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There's a small online movement called Love Has Won, and it has carried a strange fascination for some time.

Basically, it's a digital cult, and it teaches about energy healing and past life reincarnations

and galactic starships. It's been the subject of documentaries and podcasts and an HBO series

that tells its strange and tragic end, where police

officers find this mummified blue-tinged body wrapped in Christmas lights and glitter makeup.

It was a woman whose followers called Mother. She's the main character in journalist Leah Sotilly's new book. Her name was

Amy Carlson. Amy Carlson was really a daughter of America's heartland. She was someone who grew up

in the Midwest. She moved to Texas as a child and was raised in the suburbs of Dallas.

Beautiful girl, really good grades, had a great upbringing.

After she graduates from high school, she really tries to do her best to make her way in the world.

But what that means is she keeps her job at McDonald's.

And she becomes a manager.

This is not quite what Amy Carlson thought that she would become.

And, you know, as life is wont to do,

she encounters a series of hurdles and obstacles in her life.

She has three different children by three different men.

She struggles with alcohol.

Life is just really coming at her in a way that maybe she didn't expect.

Thank you. coming at her in a way that maybe she didn't expect. So around Thanksgiving of 2007, she and her family gets together for dinner in a Mexican

restaurant outside Houston.

...