like climbing a mountain. The struggle really comes just as you reach the top because you know you're near, but you can't quite see over it yet. Just keep on working the way you have. And suddenly you'll find that you're at the top of the mountain.”
Mike: Just keep ruining your friendships and personal life. And eventually you'll be better. This is, why the fuck is a therapist telling her this? If somebody was saying this about one of my colleagues, like there should be mechanisms to be like I think Dr. Pazder is really traumatizing one of his patients.
Sarah: “You may also find, he went on, that partly because of this work you'll grow differently from the way you would have, differently from the people around you, you might even grow away from some of them. This is normal. And in the long run, as you meet new people, you'll have a better basis for friendship.”
Mike: ‘Go make new friends’. This is the advice!
Sarah: I love how this book, spoiler, like we will not be told at any time in this book that Michelle and Doug realize that their marriage no longer served their needs and moved on. It's like, no, none of that. It's just like, we're told that Doug doesn't want to talk about the therapy. And then on the next page, one of Dr. Pazder's colleagues implicitly is like, you might need to break up with Doug, and that's fine.
Mike: He doesn't get you, Michelle.
Sarah: As I'm reading it, there are moments like this where I'm like, just don't lie. Like, do you have to lie? Come on. Like, just be like, and then Michelle made a choice for herself on purpose. And wasn't just advised to ignore Doug by a doctor. So you know how sometimes when you're watching a bad action movie, they have like a final 15 minutes where they're like, let's just have a bunch of explosions and a bunch of different stuff happened all at once and just do it? We are approaching that part of this book. So Michelle's rash shows up and gets even worse. And Dr. Pazder decides that this is a sign that her body has a lot to remember.
Mike: Or it's the stress of being trapped in this miserable therapeutic relationship.
Sarah: Could it be that? Could it be anything other than repressed memories struggling to get out and manifesting as a rash? Part two, this chapter begins quite honestly, with the sentence, it was September 6th and everything was worse.
Mike: It's like we know Michelle, we know.
Sarah: So they pick her up. I can point to her again. We go back to the pointing. “The child is being passed back and forth between the circles, according to some predetermined and meaningful design. She was trying desperately to remember just how they were passing her, because she was sure that they were locking her in, just as the doctor in the laboratory had tried to lock her in with his curse. The next time she spoke, her voice had changed. It was heavier now, full of menace. Out of the fire a man is born. It was as if Michelle were echoing another voice. And he walks, behind the path is born. It burns out the way. It burns out the way of destruction and decay. For Dr. Pazder the shock could not have been greater. Pretty, delicate, Michelle was speaking in a deeper, harsher voice. The tone was weighty with menace, unearthly, deadly. Dr. Pazder found it maddening”
Mike: He's finally as bored as we are. He’s like, talk faster, Michelle. I got baseball tickets.
Sarah: It's hard to rhyme everything you say. I mean, try it. Sarah, this book is way too long. I could better spend time singing a song. And then she lapses out of the Satanic voice.
Mike: Thank God.
Sarah: And then she lapses her head, just slightly, she began to speak. “Her voice was still weak, but also mild, *speaking french* Michelle was weeping, soft tears as he repeated it over and over and over. He was baffled. He could not understand this constant repetition, and in French. He had been working with Michelle all this time and had never heard her speak French.
Mike: We're both Canadian. Come on.
Sarah: I know it's not like this in Florida. This is supposed to be amazing in that the characters are speaking in languages that the host never studied, like, Michelle doesn't speak French. How is this happening? It means that the Virgin Mary is doing it somehow or something.
Mike: It's like me being *speaking spanish* and suddenly like he's fluent in Spanish. We had no idea.
Sarah: You're like *basic spanish* Yeah. “She began crying, but they were not sad tears. Dr. Pazder could hear relief in her sobs. ‘Ma mère, maman, ou est ma mère? Jésus, votre mère. Votre Mère avec moi.” So she's saying, Jesus, your mother with me, she's adopting the Virgin Mary as her mother figure, it sounds like.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: “He could not bring her back. Her voice stayed faint and distant, her eyes fast shut. She was not responding to the usual ways he helped her return from the past. She kept calling for help. It suddenly came to him that he must make spiritual contact with her if he was going to bring her back at all.” And he prays for her. Well, again.
Mike: A normal therapeutic technique in most of the peer reviewed journals.
Sarah: It's very strong Christian propaganda too. Right? It's like, we've been through so much that this feels pretty underwhelming, but it's like, so he prays over her to make her better. And then “Dr. Pazder says, what about that other voice? That deep, deep voice? What was that? I don't know. He came out of the fire, and he was awful looking, just awful. I can't tell you. And he had his tail around my neck.”
Mike: Gee, I wonder who it could be.
Sarah: It's like, if I'm trying to tell you about a celebrity encounter, I had, but like, I don't want to name the person. So I'm like, boy, Mike, I'm feeling pretty white house down about not being able to get together tonight, but you will always be Magic Mike, to me. I hope it doesn't hail Caesar. Those are the first three Channing Tatum movies I can think of. It's like he's in a fire and he has a tail, and she says, and this is I think, a great innovation, she says, ”And he had his tail around my neck. She raised her hand to her collar, my rash. She said, tilting her head. And see, it really hurts. Is it worse? Pretty bad. He replied.” Do you see, or what's happening here?
Mike: She is implying that Satan wrapped his tail around her neck. And that is what has been causing the rash this whole time.
Sarah: That's why she has this rash. I'm going to show you the rash now. I'm going to turn on my camera for a second.
Mike: Again, the least implausible part of the story, like photo documentation, photo proof of the fact that Michelle had a rash means nothing. Like it doesn't mean that Satan caused the rash.
Sarah: No, Mike, it's meant to document Satanic cause because of the rash actually. Well, I think he can read the caption, I'll show it to you.
Mike: Oh, yeah, there's a rash on her. Like it's more like on her collarbone.
Sarah: No, Mike it's her neck.
Mike: Michelle experienced body memories of her ordeal. Whenever she relived the moments when Satan had his burning tail wrapped around her neck, a sharply defined rash appeared in the shape of the spade-like tip of his tail.
Sarah: Pretty convincing stuff, Mike, what do you have to say to that rash?
Mike: It's like me saying, like, I'm a Buddhist and Buddha is the one that sent a bunch of mosquitoes to come and bite me. And it was like, look, I have mosquito bites.
Sarah: And one of them is shaped like a symbol of the Buddha and it's like, see, okay. And here's, now that I have this up, I'm going to show you a couple other things.
Mike: What the fuck is this? It's like a little drawing.
Sarah: Can you just, I think this drawing is really cute, actually. It has, like, it looks like it has a little Flo Jo nails. Like it's supposed to have like talons, I think, but it just looks like it has really long nails.
Mike: Yeah. Hollow night. It's like a little sort of childlike almost, character drawn in very rudimentary pencil. It looks like one of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are, where it's like, technically they're monsters, but they're not actually scary looking. They're like cute monsters. Like that's how her Satan looks.
Sarah: Yeah. A cute monster. Exactly. And it's kind of like, it has no mouth, but somehow, maybe the way the eyes are drawn makes it look friendly and just like shy and like, hi guys.
Mike: Cute Satan.
Sarah: So that's one of the Satan's she drew. And then there's a couple of others, yeah, there's two more.
Mike: Okay. There's one word he has like horns, like a Ram, so it's like a Minotaur Satan.
Sarah: Or like a dollar sheep.
Mike: Oh. And there's like a four legged one that looks like a sort of combination of like a lizard and a dog with like an iguanas tongue.
Sarah: Yeah. He looks like a dog iguana, like a dog-uana.
Mike: She keeps accidentally drawing Satan as super cute.
Sarah: It's like, and also this one looks kind of like a Tokyo monster. It's like, what if Godzilla was like, he stubby little back legs.
Mike: And the face of Air bud.
Sarah: Okay. So that's the rash. “Dr. Pazder involuntarily shook his head. There was something new and astounding going on here. At the minimum, it was a vision with great psychological import. At the maximum, well, if the maximum, it was almost too much to think about. The professional in him came to the fore and he resumed his questioning.” What has been occupying the professional in him for this entire time?
Mike: The professional in him. That's like me saying like the NBA basketball player in him, like, come on. Where's this professional Dr. Pazder?
Sarah: Oh yeah. We are given a vision of Michelle in the basement. They are chanting. And then Satan is there and “from the flames came the deep echoing voice. Slowly it spoke again in bizarre rhyme ‘out of dark and fire red comes a mat of living dead. I only walk the earth at night. I only burn out the light’.”
Mike: There's a syllable missing in the last line, but that's okay.
Sarah: “There is no mother who’s always care. There's only need to burn and scare. There is no mother who walks on the earth, or there is no mother that gives birth. The only light in the world to see is the light brought here by me.” See, you love it. You love the Satan poetry. You were like, there's nothing for me in that black bag. And then we got to Satan poetry.
Mike: Although if he was really following Canadian regulations, he would then repeat it in French. Like they do in airplane announcements.
Sarah: That's why this is illegal. Yeah. And Satan says a lot more poems. I'm only going to read you very brief selections from them.
Mike: God the filler in this book. It's like a nineties R&B album.
Sarah: They’re like, we got to get to 300 pages.
Mike: Just more poems, throw more poems. They take up more space because of the line breaks, just like. Yeah, pop in another 35 poems. My God.
Sarah: So here's a five, Stan's a poem that is most page 262. And the final stanza goes, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John burn in the fire and then you're gone. Their words were lies, my children will see, in the fire their word dies. The only thing left burning true is the light that shows me to you.”
Mike: Oh God, wait, why is that rhyme in there? That's like 50 Cent rhyming ‘birthday’ with ‘birthday’.
Sarah: Yeah. So Satan is like 50 Cent. He's like, it's good enough. It is good enough. “Later when Michelle's testimony was brought to the attention of Father Guy and other authorities experienced in these unusual areas, it was possible to deduce the design behind the seemingly chaotic events Michelle recounted that autumn. The 81 day ceremony that lasted from September 7th, 1955, until November 27, the final day of the Christian churches liturgical year. Satan, they suggest, was beginning of black mass called the feast of the beast. A rite that takes place only once every 27 years.” The next one is going to be in 1982. And this book comes out in 1980. So that's quite the ticking clock. Okay. So Michelle starts this remembering, the remembering escalates to animal killing. dead baby sacrifice. I don't know everything just gets grosser and weirder and scarier until he just has nowhere to go. And it's like, I feel like, you know, something needs to happen where she isn't recounting another memory of another dead baby. And at a certain point, Satan appears in whatever mixed use building this is in the Victoria BC area. And I would also add that we're in this big round room and they have just all of these huge fires and I just wonder how are they ventilating all this? Magic, I guess.
Mike: I know. What is Satan- what is this ritual like? What does Satan start doing?
Sarah: This appears to be like this big satanic conference where Satan appears. And he's like, here's my plan for like, until the early eighties, basically. This is supposed to be happening in 1955.
Mike: Here's everyone's lanyard.
Sarah: And then we start to get this ritual of bones, apparently stolen from reliquaries, where there are all these bones that Satan is counting and playing with. And he's also treating people to visions. He shows people a vision of hell. Oh. And then after Michelle comes out of this remembering, she also tells Dr. Pazder that everyone who is present at this ritual has a missing finger. They're all missing the middle finger of their left hand.
Mike: Another easily verifiable fact that people should have caught on to when his book came out. But, okay, great.
Sarah: Just the Satanist can be anyone, but they are missing the middle finger of their left hands. Okay. So here is what I feel is the natural and inevitable conclusion to the dead baby theme. So strap in. “From the dark tunnel came the noise of marching feet and soon a force of attendance surrounded the outer circle.” This is like everyone's turning up to see Satan.
“Each was carrying what appeared at first to Michelle to be a pole, but then was identifiable as an appointed Pitchfork. And under each arm, they carried that object as necessary to the proper performance of the black mass as bread and wine art to the Catholic mass.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: “The body of a baby.”
Mike: Oh God, who is the procurement director for this church.
Sarah: One by one the marchers approached Satan with extreme deference and kneeling before him, unloading the little corpses in a pile at his feet.” And then Satan cuts up the dead babies and throws the pieces of dead baby to the Satanists. We're told that the Satanists are fighting for the pieces of dead baby. So that's how it goes with the dead babies. It's very weird to me that we get a comparison to bread at Catholic mass. The weird self-own of Catholics being like ‘the Satanists ritual was just like this thing we do, but different.’ And it's like, is your religion made more legit by the fact that you have these haters?
Mike: That's the project here, right? It's like, she's so obsessed with me. Like, it's the same, it's the central fakeness of this.
Sarah: Okay. So Catholicism is Regina George.
Mike: Yes. People don't care enough about other people's religions to ape and mock them in this way, because to care about another religion, this much, you have to believe that religion is true. It's like that old quote that everyone is an atheist, it's just, some people have rejected every religion, but one. That everyone's religion seems fake and weird to you. So it doesn't make sense to be like, Christianity is bullshit and I'm going to spend my entire life doing the exact opposite of it. You would only do that if you believe Christianity was true. And if you believe Christianity was true, you'd be a Christian. This is how you can tell this was concocted by Christians, right?
Sarah: This is like, why always my quibble is an overly logical child trying to watch horror movies, just like watching Rosemary's baby and being like, so you, you are Christians. The Satanists are the most devout Christians there are because they know that God is out there, and Jesus was the son of God and everything. Like they are not questioning that even the tiniest bit. Okay. And then there's this weird perfunctory chapter where Dr. Pazder arranges for Michelle to have an EEG and a skull x-ray. I feel perhaps because there's a scene in the Exorcist where that kind of happens.
Mike: What are the results say? If they're just going to be one of these fake ass, like it was real all along, things, like that rash.
Sarah: Yep. “They accumulated a foot high stack of recordings during their session that afternoon. When the neurologist studied them later, he found no abnormalities. Dr. Pazder, however, hoped there was an interesting correlation among Michelle's REM, rapid eye movements, and the level of her remembering, one that should be studied further later.”
Mike: This is not the area of medicine that I have specialized in, nonetheless, I will offer my completely uneducated thoughts.
Sarah: Yeah. And he's like, now I'm no expert, but I think that the experts might be wrong. There might be something here, but also, I can't affirmatively say that something is going on, as this book goes to press. Chapter 30. “Day by day as October drew to an end, Michelle kept returning to her memories and picking up from where she left off the day before. It was time for the ceremony at the eyes of the horns of death. The ceremony in which Satan would say what he sees, the opportunities for evil.” I love that it's the opportunities for evil. I love that Satan is like the traveling morale booster person in a company that is going to all branches and he's like, we can boost Sebring sales by 100%. I've done it before in Utica!
Mike: He's got a briefcase full of steak knives with them.
Sarah: Michelle has another visitation from Ma Mere.
Mike: Who's the Virgin Mary, right? That's what they've decided to call the Virgin Mary.
Sarah: Yes. Satan notices the visitation and so he throws flame out of his fingers. And it says, “how dare you interrupt the feast of the beast?”
Mike: It is like a conference where someone's like, you know, I'm seeing a lot of people on their iPads right now, eyes up front. You know what?
Sarah: I'm seeing a lot of people being visited by other religious figures right now. Yeah. And then we start getting year predictions. So this is the fall of 1977 when Michelle is remembering and repeating Satan saying 78 opens the gate.
Mike: Oh no, he's doing like Nostradamus. This is what's going to happen, predictions?
Sarah: Totally. My gate will be open, the year will be mine. And that's the year of 78. That's the year full of hate. 79 goes down to the fire. It's the time when the flames grow higher. if I turn them face to face, black against race against race. When Satan comes back the next time we'll have to be like, Satan, kind of problematic phrasing.
Mike: Yeah. Maybe you don't throw in the race stuff, Michelle. Satan is canceled.
Sarah: They don't even know what I'm about by 1980, they won't even shout.
Mike: How about like, by 1980, it will be a route. I feel like that would have been more interesting.
Sarah: That's pretty good. Yeah. It also kind of doesn't work that well for the book because it is 1980. So like if you’re reading this in 1980, you're like, oh crap. Like, this is why we're not even shouting anymore. Like Satan is already completed like two years of his prophecy without me even knowing what was going on, like, why couldn't this have been a magazine article? I also love how even this book is like, yeah, Satan's poetry is not good. Because we got the description, “Michelle had listened as carefully as she could, day after day while Satan ponderously declaimed out the ring, laying out a vast scheme of evil intentions concealed within the drivel of the rhymes.” Yup. Satan is terrible at poems because he's evil.
Mike: Either that or Pazder put that in, and Michelle was like, “Hey, I wrote this. What do you mean ponderous?”
Sarah: And then after watching Satan open a portal to hell and beckon a woman to leap into it, which she does, Michelle is visited by Saint Michael.
Mike: Oh. What did he do? What's his superpower?
Sarah: He's a Saint, who's also an angel. And he tells her to remember that the Virgin Mary is “holding your hand, and then he was gone”.
Mike: That's nice. A little cameo.
Sarah: Also, how useful is the Saint if he shows up and is like, hello, it's going to be okay. Well bye. Once again, Satan has all these bones, and I was like doing numerology for a while. And so to me, the only interesting part of that is that he's emphasizing the number 28 and the book is speculating 28 is the gate, the opening to the Satanic future because it is every 28 years that Satan returns to earth. And because 28 is traditionally Satan's number.” No citation. “He divides it by four because four has always been a spiritually powerful number. Four seasons, four directions, four gospels, et cetera, et cetera.” I don't really know about 28 being Satan's number generally, but I would say that that is the age that Michelle is and the year that she's having all these conversations.
Mike: She’s just like free associating at this point, basically.
Sarah: Satan has 27 bones, but Michelle has the 28th bone because it has knocked on the ground and she picks it up and she holds it in her small fist. And now we're reaching the next phase of the final ceremony. There's always these transitions that it's like now it was time for this ceremony. And it's like, oh, we were already having a larger ceremony, is this a smaller sub ceremony?
Mike: It's like the end of Return of the King. You're like, how many endings are we going to have?
Sarah: Saint Michael appears again. He blesses the bone in Michelle's hand.
Mike: Thank you, Michael.
Sarah: And then she digs a hole and buries it. And he says, “give me back the bone that's mine, then everything will be fine.”
Mike; That doesn't even work!
Sarah: “Just go back and get the bone. I will let you go back home.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: I will not eat them, Sam I am. I will not eat green eggs and ham. I will not eat them on a boat. I will not eat them with a goat.
Mike: There once was a boy from Nantucket. Like how many greatest hits are we going to get?
Sarah: And I just feel like, when I think about how hard it is to get through this portion of the book-
Mike: It's so hard, Sarah.
Sarah: And how I just feel this desperation to be done with this story, like how much desperation is Michelle feeling? We've talked quite a lot about how she's emerging from these memory sessions feeling traumatized, crying uncontrollably, her life seems to be kind of dissolving. I feel like she's trying to find a way to reach the end of this remembering and reach the conclusion to the story because obviously she didn't die.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: So she has to reach the end of a story where she lives, but where something climactic happens, I guess. But then it's like, if I were her, I would be like, okay. But like, if I satanic abuse memories stop pouring uncontrollably out of me, will Dr. Pazder be like, great. Well, we're done. I'm going to go back home to my wife and my four children, and we're all going to go to church, and you're not invited. Each time some worst thing happens to her, he's like, wow, I'm even more amazed by your goodness and your good soul.
Mike: And your sick rhymes.
Sarah: And it's like, would she have any faith in her lovability beyond victimhood? I don't know. You know, so it's like, I don't know. I'm just impressed that she was able to ever put an end to this therapy because we also, you know, we see people who are essentially in the same trap Michelle is in the eighties who fall into this trap and this case goes on for years and years.
Mike: Of them just being trapped and describing this and not knowing how to end the process.
Sarah: Yeah. And having to recover worse and worse and worse stuff. And just not being able to get out of that narrative and be like, I'm done, I've remembered everything.
Mike: So what does Michelle do?
Sarah: Well, we also see that she is starting to, again, to try and not do it. So chapter 34, it's November 25th of 1977. She comes in and she's like, I don't feel like saying anything. “Dr. Pazder says, perhaps you should just say something about how you've been feeling the past few days”, which is like, what a thought to talk about that during therapy.
Mike: Oh my gosh he almost did something healthy.
Sarah: “I don't want to, she was not being stubborn. It suddenly seemed almost impossible to talk. More of an effort than she felt capable of making.”
Mike: . She should have thought of this months ago, just be like, I guess it doesn't work anymore.
Sarah: “It's been the coldest November that I remember, he said. All that snow. It makes your bones hurt. Michelle said almost under her breath. Your bones have really been hurting a lot. Haven't they? You can hardly walk. And your rashes are back these past few days, he reached over and took her left hand. Hmm. They're coming back on this arm, especially on your elbow and your forearm. She made no response. He sat quietly. Then she burst out. I can't talk anymore. I have nothing to say. It's like, there's nowhere else. It's just a dead end. Nothing else is happening? He asked. You're just lying on the floor, painted black and white?” Because that was what they did at the end of the last session. “Again, she was painted, and she was painted black and then had a skeleton drawn on her with white paint. I know one thing, he told her. I know if you're left in that place, you are going to be left in that feeling. You're in a place of total exhaustion and aloneness. I can't hear what you're saying without hearing where you are in the past too. I can't see us leaving everything where it is now. It wasn't right for you or for me or anyone, in fact. I can't accept that, it's too serious. You've put too much into it.”
Mike: So again, he's doing this thing where it's like, what dreams may come or something where it's like, you're trapped in this vision or whatever. Like, this is not how memory works.
Sarah: It's like The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez.
Mike: Yes, God. And also, she's showing reluctance and he's just pushing through.
Sarah: And it does not seem to be crossing his mind that her very real and repeated and clear objections matter. And, you know, and I blame him, but I also blame the medical establishment because this is, you know, Dr. Pazder did not invent the culture in which he was trained and is practicing. And there are a lot of great therapists and we're a lot of great therapists at the time who genuinely cared about women and who are able to do something therapeutically useful for them. And there were also a lot of therapists and a lot of doctors who took care of women and were like, I am the doctor, and you are the patient and you don't know anything and I know everything. I'm smart. You're dumb. I'm big, your little, it all comes back to Matilda.
Mike: And we’re going to keep doing this thing that you hate that is harming you because I say it's best for you to continue.
Sarah: Maybe I'm actively harming you. Maybe I'm actively destroying your health. But for me to second guess that would mean I would have to believe in a world where I could be wrong and that's not acceptable to me. “Dr. Pazder says, I know it's hard to go there, but I can't accept that there's nowhere left to go. I can't accept that you are stuck, finished, there's no ending, no way out. I shouldn't have said anything. Michelle was almost sullen. I was just trying to talk.” This is also the least flattering. The narrator is toward Michelle this entire time. He's like Michelle was almost sullen. Like her normal saintly demeanor was slightly not nice.
Mike: You can tell that, like, he had more of a hand in writing this than she did because throughout the book, we don't get the same kinds of like Michelle, like her tendons were poking out of her athletic body as she laid on the couch. Like, we don't get the same kinds of descriptions of her that we get of him. We have her like disobeying his orders. And there's like, there's subtle undermining of Michelle in the language in a way that it never does, to Pazder.
Sarah: Yeah. All the descriptions of his thought processes and decisions are like, he was a very logical person and thought about all sides of this issue and came to the most reasonable conclusion.
Mike: And we never get inside of her head, the way that we get inside of his head, which is an interesting choice considering they're both writing the book well.
Sarah: Or considering that they're both credited with it.
Mike: Or, yeah, they're both ostensibly writing the book.
Sarah: Because I also feel like Michelle could be an author of the book to the extent that she has produced this transcript. Which is certainly a very painful and real act of authorship. And so, “Eight hours later, Dr. Pazder dictated a memorandum into the tape recorder. It is 7:30 now. We've been trying really, really hard all day to go back to the place. Michelle has not been able to.”
Mike: It's like a work slowdown. She's just like, yeah, I'll be there, and I'll do it. But then she's just kind of like, not participating in it.
Sarah: I feel like it's just too painful for her. And also, I guess the fact of like, if she goes back in there, she's going to have to have a confrontation with Satan in which he, for some reason, doesn't kill her. And I feel like it's very hard to come up with any kind of a justification for that from a story perspective.
Mike: And while rhyming.
Sarah: And while rhyming! Oh my God. She’s like the Ginger Rogers of this whole thing. Dr. Pazder says she has to do backwards while rhyming. And then she says, should I just write it down instead of telling him what the vision says. And he says,” I'd like you to tell me. And then in the blink of an eye, she had taken that frightening plunge into the abyss,” and then she just starts, and she just keeps going, according to the book. And she describes being back in the round room and she's making the sign of the cross to scare the Satanist. And Satan still wants his bone, and he still hasn't gotten his bone back. So after some of this, he's like, give me my bone, by the way, I still need it.
Mike: Do you have that Tupperware?
Sarah: Oh, and then Jesus comes too. But we know him as Ma Mere’s son. Cause apparently, they thought it was over the top to say it was Jesus. Oh. She's like then I saw Le Jesus and he's like, Ooh, French. She’s a miracle. Le petit Jesus. Oh, wow.
Sarah: Yeah. So I, I feel like she's, and there's actually, I want to digress a little bit. There's another repressed memory, satanic ritual abuse book. It's called Lessons in Evil Lessons from the Light. And basically, it's about a therapist who starts seeing a patient. The patient comes in being like, yeah, like I want to enjoy sex with my husband. And I just did have a very abusive childhood and I was sexually assaulted when I was a young child and I remember it and it was really traumatic and the therapist is like, hmm, let's look for repressed memories that are harming your ability to enjoy sex.
Mike: Let's dig around in this box a little bit more.
Sarah: And she also comes into therapy because she's feeling all this anger at her little daughter, and she's afraid that she's going to become abusive and they start recovering what they believe to be repressed memories, where the patient was abused sexually. And in other very gruesome ways by family members who were part of an intergenerational satanic cult, and her life also disintegrates, she starts doing worse.
And the way that they get out of this loop, this trauma loop, is that the therapist, at one point, goes to a conference that talks about past life regression hypnosis, and her patient undergoes the therapy and produces a memory of a past life where she, as a child was chased out of the house by an abusive parent because she spilled something. And this is shortly after she’s become spectacularly angry at her daughter for spilling juice. And in the past life, she hid under a porch and died. And she decides that the parent who is responsible for her death was reincarnated as her daughter right now.
Mike: Did it fucking help?
Sarah: That is the strangest thing. According to this book, it is extremely helpful. Like, and I think it's also because she recovers a memory that allows her to forgive herself. And this past life therapy allows her to feel this intense love and compassion for her young self, as opposed to describing herself and watching herself being tortured over and over again. And I think that Ma Mere and St Michael and Jesus are able to do the same things for Michelle. And I think that this is how he's able to get out of it is by bringing in these religious figures who love her and can tell her that she's worthy, I think is what she's needing to be told.
Mike: What’s amazing about that is that it's Michelle doing the work of coming up with that.
Sarah: Yes. Michelle had to figure it out. She had to do therapy on herself.
Mike: Because her therapist is so much more interested in his own intellectual prowess than her emotional experience that he's never going to be perceptive enough to be like what you actually need is a sense of forgiveness. And what you actually need is some form of catharsis with reckoning with the fact that your mother was not the greatest mother to you, despite her early death and that having a miscarriage or potentially more than one miscarriage is something you are blaming yourself for, but he's not perceptive enough for that. So it's like, it takes fucking 14 months, and she has to finally come up with like, well, I'm going to create some like saints on my shoulder rooting for me.
Sarah: And the saints don't want me to suffer. And I'm not sure that you don't.
Mike: I mean, there's also the thing of, I think it's impossible to separate the form of therapy that you undergo from the question of whether or not you believe it. There's people that swear by psychoanalysis, there's people that swear by CBT or whatever, you know, hypnosis, whatever it is. But it's not clear to me that the effect of the actual therapy is more important than the extent to which you believe in it. If you know, you do like Freudian id, super ego stuff, and that works then like it works. And if you do acupuncture, it works. And if you do past life regression, it works. It's just, Pazder is so much less interested in what Michelle actually needs.
Sarah: And she just kind of finds her way there essentially on her own, which is amazing. Okay. So back to Satan in the bone, I know you're very excited to see how that resolves. Satan is again, so upset that he's like not even rhyming. “The beast, enraged, plugged himself deeper into the fire. Across the chamber Michelle thought she saw her mother. As Michelle watched, her mother fell to the ground. And from the spot on which she fell there came a flash of light. Michelle realized that was where she had hidden the bone. Then she felt a hand on her head and the touch was ineffably comforting. Look, set a voice. Just, look there. It was Ma Mere’s son. And my Ma Mere’s son says, hang on to this. And she opens her hand and it's the fragment of bone. I've got the bone, she whispered to herself. The trophy had been taken and the war was over. The fire began to die out. She looked over at the beast. He was watching from the fire, supervising as his attendance packed the altar implements.” This makes me think of every convention I've been to where it's like the last day. And they're like starting to break down the tables and stuff. “With that, the hordes turned their backs to the altar and began to trudge away. As they went, Satan rasped out to them his final charge. The time is ripe. The time is near. The time of the beast. The time of year. The time to come, the time to begin, the time to spread, to die, to win.” Poems can't lose. Ma Mere shows up and the Virgin Mary says, “We'll put everything that you've seen and heard, we'll put it in a safe place. We’ll keep it safe.” And so the Virgin Mary is the one, she's performing a miracle and locking her memories up. So that she can only access them when she's old enough and strong enough and ready. When she finds a kind, good, lithe, man. She’ll recover them. Presumably.
Mike: Because she needs an in-universe explanation for why this didn't come up earlier. So she's adding like a little magic box thing.
Sarah: And the other thing that Michelle is doing that I think is answering the conundrum that she's been in ,is that she is turning Dr. Pazder into part of the prophecy, right? Because the Virgin Mary is like, you have to find the ears to hear when you’re grown up. And we have to preserve these memories so the right people can help you to spread the word.
Mike: I feel like Michelle is doing the thing where it's like, I have to leave this abusive relationship, but I have to leave it in a way that makes him think it was his idea. She is doing the work of preserving Dr. Pazder's fucking ego that like he gets to be important. She knows that there's no way she's going to get out of this and less Pazder gets to be the hero.
Sarah: Yes, she needs the right, good kind judo-doing Catholic to help her in this holy war that she has been chosen to be a crucial part of. And that by extinction, he has been chosen by the Virgin Mary and her kid to be part of also. I mean, this also makes me think of how it always annoys me when there's some like viral tweet or something that's like, women apologize too much in emails and they should all write emails like men do where they're like really abrupt. And my response to that is always A.) I like being nice. And I don't think that it's entirely a bad thing just because women do it more often and B.) if women are inclined to be overly apologetic or self-effacing in communications with men generally, and maybe especially in workplace communications, it is because we have been paying attention and we have learned that the way to get a male superior or even a coworker, basically any man you work with or near, sometimes the best way to get him to listen to your idea is to make him think it was his idea. If we are acting in a way that reflects the fact that we know that, then like that's not ultimately our fault.
Mike: Right, right. That is absolutely what Michelle is doing. I mean, it's also noteworthy that she has now converted to Catholicism and she's now throwing in all these Catholic figures into her visions. Right? Because that also reinforces, for him, the fact that his religion is true. Like she could have thrown in other mystical figures that saved her.
Sarah: Yeah. She could have had a big Ganesh come in and do something helpful. That would be nice. And it's like, he's plateaued on the fact that he is the chosen one for Michelle. And it's, it's kind of like when Luke Skywalker figures out that like, actually that astronomic droid didn't end up on Tatooine, like just by happenstance. He's like, oh my God, the whole time, like, I've always been the one who was meant to be the protagonist.
Mike: I also love the lack of self-awareness that he can't see any of this. Like, is there a chance she's doing this to flatter me? Doesn't fucking cross his mind.
Sarah: It's one thing to not notice what's going on as you're living it, but then to not notice things like, as you're writing about them in book form.
Mike: Yeah. So is this kind of it like the vision, just kind of peter out, with like the bone thing kind of went nowhere, but like Virgin Mary kind of gave her the bone.
Sarah: And it's interesting cause it doesn't appear that that did anything except annoy him. It's unclear if this has affected his ability to do anything, it's more just like Michelle wins in this contest of wills, I guess.
Mike: And then everyone just kind of files out and she's still in the room and like that's basically it for the visions?
Sarah: Yeah, the final version is Michelle is in this empty round room talking to the Virgin Mary, and they just get to have this little moment together. Michelle and Ma Mere, and it's really, it's, it's really lovely, I think. And my marriage takes her robe and does the classic mom thing of rubbing some of the dirt off of Michelle because no one has bathed or taken care of Michelle or done nice mom things for her. The Virgin Mary is telling us, and I'm really glad that she's explaining this because I would not have guessed it, that Michelle taking the bone and Satan not being able to find it rattled him enough, that he spilled more of his plans than he was intending to. Michelle says she doesn't want to go back to live with her mother and Ma Mere says, “You can live with her. You don't have to be what she is.” Which like, thank you. That's I think, again, something that Michelle has been just wanting to hear this entire time, and rather than her therapist say it, she just had to get the Virgin Mary to say it to her.
Mike: She’s telling it to herself like all of the other work she's done in this entire book.
Sarah: Yeah. Jesus comes also.
Mike: Oh, sure.
Sarah: And he says, “Close your eyes for a while. Think about the bunnies and grass and little lambs.” And he holds her hand. We just cut to we're back in the consultation room and Michelle says, “I don't have any more to say that's all there is. And that was all, the remembering was finished.” So it's worth noting that, like Michelle has said this before, like she's done remembering apparently because Dr. Pazder agrees with her, finally, and he's like, yeah, I'm satisfied with that.
Mike: Right. Only because he got the denouement that he wanted.
Sarah: And then we get an epilogue where we just have just a tiny bit of wrap-up. Had anyone noticed Michele's absence from everyday life during the time in the round room?
Mike: For 81 days in the middle of a school year!
Sarah: “She does not know. Did anyone question her about it after her return? She cannot remember that anyone did”, she can neither confirm or deny.
Mike: This is totally, this is cogent or the publisher being like, uh, this seems really implausible, so like, can you add some, just like, yada, yada, yada, about like wouldn't somebody have noticed that she was gone? And so they add this like, oh, nobody asks cause like nobody cared enough about Michelle.
Sarah: Call the Rockford Peaches because we’ve got to cover some bases. “Did she ever again see any of the Satanists? She has no idea. Since Michelle, as a child, had no memory of the horrible things that had been done to her, she had no reason to be aware of such people.” So this is smart. They're like, why would she be looking for Satanists? Ma Mere locked away all these memories and gave her no reason to find suspicious, perhaps vast numbers of people in Victoria missing one finger on their left hand.
Mike: This is like the FAQ at the end of the book, everything the editors were like, Hey, sorry, hang on, did she recognize the people with missing fingers? And then she's like, oh no, because the Virgin Mary locked them in their thing.
Sarah: And then we get kind of a soliloquy from Michelle about what, what seems to be at the heart of this, or what seems to me to be at the heart of this, which is her relationship with her mother. “I think I figured out why I ache inside out so much. I am in mourning. A part of me is dying. It's a part of me inside, a part I had to have for years. It's the me who saw my mother as wonderful and loving me terribly. The part who worshiped my mom and saw me as the center of her world. The me who had a mom to play with.”
Mike: This is actually insightful.
Sarah: “Now, my body memories have killed my make-believe and I just can't get away from it. My body has told me the reality and never again will I have Michelle with only happy memories. I have to be real, no matter what the cost.”
Mike: This, this is the insight that she would've gotten within like three sessions if she had gone to a fucking female therapist, like all she had to do was go to like a real therapist.
Sarah: But we are told, “The remembering is no longer with her. She is a busy and cheerful person. She has faced her past and resolved her feelings about it. It is hard for her to forgive her mother, but she hopes her mother will be forgiven.”
Mike: Also not how therapy works.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s like she's done now. And she's fine. Yeah.
Mike: This is like what we saw in the letter that she wrote to Dr. Pazder, it's like, bad is bad and good is good. It's like you do therapy and then they fix you and then you're done and happy. Like, no, that's not how anything works. It's also amazing that Pazder is like, I guess, allegedly a therapist and signed off on this, what therapist would be like, yep. That's what therapy does. Totally happy afterwards.
Sarah: Like, I mean, there's a lot of this rhetoric too. We talked about how in Sibyl, like the famous climax of that book is that all of her alters integrated. And she was better. And then there's like the perennial issue of the fact that there are certain forms of knowledge. And this is one of them where the shape of narrative that the publishing industry insist, something has to take is just a shape that doesn't exist in that world. Like there are no therapy narratives where someone's like all better at the end that they don't have any more problems for the rest of their life.
But like, that was the way that Americans got to read about therapy, because that was the profitable way to publish it. So you have this thing where you can see the industry mangling the truth of the subject matter that it's trying to represent.
Mike: It's also entrenching, this myth that I think is very widespread and very pernicious that like whatever mental illness you have, whatever issues you're dealing with in your adult life, they have a cause. And all you have to do in therapy, regardless of the form of therapy, is figure out the cause and then they’ll be fixed. And like, you can cut it out like a tumor.
And I hate this idea that it's like, the thing you do when you go to therapy is like, you find the one thing, which is like, why you're sad and then you talk about it and you're not sad anymore.
Sarah: Like if sadness is a boil that you lance, and all this emotional puss comes out. And then you just go home.
Mike: You could have picked a less gross one for that, but yes.
Sarah: I'm sorry.
Mike: Are we done with the book? Are we, are we doing talking now? I have thoughts.
Sarah: Are we doing talking now? Yes. Let me read you the final page of the epilogue, because this is a book kind of giving us its mission statement. And so once again, it's 1980, right? Imagine that you were finishing this book, that you made it all the way through somehow.
Mike: The seven Americans who did yes.
Sarah: Very impressed. And you're like, what does Michelle want me to take away from this?
Mike: Oh no. Is she going to be raising awareness?
Sarah: “Michelle hopes the book will alert people to the horror of hurting children. The possibility that another child is now being prepared for the next feast of the beast. It is the time for it. It's very much on her mind.” And yeah, that's the, oh wait. And then I have the acknowledgement, sorry.
Mike: Oh, where she thinks Satan and the Virgin Mary.
Sarah: She does not thank Satan. “To our families, with much love.”
Mike: I mean, obviously not. To our families with divorces, eventually. What is that?
Sarah: “To Doug, particularly. For his strength and support. For not questioning, but trying to understand.”
Mike: That’s some cold shit.
Sarah: And to Michelle's mother, whom she still loves, “And to Ma Mere, for her helping her to know that.” So that's the book! We have made it through this book.
Mike: Oh God, thank God.
Sarah: And you can tell people for the rest of your life that you have experienced Michelle Remembers. And they'll say what's that? And you'll say, I don't want to talk about it.
Mike: Yeah. I think ‘experienced’ is a good word for it. Cause it's not like you read it, because that implies some level of pleasure.
Sarah: It's a lot. I think it's much more enjoyable for me getting it through with you than it has ever been at any other time. So thank you. And I'm sorry.
Mike: I'm glad one of us enjoyed this. So I guess it's time for Jerry's final thought about what this book is and what it means to us.
Sarah: For now, because we are going to come back in another episode and talk about what I am going to try to figure out about what actually happens.
Mike: I'm so excited.
Sarah: But for now, let's focus on what we have been given by this book. If someone asked you what this book was about, what would you tell them?
Mike: Oh for fuck's sake. I mean, that's a tricky question to answer because there's sort of the ostensible story, which of course, is a child being tortured by Satanists. There's the story that we have projected onto it, which is that this is a woman who is suffering from trauma and eventually starts being traumatized by her own therapist and finds a way to escape.
But then there's also the third explanation, which is that, I mean, she married this guy at the end. So in some ways they both got exactly what they wanted. Pazder got to feel like he was this fucking crowning genius therapist, guy who discovered this thing that it didn't even have a name at the time that he discovered it. And she got the guy that she pretty clearly wanted from our reading of the text, anyway.
Sarah: Yeah. And I also think that this is getting into a really uncomfortable area, which is that thing where there are relationships that are a positive thing in the context of someone's life, but that involve uncomfortable elements as far as the potential for actual consent is concerned. Like, I feel like this is an issue that we also find ourselves confronting, if we feel ourselves called upon to judge a relationship between two adults, that began when one of them was quite young. I guess the only thing you can do in that situation is to be like, well, why do I think anyone needs me to decide what I think about any of this? We can kind of acknowledge stuff is troubling, but I think we can do that without deciding to pass judgment on the whole situation.
Mike: Right. But I think I find it chill for me to be judgy of this, because if somebody is going to put their relationship into the public realm as a model for other professionals, like I get to be kind of a dick about it.
Sarah: And that's where judgment becomes relevant because it's like, okay, it's fine what you're doing in your own life, like, that's not my business. But if you are trying to educate social workers and prosecutors using this text and this memoir of your confusing relationship as something that we should do for the good of the children, that's where it becomes necessary to start trying to kind of debunk this story that you're selling.
Mike: I mean, how do you describe this book to people?
Sarah: Oh my God. I describe it as the book that accidentally started the Satanic panic.
Mike: Oh by ‘accidentally’, you're giving it some credit, which is interesting.
Sarah: I am. And that's how I would describe it. And I'm curious about to what extent our listeners would agree with me, because my reading of it is I see it kind of as this equation. Dr. Pazder wants to believe he's heroic. He has to believe that he's waged in some kind of holy war, I think in order to not feel completely terrible about leaving his wife and family for his patient, you know, which means that he's violating very sacred laws of both his profession and his faith.
Mike: I mean, I was going to say, it's interesting for a book that basically posits that Catholicism is straightforwardly true to then, as an epilogue, be like, oh, and both people left their marriages, which is not something that Catholics are like super chill about.
Sarah: That's not mentioned anywhere in this book, which is also something where you're like, okay, but like that's part of the narrative. So the fact that we're not, that readers weren't able to get that information is frustrating. I also think it's like, can you imagine reading this book and not picking up on that, though? Because like, oh my goodness. Like how would you describe the way that they're describing their relationship?
Mike: I can't even do it without bursting into song. It's pure, like lovey-dovey-ness. He's holding her hand. He's rubbing her arm.
Sarah: It is very romance novel-y, isn't it?
Mike: Super-duper romance novel-y. Nobody, if it was like another form of therapy, you can imagine some steamy bestseller about a therapist and a patient falling in love with each other over like the mystery that she solved or something like something secular and something a little less fucked up than what she's describing.
Sarah: What you're saying is that this is like a promising first draft.
Mike: Yes. Because imagine if he had hypnotized her and like gotten her to remember all this extra stuff and like solved a cold case.
Sarah: And then that could have been a Dustin Hoffman movie. That would have been very charming. But instead we're living in a world where this was published as non-fiction and where it informed the next 40 years of legal reality in North America. Like, I cannot overstate this. I know I'm being repetitive, but like, you can't possibly blame Michelle or Dr. Pazder or Thomas Congdon, the publisher or any single person who worked on this book for what happened, because the scale of what it inspired is almost unimaginable. So I would say that I look at it as an equation where we have these two people who clearly need something, and it seems like what they need is each other. And Dr. Pazder needs to feel needed and important and chosen.
Mike: Lithe.
Sarah: And Michelle has to feel needed and valued and loved and accepted. And it feels like this, not even an equation, let's say a chemical reaction. Let's say we have this reaction. And then poof, you know, they come to each other with these needs, they generate the story and then that story allows them to fuse and to fall in love and confess their love to each other at some point, and then get married and have a life together.
And we can presume it's at least likely since they stayed married until Dr. Pazder's death, that it was a good marriage. And the problem is that that reaction created that story and they presumably kind of moved on with their lives eventually. And we're focused on their marriage and on each other, but the story still existed and the story sort of lumbered off across the border, you know, just like this-
Mike: Gollum.
Sarah: Yes, exactly. That's what I was going to say. And it showed up in Southern California and it showed up in Minnesota and it showed up in the Miami area and in North Carolina and just made its way around America and Michelle and Dr. Pazder didn't intend that but that's what happened. And I guess to the extent that there's a lesson to be learned here, it's about owning your emotions, right? This is something we run into a lot and then we've been talking about a lot, this thing where like, if you feel like, I need this person. Like I want to be with this person. Like you can just acknowledge that you feel that way and it's real. And it matters because you feel it and your feelings matter and you don't have to be part of a holy war. You know, you can be weak, and you can be tempted, and you can still accept yourself as a human being. And you don't need to be pardoned by any major religious figures. And I just feel like here were these two people who wanted each other and who apparently had the ingredients for a good relationship. And like, wouldn't it have been nicer if they had not gotten there this way.
Mike: Yeah. If they had met at Jamba Juice and just gone on a normal date.
Sarah: But yeah, next time we're going to, we're going to talk about what really happened to the extent that we can figure that out.
Mike: You have no idea. I'm so excited. We're finally going back to real life. This is it.
Sarah: I think real life can never truly be grasped, but we're trying, we're making a good faith effort.
Mike: And if it doesn't match up to your expectations, we can just make a TV movie about it.