Parvati Shallow Aims to Destigmatize ‘Bad Behavior’ With Stories of Childhood Commune, ‘Survivor’ and Marriage
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Parvati Shallow was learning survival skills long before she just stepped on the Cook Islands for her first appearance on Survivor in 2006.
In her new memoir, Nice Girls Don’t Win, Shallow — who would go on to play Survivor four more times (including her upcoming stint on Australian Survivor) and appear on Traitors and Deal or No Deal Island — reveals she spent the first years of her life on a commune led by a controlling guru. Shallow, who interviewed her parents for the book, writes about the guru collecting the members’ money, orchestrating arranged marriages and planning elaborate schemes to adopt her followers’ newborns. The communal living conditions were described as “pure chaos,” where members were punished if they weren’t attentive in endless meditations.
“It was just really interesting to hear my parents’ stories and then overlay them on my adult life because I recreated so much of the same emotional themes that they had gone through without even knowing it,” Shallow tells Us Weekly in an exclusive interview ahead of the memoir’s July 8 release. “The theme of the book is patterns repeat. So take a look at your life and see what keeps showing up — and it’s probably you.”
One pattern Shallow is well aware of? The fact that she’s taken cues from the cult-like leaders in order to succeed on reality TV.
“I’ve been a student of yoga for decades, and the yoga community is full of these charismatic teachers and leaders who use love bombing to connect with their students to build a following. Then hearing the stories that my parents shared about the guru, I was like, ‘Oh my God, yeah, I’ve been using this,’” Shallow says. “My go-to strategy to win reality competition games is to make people fall in love with me. I am just naturally very enthusiastic and warm. I can also turn it on in context like competitions to win.”
Shallow certainly doesn’t apologize for her strategy, sharing everything 一 “good, bad, light, dark, shameful, proud” — in the book so she can give people “permission to be their whole selves” and “de-shame and destigmatize bad behavior.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/survivors-parvati-shallow-shares-marriage-cult-insight-in-memoir/.
