Nicole Cuffy: On the Allure of Cults, the Trauma of the Vietnam War, Grief, Rage, and Her Novel ‘O Sinners!’
Nicole Cuffy’s new novel, O Sinners! (Penguin Random House, 2025), tells the captivating story of Faruq Zaidi, a journalist on assignment in the California redwoods to cover a sinister cult known as “the nameless.” The nameless is led by a charismatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, who lures beautiful young people into his cult and preaches what he refers to as the 18 Utterances. In compelling prose, Cuffy weaves together three narrative threads: one that takes place in present day California, one that takes place in Vietnam during the war, and one that takes the form of a documentary script about the nameless. This generation-spanning epic explores grief, rage, the trauma of war, and what exactly it is that makes cults and their leaders so inescapably magnetic.
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Nicole over Zoom to discuss the novel, her writing process, and the fascinating research that went into her gripping new book.
Emma Burger: When we meet your protagonist, Faruq, he’s living in his parents’ home after both of them have died, going through the grieving process. He refuses to move anything of theirs and has left his home exactly as they had it. Why did you write him in that space?
Nicole Cuffy: I think one of the things about Faruq that he maybe has in common with Odo is this idea of trying to enforce a sense of order on a world that is chaotic. It manifests slightly differently in both of these characters, but with Faruq, it really manifests in this sort of adhesion to stasis. You have this very rigid structure. His father has died. There’s been this seismic change in the house and this trauma in the house that he lives in. And yet he doesn’t want any part of it to change. He’s actually quite resentful even to his family members coming and maybe cleaning up a little bit. He doesn’t want any of that. He just wants things to be still. And that is his way of trying to enforce order on people.
EB: You write really beautifully about grief and what it means to lose your parents. When you began writing, did you set out to write a novel about grief?
NC: I think it didn’t really occur to me that I was writing about grief so much as I was writing about rage, especially rage as a result of systemic injustice or an oppressive system. Again, this is something that both Odo and Faruq have in common with each other. Odo comes from fighting in a war that, for a lot of soldiers, feels chaotic and unjust, and he is coming from a country where his blackness is a problem. And Faruq is coming from an experience where being a Muslim American is really difficult. Both of them have this rage against their circumstances that they are dealing with in disparate, but similarly maladaptive ways.
EB: Faruq goes to California to write a piece of investigative journalism looking into a cult known as the nameless. When you were conceiving the nameless, did you draw on real cults? Where did you draw inspiration from?
NC: I did a couple of things. I did a ton of research into cult rhetoric and how cults are structured, as well as a lot of research into the way religions are formed and how they’re structured. So a lot of the nameless, I sort of conceived of myself. I did my research into how a religion is structured, and basically, all major world religions have the same eight components. All I did was take those eight components and fill them in under the fictionalized version of the nameless. So the nameless is completely fabricated. It’s completely made up. But I will say that I did draw inspiration from some real life cults. The biggest influence was probably, I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary on Netflix called Wild Country.
[So] the nameless was something that I completely cobbled together through a theological structure. I wrote out this cult in my notebook and then enacted it in the fiction itself.
EB: Faruq, when we meet him, is in an emotionally vulnerable place. Do you think this makes him more susceptible to the ideology of the nameless? Did you spend a lot of time thinking about how people end up getting sucked into cults?
NC: Lots of time thinking about how people get sucked into cults. Part of the impetus of even writing something that explored a cult was this central question of, what is it that makes cults so compelling for us? I feel like there’s a lot of cult media that has been coming out and people continue to be fascinated by it. I feel like every ten years or so we sort of recycle the Manson story and people just can’t get enough of it. Or we recycle the Jonestown story. And again, people just can’t get enough of it.
So I kind of was starting to ask myself, what is it that people find so fascinating about cults? Why is this such an inexhaustible interest for us culturally? And the answer is actually kind of boring because it’s a boring question. The question that we’re all trying to answer is, what makes people join cults? And I think the reason that we’re seeing that this interest in cults is so evergreen is because the answer to that question is not really satisfying. The answer is simply that people are drawn to cults because cults are really good at finding people’s vulnerabilities and exploiting them. I think the more interesting question, though, is how does a cult leader do that? How do we find those insecurities and exploit them? And so that was really the question that I sort of unfolded in my research and then began to write.
Coming back to Faruq, the two things that make him most vulnerable to his cult are yes, the fact that he’s in this really vulnerable emotional space, even though he’s almost not acknowledging it for himself because he’s created this really structured existence to cage in his grief and his rage. It doesn’t quite work though because of course you have to move through those emotions. You can’t just put them in a box and never deal with them. They will come out somewhere. So he is more vulnerable than he thinks he is because he hasn’t quite allowed himself to grieve first his mother’s death and then the death of his father, which is more recent.
The other thing that makes Faruq especially vulnerable to the cult’s rhetoric is the same thing that makes us kind of all vulnerable, which is that we don’t think that we are vulnerable. Everybody thinks they’re not susceptible to a cult. You know, we sort of see the end stage of a lot of these malicious cults. And we think to ourselves, how does anybody get stuck? I would never fall for that. But the truth of the matter is that cults are a lot more ubiquitous than we think they are. Probably all of us are currently involved or have been involved in something a little bit culty. So I think that illusion that I could never is actually what makes people more susceptible to falling into the trap of a cult.
EB: The women of the nameless are all remarkably beautiful. Is that a common thread you found in researching cults? Why was it important to you that this be a feature of the nameless?
NC: I’m almost making a joke about how Odo is sort of positioning himself as this progressive, worldly, or wise cult leader, though he doesn’t think of himself as a cult leader, I don’t think, when really a lot of the cult is rooted in cultural appropriation and misogyny. So he’s specifically recruiting these young people and all of them kind of have to be hot. There is a really problematic system from the genesis of this cult that Odo is enacting, but not acknowledging at the same time.
EB: The story is told through three separate timelines. How did you decide on these three narrative threads, and was it difficult to write in this way?
NC: I didn’t really find it difficult to write in that way. If anything, it was kind of fun because the writing of it happened for me the same way that the reading of it happened. So it’s not like I wrote all of 1969 to 1970 in one go and then turned to present day. I would write one section and then go to the next section and write the next section, which sort of kept the experience of writing it fresh for me. So, if anything, it was maybe challenging just to get back into the voices of those various sections, but it made for a fun writing experience for me.
The book really starts for me in Vietnam. The first time I got inspired to begin the journey of writing this book was when I’d just started listening a little bit more closely to the music that came out of the Vietnam War era. And it was songs that I had been familiar with before. The first one that I heard that struck me in a particular way was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son. I had heard the song before, but I had never really listened to it. And so I was really listening to it and I was like, wow, this is so interesting, because as I’m listening to this song, it feels like an immersive experience. It feels like I’m in the era in which this song was produced. And it feels like I’m tapping into the youthful sort of rebellious, angry energy that was happening in American popular cultures, as well as countercultures in the 1960s to early ’70s. That was what really inspired me to start researching the Vietnam War itself.
As I was researching the Vietnam War, I started to focus particularly on Black soldiers because one of the really fascinating things about the Vietnam War and why it was so unique in American history was that it was the first war that was fought with a completely desegregated American army. Which is really significant for the time period, because we’re sort of at the climax of the civil rights movement in the United States. So for those two things to coincide led to this really volatile atmosphere that was complicated for soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. As I started looking more into the experiences of Black soldiers, one of the common narrative threads from these firsthand accounts was this sense of rage that hey, they’re being sent to the front lines dying in disproportionate numbers in a war that they understood to be a civil war. There was a lot of confusion among soldiers, not just Black soldiers, about why the U.S. was involved in the war at all.
On top of that, there was this sense of rage that here you have soldiers who are fighting for their country, but then at the same time, going home to their country and still being treated with the same bigotry that they left behind. There was a sense of a war being fought in Vietnam that they didn’t understand, that was taking them away from the more relevant-to-them war that was being fought on the ground in the United States. And so I started to ask myself the question, what could that rage do to somebody?
What happens to somebody as a result of that kind of rage? [That] injustice and that kind of impotent rage, what [could] that do? And my answer was that one thing that it could do is it could psychologically mutilate you. It could sort of warp you into this really damaged individual who as a result of the damage done to them starts to enact damage on other people. And that’s how I got Odo. Once Odo came to life for me, then the rest of the narrative started to unfold, and I started to realize what else I needed to tell the story I wanted to tell. I needed that bird’s eye perspective that the documentary provides. And it gave me the opportunity to break down some of the theology, some of the philosophy that goes into the cult versus a more recognized organized religion like Christianity. And then there’s the present action where we have someone else who is coming in—there’s an outsider’s perspective and we see the cult’s seductiveness through Faruq.
EB: How did you research the Vietnam War? Was there anything you read that was especially salient for you?
NC: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much material. And I will say that another thing that made the Vietnam War a unique war in American history is it was one of the most televised wars in our history. And that was part of what led to the ire that soldiers often returned home to, because we were just seeing too much. As I was researching it, I really had to learn to compartmentalize because the amount of information that I had and the amount of access to photographed evidence of war atrocities that I had was actually pretty uncomfortable to sit with. It was really disturbing on the one hand, and on the other hand, it was an avenue for creating a really immersive experience. I could really empathize with these soldiers on the ground. I did a lot of research into just like Vietnam documentaries, a lot of footage that was out at the time I was able to get access to, as well as reading firsthand accounts from soldiers.
I also made sure to specifically seek out firsthand accounts from Vietnamese soldiers as well, because I really wanted to round out my perspective. I didn’t only want the American perspective. And then I read any fiction that I could get my hands on about the Vietnam War, especially if it was written by a Vietnam War vet. The Things They Carried [by Tim O’Brien] was particularly impactful. That book is amazing. My god, what incredible writing. One of the things that I really love about it is that it calls itself fiction, but really it toes the line between fiction and nonfiction in a way that I love. And Matterhorn [by Karl Marlantes] was really impactful as far as being able to write about it, to start to inhabit the lingo and the language of soldiers fighting in Vietnam.
Then just kind of by chance, I ran into and struck up a friendship with a Vietnam War vet. He was willing to sit and chat with me about his experiences during the Vietnam War, which is not something that I necessarily would have sought out myself because I would be a little bit hesitant to sort of re-traumatize somebody. I know that was incredibly traumatizing and a lot of them are very reluctant to speak about it, but he was willing to speak about it. I was really lucky to get some of that firsthand perspective. He had a friend who came to the same café where we encountered each other for the first time, who wasn’t a soldier, but was around in the time and remembered the experience of being at home and watching some of his friends get shipped off to fight in Vietnam, and some of them returning and some of them not. So that was a really valuable perspective for me.
EB: You made the protagonist of your book a journalist, who at least at first, occupies an outsider role, observing the cult from an anthropological perspective. What about the role of the journalist was interesting to you as a vantage point?
NC: I think the thing that was interesting to me is the journalist, especially when you’re talking about any form of immersive journalism, is an objective, or is supposed to be a relatively objective observer, but they kind of can’t be. There is no such thing. I think one of the things that’s really interesting in our public conversations about media that’s happening right now is there’s this expectation of objectivity, when in fact there is nothing that is created by a human that is objective. We can’t do it. We can’t escape our own perspectives, but that conceit that you can enter into a situation and maintain that objective lens is really fascinating to me, especially as it pertains to something as seductive as a cult. So Faruq has one agenda. And then Odo and the nameless have a completely separate agenda. And I think the thing that was fascinating for me is to see this buttoned up journalist agenda really be at odds with the cult’s more sort of insidious and maybe even sinister agenda.
EB: What interested you in the 1960s and what do you think it was about that era that inspired so many cults like the nameless?
NC: That is a really good question because I do think, though there is a pretty large cult culture happening right now, the 1960s was really ripe for cults and counterculture. One of the reasons that was the case was because there was so much turmoil in the world in the 1960s. If you look at the historical context from 1960 to 1970, it’s not just that we have the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. We have a lot of political unrest. We’re coming off of the economic stability of the 1950s. We’ve just come through the Korean War and are heading into another war. There’s this incredible fear of the spread of communism, which is what ultimately propels us into the Vietnam war. We have just come out of the McCarthy era. And so there’s this lingering sense of paranoia and suspicion.
Then we have a generation of young people who are just kind of pissed off because the world that they are coming of age in is tumultuous and dangerous. So I think it was just a perfect storm for people to be looking for something else, something outside of the traditional religious structures of their parents, but that still held the security of the religious structures of their parents. And that’s where you get these cults that come in and say, hey, I’m not your mother’s Christianity, I’m a different kind of Christianity. I’m something else entirely. And I think that would have been really attractive to the youth of the ’60s and early ’70s.
EB: How has your experience been with this book getting into readers’ hands?
NC: It’s been cool. I feel like with this book, as opposed to Dances, which was my debut novel, I’ve been getting a lot more people reaching out to me directly to let me know that they’re reading or to even ask me questions, which is really interesting. I actually got recognized in public. I was in a class that I take every week and I was talking to this person I’ve been taking class with for a while and they were like, did you write a book? And I was like, yeah. It’s almost kind of embarrassing because I’m not Brad Pitt, I’m not a celebrity. It’s just this idea that my work is out there and people are able to connect it to me. That is very cool, but a little bit destabilizing for me.
EB: How did you get interested in writing in the first place?
NC: I just kind of have always known that I was a writer. I’ve always loved stories. I’ve always loved reading. My parents had this huge, or at least it looked huge to me at the time, library full of mostly sci-fi and horror and fantasy. Those are the genres that I grew up reading and I would just raid their library. I have always loved storytelling. Pretty much as soon as I knew how to spell, I was writing stories, and I didn’t know necessarily until maybe I hit high school that you could have a career doing that. And then it took me a little while to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. I thought I wanted to be a travel writer or a journalist, and then by the time I got to college, I realized that my lane was fiction.
EB: Is there anything you’re working on next?
NC: So right now, the next thing that will probably come out will be in spring of 2027. And that’s a book that’s pretty much written, though we’re still sort of tightening the manuscript up. I’m still working on it, but not actively writing anymore. And that one’s going to be about two musicians. It starts in the ’60s and it spans their lifetimes. It’s a blues musician who befriends this folk singer and they just have this really deep friendship over the course of their careers and over the course of their really complicated lives. That will be coming out in 2027. I don’t know what the title is going to end up being, but right now the working title is They Will Know Our Names. And I just started actively writing a new novel right now that’s really early in its infancy. I just finished my detailed outline for it. But basically it’s sort of exploring this concept of like a trickster deity being passed down through generations of ancestors.
EB: You love an epic!
NC: I do. I didn’t realize that. It used to be, even if you asked me last year, what kinds of things do you write? I’ve always found that question to be really paralyzing. But now I’m starting to realize, through other people telling me, that I have some themes that I consistently explore. And I think that sort of epic, spanning lifetimes or spanning a broad concept, is one of those. I didn’t realize that I was doing that, but I guess I do.
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Nicole Cuffy is the author of O Sinners! and Dances, which was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and 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.
