I didn’t think anyone would take my Hinge prompt seriously. My ideal first date is … hot yoga. The prompt was partly a joke, written by a friend because I couldn’t figure out what to write. If anything, I figured the prompt would explain the series of yoga pictures scattered across my profile, proving to potential suitors that I wasn’t simply a yoga poser like most Angelenos who view vinyasa as just another workout trend.

I was a “serious yogi,” and to date me would mean respecting my daily practice and being OK with the 3,000 small Ganesha statues tucked into every crevice of my apartment.

Still, I was surprised and slightly amused when Noah asked, in all seriousness, if I would like to go to a yoga class with him and then get dinner afterward. In my effort to go on as many dates as possible as quickly as possible, I said yes, of course. I was a couple of months removed from an eight-year relationship that ended badly. I had convinced myself it would take 100 bad first dates before I found anyone remotely interesting. At least a yoga date for date No. 14 would be slightly more exciting than recounting life stories over drinks at the local bar.

In the texting convo that followed planning our date, Noah and I exchanged music tastes. He is a raver and loves EDM, and I am a Swiftie who also, as it turned out, loves EDM. We learned we attended Chapman University at the same time. We both worked on the Fox lot during the same years. And we share an appreciation for tofu, which he called a “gift from the heavens,” making my vegan heart skip a beat.

Noah and I met at a popular hot yoga studio in Hollywood for our one-hour Bikram-vinyasa fusion date. There was something familiar about him that I initially attributed to having crossed paths in college at some point. In the moments before class, we unloaded our gym bags and shoes into separate lockers outside of the yoga room while exchanging hellos that I expected to be awkward but somehow felt easy and unforced. My interest piqued.

In the yoga room, we set up our mats in the second row. As the class started and the instructor dimmed the lights to an orange glow, it hit me that hot yoga might be a horrible first date idea. We were two strangers, our yoga mats a little too close together, already sweating profusely as the yoga teacher instructed us into sun salutations. I couldn’t decide whether to focus on the class, the poses and keeping my breath slow or if I should try to continuously look cute since this was a date. I kept accidentally catching Noah’s eye in the mirror, and through facial expressions, tried to communicate that I was having fun and in no way subtly judging his yoga practice.

At some point during class, Noah slipped his shirt off and, even through my sweat-filled gaze, I caught a glimpse of his six-pack in the mirror. He met my eyes right as I started to blush, and I looked away fast, embarrassed at having been caught staring. The room suddenly felt hotter and more humid than before. I struggled to steady my breath. Yes, this was definitely a horrible yet interesting first date idea.

The teacher cued us onto our bellies for a backbend sequence. My eyes met Noah’s in the mirror again. This time I turned to look at him, and he smiled a surprisingly familiar smile that meant, “I know this is weird, but I’m having fun too.”

“That was a nice class,” Noah said once our hour was up and we were back in the air-conditioned studio lobby. “It’s one way to see your date sweaty and half-naked.”

I laughed in agreement as we parted ways to shower and change for dinner.

We met again at Cafe Gratitude on Larchmont Boulevard and ordered dishes called “I Am Grateful” and “I Am Remarkable” while recounting the class from our perspectives. He told me about his interest in yoga, how he only recently began practicing as a way to help with mobility. I told him yoga keeps me grounded. I showed off the book I kept in my purse, a story about living Jewishly in modern times, which led to a discussion of how we both grew up Jewish on opposite sides of the country. I liked how neither of us ordered a drink with dinner, choosing water over alcohol as the conversation remained interesting and focused. I liked how he was nice to the server and that his eye contact put me at ease. I liked how after paying the check, he walked me to my car and asked if he could kiss me.

I nodded, and he closed the distance between us. We kissed, and with it came a memory: Freshman year of college, orientation week or shortly afterward, I was at a football party with the girl who would soon be my sorority big. I was drunk and chatty and looking to make friends. I started talking to a freshman boy, and that conversation soon turned to making out, the way most drunken college flirting did back then.

My eyes opened, I pulled away from the kiss. “Have we done this before?” I asked.

Noah blushed then nodded softly.

“Freshman year, I think,” he said, “at a party.”

“A football party?”

“Yes!” He laughed, and I did too.

We kissed again. It was the type of kiss you don’t forget. The type that makes sense.

“Well, we have to do this again,” he concluded.

We said good night. He texted me a song to listen to. I played it in the car on repeat until I arrived home.

Until Noah, I thought an invisible string was only the name of a Taylor Swift song. Now, I know better.

The author is a community builder, writer and yoga teacher. She lives in Echo Park. She’s on Instagram: @allegramarcelle.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Agatha Smithson is that rare person who lacks the gene for self-doubt. Brash and brutally dismissive of anyone who disagrees with her, Agatha is the main character and unreliable narrator of Nancy Foley’s deviously plotted debut novel, I Am Agatha.

If you’re one of those readers who prizes likeability above all else in your fictional characters, you may be inclined to give I Am Agatha a pass. But that would be a mistake. This is a strange, fresh story about artistic ambition and personal autonomy willingly abridged for love. And, all too unusually, the love affair here is between two women in their 60s.

Agatha’s character is inspired by the real-life minimalist painter Agnes Martin, known for her canvases covered in graphs and stripes. Martin lived for years in New Mexico near Georgia O’Keeffe.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Martin was a solitary person, although she had significant relationships with women. Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, says that her novel was inspired by rumors of such a relationship between a friend of her grandmother’s and Martin.

I Am Agatha takes place mostly in the 1970s, with flashbacks to Agatha’s rough youth in Canada and allusions to a hard time in New York, including a stint at Bellevue. New Mexico offers Agatha a new start and an austere landscape that jibes with her art and own personality. Here’s Agatha, in her typical brusque, pared-down manner of speaking, describing the view from the adobe house she built herself high upon a mesa:

My house looks west out over a canyon that although far from any ocean whatsoever yet resembles one in scope and light. This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt. Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.

There is no other place on Earth like Mesa Portales. I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion. The truth is that there is a hierarchy. Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others.

The “objectively better” person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice who’s now declining into dementia. But, there are two obstacles to Agatha’s caretaking plan: The first is Alice’s adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan and Frank Jr. drops some bombshell news. Agatha tells us: “I’m startled but won’t let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it.” It’s hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.

The other obstacle seems more immovable: It’s Alice’s daughter, Lorna, who’s buried in the backyard of Alice’s house. Years ago, Lorna was murdered by her abusive husband, and Alice likes to sit every day by her daughter’s grave, which is planted with violets and lilacs. I’m not giving much away when I point out that Agatha’s practical, if grotesque, solution to this dilemma is revealed in the cover art of I Am Agatha; metaphorically, that book jacket hits readers over the head with a shovel.

This novel becomes even more deliciously weird as a pattern emerges: That is, whenever Agatha talks with Frank Jr. or other characters about Alice’s welfare, Alice is never present. She’s always taking a walk or a nap or just unavailable.

It becomes impossible to ignore that Agatha is estranged from a lot of people. She makes brief enigmatic references to a falling out with O’Keefe, and an academic colleague, and a parasitic graduate student who’s writing her thesis on Agatha’s art. As a narrator, Agatha turns out to be no more forthcoming to us readers than she’s been to any of these characters — former friends she now regards as antagonists.

In its ingeniously duplicitous narrative structure, I Am Agatha is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s magnificent Ripley novels. Not that Agatha is an amoral con artist like Tom Ripley, but she will do anything to safeguard Alice, her fading love. “We are all of us hunted animals from the moment we are born,” says Agatha, contemplating old age and death. None of us will outrun Mortality, but watching brilliant and wily Agatha try is captivating.

In 2017, a gaunt, bespectacled, 71-year-old woman wearing a crisp white uniform with two stars on the shoulder was arrested in New Mexico. This was Deborah Green, nee Lila Carter, the leader and self-described general of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC) – a cult that had been operating with impunity for three decades, despite various attempts by former members to get law enforcement to shut it down.

“But Deborah looked so small, so frail – so old” when she was arrested, writes Harrison Hill in his new book, The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult. And yet this was the woman who with her rantings and ravings about God and hell had struck fear into the hearts of her followers.

Hill’s book closely follows two characters – Maura Aluzas and Sarah Green – and their journeys into and out of ACMTC. It also explores the broader landscape of cults in the U.S. and how their logic and approach to religion have become less and less fringe over the years, to the point where ACMTC’s messy doctrine seems, in a twisted way, to have been ahead of its time.

Maura Aluzas met Lila in the late 1960s, when Maura worked at a hospital and helped care for Lila’s dying brother. The young women became close friends for a time; both women were seekers, each wishing to lead a meaningful, intentional life. During the near-decade they were out of touch, both embraced Christianity, and they certainly weren’t alone in their newfound fervor when, in 1980, Lila Carter – now married to Jim Green – reached out to Maura to share that she and her husband had found God; the 1970s had seen a resurgence of religious zeal. When the Greens returned to California, the families spent time together and Maura’s husband, Steve, was impressed with the Greens’ vision of a spiritual army that would “take up arms against the forces of secularism and mainstream Christianity.” Maura wasn’t entirely convinced, but she loved her husband and still held an old loyalty to the Lila she’d once known, even if this new, born-again version was harsher and stranger. And, so, when Steve wanted to move closer to Lila and Jim Green, Maura Aluzas agreed.

This began a series of incremental choices that wouldn’t, at the time, have felt as extreme as they seem in hindsight. Maura and Steve became the first members of the Greens’ church. They raised children in the harsh environment that Lila – who’d renamed herself Deborah – cultivated. And because of her lingering doubts, or simply because she refused to beat her children as firmly as Deborah thought she should, Maura was punished. She was first ostracized then exiled. Although being banished was painful, for Maura, it eventually became a relief, a way to escape.

The twists and turns Hill follows throughout this true story are extraordinary, and the author does a wonderful job of contextualizing the painful, sometimes horrifying choices his subjects made – especially those involving women leaving their children, which, as he points out, would be perceived very differently if these women had been men.

How and why do people end up in cults? Why did Maura Aluzas join ACMTC if she was never fully on board? Well, Hill reminds readers, no one really “joins” a cult. “They join what they believe to be an alternative community, or an especially devoted religious group.” Gradually, things change, but by then, the group has become a home, a kind of family.

Those born into or raised in a cult, of course, have no choice in the matter of joining. Sarah Green, Deborah and Jim’s first child, grew up in ACMTC, moving with her parents and their followers as they sought to avoid legal consequences for their various actions. When she escaped in adulthood, she left behind three young children of her own – practically speaking, she couldn’t run away with them. She tried to go back to get them, but her mother allowed her to see them only briefly before effectively hiding them away. Part of Sarah still believed that she was very literally going to hell for leaving ACMTC; she rationalized that her children, at least, could still be granted entry to heaven.

Our culture is fascinated by cults, and there’s an element of self-soothing to be found in consuming media about them. We would never join a cult, we tell ourselves. But it’s generally believed now that what makes a person vulnerable to a cult isn’t anything innate about them but rather a confluence of factors relating to their circumstances, their support networks, and the options open to them. I was often reminded, while reading this book, of a now-iconic scene in the second season of Fleabag, when Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character, who is grieving the death of her friend – which she believes to have been her fault – confesses to the priest she’s in love with that she wants someone to tell her what to do. She wants to be told “what to like, what to hate, what to rage about.” Most of all, she wants someone to tell her what to believe in and how to live her life.

It’s a relatable impulse, even for those who consider themselves fiercely independent. As Hill points out, the Greens were hippies, enthusiastic members of the counterculture before they became Christian extremists. “Hippies placed a premium on freedom,” he writes, “on the right to improvise their lives as they saw fit. And yet the 1960s and seventies also revealed the limits of freedom – how an endless array of options could be confusing, overwhelming, even debilitating. Sometimes it simply feels better being told what to do.”

Indeed – and it is precisely when we’re most confused and overwhelmed that we are most susceptible to losing sight of what we actually believe in and how we actually want to live. The Oracle’s Daughter is a story about the terror of losing the self but it’s also, gratifyingly, a story about finding the way back to it.

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her latest novel is Beings.