An interview with Nicole Cuffy
On the magic of craft, writing a cult, and the novel that changed her life
When a young journalist who is grappling with a recent loss is summoned deep into the California redwoods to investigate a mysterious cult, he begins to understand that not every question in life has an answer.
Faruq Zaidi is expecting something more nefarious when he is accepted into the cloistered world of “the nameless”, a group who adhere to devotions like See only beauty and Do not despair at death. Instead he finds an Instagrammable enclave rife with beautiful, young followers who have dedicated their lives to an enigmatic man known only as Odo.
Interspersed with Instagram posts underscoring the sect’s popularity, the novel is told in three parts: from Faruq’s perspective as he reflects upon the death of his parents and his own disillusionment with faith, through a documentary script which outlines the nameless’s clash with a Texas fundamentalist church, and a glimpse into Odo’s past as a young infantryman during the Vietnam War. As Faruq’s days with the group lapse into months, borders and beliefs blur, challenging his perception of the past and future.
Hypnotic, propulsive, and strikingly textured, O Sinners! explores the realms of possibility that unfurl in the wake of grief.
Where did O Sinners! begin for you—how did the idea arrive and what excited you most about writing it?
This book really began with music. I randomly came across Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son and just became fascinated by the popular protest music that was coming out in response to the Vietnam War in the late sixties and early seventies. This led me to begin researching the Vietnam War, and from there, my cult leader, Odo, began to form.
Everything else sort of spun out from there, and I began researching religion/theology, cults, and extreme beliefs. I was fully immersed in the research. I was voracious—I consumed anything I could get my hands on that was even marginally related to my research. So when I began writing, I was really excited to be fully immersed again.
I loved writing from the perspectives of Silk, Bigger, Crazy Horse, and Preach. And I loved unfolding the documentary, and imagining what it would be like to actually watch this fictional documentary. And Faruq’s perspective was really absorbing too, from his relationship with running to his experience with grief. That immersive component was really consuming for me as I was writing.
When did you first fall in love with writing? Were there any stories or books that particularly inspired you to begin writing fiction?
I have always loved stories, and I have to credit my parents for that. Both of them are avid readers, and they used to read to me quite a lot when I was a kid. My mom would make up the best stories off the cuff whenever I asked her to, and my dad was reading me The Iliad and The Odyssey (two of his favorites) from when I was a baby.
Their study was filled with books—mostly sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—and I would treat it like my own little personal library. They never discouraged my reading at all, or told me that there were things I couldn’t read. No censorship. So I read everything.
As a result, I’ve pretty much always been in love with storytelling. There wasn’t really one point at which I realized I wanted to be a writer—it was something I just knew about myself as soon as I had language, even before I knew that it could be a career.
When I reach high school, I read Toni Morrison for the first time—Sula. And it forever changed me as a writer. I hadn’t realized that I could do that with language. That was probably when I became very serious about connecting storytelling with the craft of language. I already knew, thanks to my folks and my culture, how powerful storytelling could be, but that was the moment at which I fully realized how much more powerful storytelling could be when paired with the very deliberate magic of craft.
What did your days look like while working on O Sinners!? Did you have a good idea of where the novel was going, or did the first draft surprise you?
When I was writing O SINNERS!, I was still single with no children—I didn’t even have my dog yet. So I had the luxury of getting out of my house, going to my local café, and spending the entire day writing. I started O SINNERS! in the summer of 2019, so my teaching schedule was really light. I remember sitting outside with a coffee (even though I don’t actually like coffee) and writing for hours. I would sweat and get stuck to the metal café chairs, and when I’d get up to leave, their imprints would be pressed into the back of my thighs.
I always go through a couple rounds of outlining before I actually start writing anything, so, while the outline isn’t set in stone (I set it up and then set it free once my pen hits the page), I generally have a clear sense of where the novel is going before I start writing.
The novel centres around a mysterious and controversial group who are known as “the nameless”. This, from Faruq’s perspective as he’s leaving New York for California on his assignment:
In his notes, he kept capitalizing “Nameless,” treating it like a proper noun. But that wasn’t really what they wanted. In their own documents, they never capitalized the n. They were called the nameless because they refused to label themselves as an organization, a movement. A cult.
From the 18 Utterances (the commands that the group follow) to their phrases and practices like getting “hipped” or “stripped”, you do such a wonderful job of avoiding the usual tropes typically found in fictional cults to flesh out this believable collective of people with a very mysterious, enigmatic man at their helm. There is something endlessly fascinating about cults. Were did you draw from—whether cults in history, or films or movies—for inspiration while writing?
To write this book, I did a ton of research into religions, cults, and extreme beliefs. I consumed everything on these topics that I could get my hands on, from movies and documentaries, to memoirs and fiction, to academic texts. One of the things I learned during this intensive research phase was that religions all have more or less the same structure, made up of about eight components, which include things like a theology, a cosmology, and cultic practices. All religions have these things.
So I used that structure to create “the nameless.” I literally wrote out this entire religion in the same notebook that I wrote the first draft of this novel in. There’s a documentary on Netflix called Wild Wild Country, which follows a group that builds a utopian city in Oregon, and then clashes with the local community already there. This documentary in particular was an inspiration as far as fleshing out the nameless community, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say the nameless is based on Rajneeshees (the group in the documentary).
There is also a narrative horror film called The Other Lamb, which helped to inspire the title, “O Sinners!” But probably the biggest source of inspiration for this book came from the music of the late sixties and early seventies. I’d often have it playing in my earphones as I wrote, as it helped me not only set the mood for the Vietnam sections, but also to frame Odo’s mentality and how it could leak into Faruq’s head the longer he stayed out in the redwoods.
“When I reach high school, I read Toni Morrison for the first time—Sula. And it forever changed me as a writer. I hadn’t realized that I could do that with language. That was probably when I became very serious about connecting storytelling with the craft of language. I already knew, thanks to my folks and my culture, how powerful storytelling could be, but that was the moment at which I fully realized how much more powerful storytelling could be when paired with the very deliberate magic of craft.”
—Nicole Cuffy
How did Faruq first arrive to you—did you always know you were going to write the story from a male perspective?
Faruq, in some ways, stands in for that part of all of us that thinks that we’re immune to the seduction of a cult. He’s that voice that says, there’s no way I’d ever fall for something like that. And then Faruq gets to go and get dangerously close to “something like that.”
It never really was a conversation I had with myself that I was going to explore that through the male perspective. Faruq just came through as male as I began to flesh out his character and the particular trauma he’s carrying around.
The novel unfolds across three connected segments: Odo’s time in Vietnam, the Nero documentary script, and the present as Faruq is living with the nameless. I imagine each section would demand something different from you as a writer. For example, the details in the Vietnam scenes are so precise, from the war names, to the food they eat, the way they speak to one another—can you talk a bit about how you navigated writing each section?
Each section was such an immersive experience; when I was writing the Vietnam sections, I would fully immerse myself in the sensory experience of those soldiers, and when I was writing the documentary script, I half imagined myself as a producer, invisible and almost voiceless. And in the present-day sections I fully wrapped myself up in Faruq’s perspective.
So, given that the book was more or less written in the same order that it is read in—I didn’t for instance, write each section out and then go back and weave them together—I found that I had to take little palette cleansers in between sections, either by sinking into research again or by reading novels about something wildly different. I read at least five novels while I was actively writing this one for exactly that reason.
Writing an almost eighty page script for a fictional documentary (titled Nero in the book) is an incredibly innovative way to add another layer to the nameless that Faruq wouldn’t necessarily have been able to present from his perspective. You even include music cues! How did you decide to incorporate the script into the novel—and did you have any prior screenwriting experience?
The fact that it’s 80 pages is actually news to me! It felt so brief from my perspective in writing it. Those sections tended to fly by for me as I was crafting them. For my cult research, I watched and was really moved by so many cult documentaries that it really seemed the natural move to write out this section in this way.
I had absolutely no prior screenwriting experience; I had to teach myself to write in this way completely from scratch. And then I turned to other books that had done something similar (such as Charles Yu’s INTERIOR CHINATOWN) to figure out how to ensure that this format was still readable in a smooth enough way for people expecting the experience of reading a novel.
So much of this novel’s inspiration is connected to music that I really wanted a way to communicate musically with the reader as well. The music is there, if a reader wants to know what that section sounds like, but they don’t have to look it up to have the experience of this documentary script.
“There wasn’t really one point at which I realized I wanted to be a writer—it was something I just knew about myself as soon as I had language, even before I knew that it could be a career.”
—Nicole Cuffy
Both Faruq and Odo are marked by war, loss, and tragedy. For years Faruq has not felt connected to his faith. When he embarks on his journey to the Forbidden City, he is described as “a brown ex-Muslim entering a world of beautiful people, many of them rich—and white.” In one instance, Faruq recalls, in the days after 9/11, returning home and finding the word TERRORIST written on his front steps.
What is an author’s responsibility when incorporating historical events or religion into a work of fiction?
Above all, fiction is fiction. It may mirror lived experience, but the mirror is only the thing that does the reflecting, not the object being reflected. So when writing fiction that incorporates history, there’s an agreement happening between the writer and the reader. We agree that I am only reflecting something. And as an author I think that I owe the book my meticulousness and my care. I do a ton of research, I try to speak to people or at least gather perspectives outside of my own.
I always want to be really thoughtful about what I’m trying to do when I’m reflecting. In this book, for instance, I explore the Vietnam War. In doing so, though, I’m really reflecting some of the central questions of the book: what does oppression and disenfranchisement do to someone? What can rage do to you?
Early in the book, you write: Faruq’s own faith began to fall away from him, gone entirely by the time he was seventeen. How he had to pretend, so he wouldn’t break his father’s heart. How the mimicry of devoutness was so close to the real thing…
This novel is also about the exploration of faith, the desire or quest to find something worth believing in. What do you hope readers will take away from your novel?
I’m hoping readers start to ask themselves the same questions Faruq asks himself throughout the novel: what is worth believing in? Are you immune to the seduction of a cult? Where are we all vulnerable and therefore ripe for exploitation?
But I’m also just hoping readers enjoy the movement I’ve tried to create here. It’s safe to succumb a little bit to this current because it isn’t real.
Can you recommend three books either similar in tone or content that a reader might enjoy after finishing O Sinners!?
Definitely!
O SINNERS! gets a lot of comparisons to Kaveh Akbar’s MARTYR! and I am both deeply flattered by that as well as understanding of the why behind it. It’s about more than cults; it’s about searching and hunger as well, however you interpret those themes. You can definitely see Akbar’s poetry muscles working throughout this book.
Lena Andersson’s WILLFUL DISREGARD is not about a cult, but it is about obsession. It’s a quick read that really explores power, perception, and self-destructiveness.
Rebecca Makkai’s THE GREAT BELIEVERS is stunning, and such a satisfying read in the sense that it is beautifully written and has this strong narrative current.
And as a bonus, I recommend everyone read Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, which is an amazing short story collection by a Vietnam vet that stopped me in my tracks when I first came across it.
Nicole Cuffy is the author of Dances, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Cuffy has an MFA from The New School and is a lecturer at the University of Maryland and Georgetown University. Her work can be found in the New England Review; The Masters Review, Volume VI (curated by Roxane Gay); Chautauqua; and Blue Mesa Review. Her chapbook, Atlas of the Body, won the Chautauqua Janus Prize and was a finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition. She lives in Washington, D.C.
To buy a copy of O Sinners!, consider supporting one of the Nicole’s favorite bookstores: Mahogany Books, Politics & Prose, Greenlight Books, Books Are Magic, East City Bookshop.
Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
I personally loved this interview for the insight into the all the craft and care that went into this book! Really insightful!!