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Salon Books interviewed Fraser, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., via e-mail.

Your book describes many past examples of how the Christian Science Church energetically attempted to squelch the publication, dissemination and sale of books that are unflattering to Mary Baker Eddy or the church itself. Were you or "God's Perfect Child" the object of similar tactics?

So far, there's been little interference with my book coming from the church. I did hear recently that an editor at the Christian Science Monitor (whom I've never met) approached one of my publisher's representatives at a book fair and informed her that I was "troubled." This is a regrettably common ploy: A previous manager of the church's Committee on Publication (its office of propaganda and press relations) once told a journalist that Tom Simmons, author of a memoir about his Christian Science childhood ("The Unseen Shore"), was an unreliable source on the religion because his life was "falling apart."

Also Today The respectable cult In her richly researched new book "God's Perfect Child," Caroline Fraser asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin.

The Committee on Publication called my editor at the Atlantic Monthly just before my article about Christian Science was published in 1995, expressing various concerns, and Scientists sent outraged letters after it appeared, many of them detailing healings they'd experienced and one of them going so far as to suggest that I'd nailed the last nails in Christ's hands. Although I'm grateful that the Christian Science Church is not as aggressive in policing its reputation as, say, the Church of Scientology, Christian Scientists, particularly those who work for the Mother Church (headquarters of the movement), are masters of the passive-aggressive style, and I'm sure I haven't heard the last from them.

It also sounds like the church is disabled enough by its recent decline in fortune and membership that it can't really mount the sort of intensive campaign against your book that it did against others several decades ago. Did anyone in your family or personal life who is also a church member attempt to dissuade you from writing either the Atlantic article or this book?

I think it's true that the church has far less influence now over publishers and editors than it did a few decades ago, in part because of the decline of the Monitor and in part because the cachet of Christian Science has largely vanished. Oddly, however, the church continues to retain significant political power. There are currently five members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are practicing Scientists, and the church has convinced Sens. Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy to fight for Medicare coverage for Christian Science "nursing" services, which are essentially religious.

Aside from the Committee on Publication guys, who certainly tried to convince me not to write about Christian Science, no one in my own circle of family or friends has. The only remaining Scientists in my family are my parents; my brother and sister left the faith long ago, as I did. After the Atlantic article, I heard that old friends and acquaintances from my Mercer Island, Wash., church were disappointed by it, but you have to remember how circumspect Scientists generally are; indeed, Mary Baker Eddy's Church Manual forbids members of the church from "unauthorized debating" about the religion. And Scientists believe that talking about illness or misfortune of any kind makes it real, so they tend to be pretty close-mouthed about the things that bother them. I got a letter from my longtime piano teacher, for instance, which gently remonstrated with me, but, like most Scientists, she attempted to persuade me to her point of view by telling me about the healings she's experienced. Another woman from our church told my sister that everyone there still loves me.

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