The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

(Gaiman Photograph by Eric Ogden from the New Yorker)

Neil Gaiman has a write up/profile in the New Yorker this week by Dana Goodyear. Described as “a lengthy, if also gently sniffy, profile” by the Guardian, it’s essentially a bit of a Gaiman primer although interesting for these little snippets, which delve into a little known detail of his background:

“The pivotal fact of Gaiman’s childhood is one that appears nowhere in his fiction and is periodically removed from his Wikipedia page by the site’s editors. When he was five, his family moved to East Grinstead, the center of English Scientology, where his parents began taking Dianetics classes. His father, a real-estate developer, and his mother, a pharmacist, founded a vitamin shop, G & G Foods, which is still operational. (According to its Web site, it supplies the Human Detoxification Programme, a course of vitamins, supplements, and other alleged purification techniques, which Scientology offers at disaster sites like Chernobyl and Ground Zero.) In the seventies, his father, who died last year, began working in Scientology’s public-relations wing and over time rose high in the organization. Gaiman has two younger sisters, both still active in Scientology; one of them works for the church in Los Angeles, and the other helps run the family businesses.”

“These days, Gaiman tends to avoid questions about his faith, but says he is not a Scientologist. Like Judaism, Scientology is the religion of his family, and he feels some solidarity with them. “I will stand with groups when I feel like they’re being properly persecuted,” he told me.”