Book 60 - Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper

Reading date - January 2021

My introduction to the Phelps-Roper clan was via the Louis Theroux show about the Westboro Baptist Church, The Most Hated Family in America.  That was on years ago and I had some thoughts about them which I maintain to this day.  They are the family that picket the funerals of US soldiers, stating that they died because their parents are sinners and therefore the kids deserved to die.  

From this, you would think that the family were going to be total arseholes to everyone and that they were a group of uneducated hicks.  Both of these assertions are untrue, they were big advocates of the civil rights movements and both the founder and his daughter (grandad and mother of Megan Phelps-Roper) are lawyers.

The book doesn't sugarcoat anything and Megan explains how life was for her and her siblings, how they petitioned outside her own school, outside churches and at the funerals of the cannon fodder sent to war for a country that won't give a shit if you're homeless once you return.  Megan is on Twitter and she defends what her family does until one day she starts talking to a man who challenges her way of thinking.  

You know what happens next, it's a tale as old as time.  She escapes the family.  She escapes them and holds no ill will towards them, she has said herself in the book that when she goes back to her hometown, she leaves flowers on their doorstep but she cannot bring herself to go inside and speak to them, which is fair enough.

I liked this book, it showed how her whole brain was twisted one way because she was only ever fed one narrative but because of social media, she was able to free her mind (and the rest followed) and understand that the world is actually very different to how she was told to see it.