"Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion" by Janet Reitman

Jeff Glor talks to Janet Reitman about "Inside Scientology."

Janet Reitman: The book grew out of a very long magazine story that I wrote for Rolling Stone, also called "Inside Scientology," which took about nine months to produce, largely because the learning curve was so steep. Scientology has its own language, its own codes, its own justice system, its own worldview - and none of these things had ever been well explained in any sort of mainstream, accessible way. That shocked me a little bit, I have to say, and it also offered a challenge, which was to write that sort of book, a really objective, thoroughly researched and documented history and narrative exploration of this subject that so many people have heard of, yet know almost nothing about.

JM: How hard writing a book can be! I have been a magazine writer for a long time, but I had never written a book before, and I think I entered into it thinking, well, this will be like writing a whole lot of really long magazine pieces -- uh, wrong. Totally wrong. The reporting and research I had to do for the book was extremely challenging and daunting at times, and there were lots of surprises along the way just substantively, but I honestly think the most surprising element of actually writing the book was how difficult, and time-consuming, and frustrating writing a book can be. It takes a certain type of discipline and concentration that I never had to exercise before, and I had to learn it. As a result, I had to go through something like five drafts before I had a real "book." And in the meantime, it drove my boyfriend and all of my friends and family kind of crazy, not to mention my editors at Rolling Stone who called me regularly to ask "are you done yet? when are you coming back to work?..."

JM: Probably having a tough time finding a job, to be honest... I've been a journalist since the 1990s and it's the only "job" I've ever had. I'd love to live overseas, maybe in Africa, where I know a lot of people and have worked before, but I have a feeling I'd wind up writing from there just as easily...

JM: I just finished Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers," which is a really wonderful, but extremely dark book about the 1970s, and may start another one of his books fairly soon. But in the meantime, I'm reading Joe McGinniss's new book about Sarah Palin, "The Rogue," which I need to read for a story that I am working on....

JM: I'm working on something about the resurgence of the Religious Right at the moment, and then we'll have to see... there are a few ideas I have, but right now they're still in the incubation stage.