Coming of Age in a Cult and Beyond (with Guinevere Turner)

One January day in 1975, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, hugged her favorite toy tightly, and waited for the spaceship to arrive. The world was ending and she would be saved, spirited away to Venus with the rest of her enormous and enlightened family.

When the prophecy failed, the cult carried on. But Guinevere would soon find herself thrown out into the world beyond, where things somehow became more nightmarish than before.

In this episode, Guinevere Turner joins us to talk about her remarkable memoir, When the World Didn't End.

Note: This episode includes discussion of psychological manipulation and sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

 

SHOW NOTES

• Buy the book here.
• Read Guinevere's piece in The New Yorker that led to her memoir here. 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Guinevere Turner is an acclaimed screenwriter and director. She co-wrote the screenplays for American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page and, most recently, wrote the screenplay for Charlie Says. She also wrote and starred in the film Go Fish and was a writer and actor on Showtime’s The L Word. An essay she wrote for The New Yorker is the inspiration for this memoir. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.

A full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
This is Relationscapes. I'm Blair Hodges. We're mapping out the stories
and ideas that shape how we connect with each other in this episode. Our guide
is Guinevere Turner.
I think beyond the disappointment, because I was really looking
forward to going to Venus and living there, there was just anxiety

(00:22):
and fear because the adults all said something was going to happen and
it didn't. This isn't going to be pretty, whatever it
is.

(00:45):
One January day in 1975, seven year old Guinevere Turner
put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy and waited for the
spaceship to arrive. But the world didn't end
that day after all. And even though the cult she was being raised in carried
on, Guinevere would soon find herself thrust out into the world beyond
the cult, where things would actually become more nightmarish than

(01:06):
before. In this episode, acclaimed screenwriter Guinevere
Turner joins us to talk about her remarkable memoir, when the World Didn't
End.
I still don't know somewhere.

(01:36):
Guinevere Turner, welcome to Relationscapes. Hi Blair, thanks for
having me. At the start of your book, there's an author's note and you
let us know in that note that you wrote the book from the perspective of
your 6 year old self, kind of up to your 18 year old self.
One of the most striking things about your memoir is how well you're able
to tap into earlier eras of yourself. You're writing

(01:58):
from that perspective and so I wanted you to tell us about the decision to
write from there. Instead of writing retrospectively from your present day
perspective with all of the knowledge you've gained since then. We get to experience
you learning things as the book goes. So how did you decide to frame
it that way? Well, I decided to frame it that way after
a lot of thinking and reading

(02:20):
other memoirs and considering the specific challenges of
my story, which is that the family that I grew up in occult are
still alive and well, predominantly.
And I know, because I wrote this piece for the New Yorker that is also
on the same subject, that when the fact checker at
the New Yorker called their lawyer, they said, that's ridiculous. How can she remember any

(02:42):
of this? She was just a kid. And so for
one, I thought it would be a good idea to write from the perspective of
being a kid because in some ways it's ironclad. If I'm
saying this is how I remember it, you know, I'm not saying it's science,
I'm not saying it's journalism. I'm saying this is what it felt
like for me. You can't call it into question. I'm not saying this is the

(03:02):
absolute truth. I'm saying this is my experience also.
Then when I read many, many memoirs, many of which are good and come
from the perspective of, you know, the adult hindsight,
I personally just stylistically don't like the if
I only knew now what I know then or, but things were about to get
so much worse or, you know, any of that. It's just it, it kind

(03:25):
of takes you out of it and it, I think it kind of sort of
lowers the art profile of a book if you don't make a very conscious
choice of a pov. This perhaps comes from
my screenwriting self background and also because
I felt I have these diaries that I wrote back then
that are, you know, obviously in the first person and are very.

(03:46):
You can't, you can't call them into question. They're real. That's really what I wrote.
And so it was kind of already halfway there for me, you know, that here
I had this voice and this voice is so, you know, it's so present because
it's, I preserved it. So for all of those reasons,
I decided the best approach. Oh, no. And for one more reason, which is
there's such a glut of quote unquote cult content in documentary,

(04:06):
in memoir, in podcasts, for sure, right. That,
oh, there's something about telling it from the perspective of my childhood self that takes
away a little bit of the sensationalism because obviously inside
of it, as a kid, I didn't think that I was in a cult.
I didn't know what a cult was. And I wasn't shocked and scandalized
by child brides and, you know, all the weird stuff they were doing because

(04:28):
it just wasn't weird to me. And I also felt like it kind of created
a buffer for that potential pitfall, which is that
I didn't want to write a salacious tell all memoir
about that stuff. And because that's not how I experienced. It,
that makes so much sense. And not to take anything away from other books
of people like telling their experience of coming out of abusive

(04:49):
situations as children, but the way that you framed it, we're really able to experience
it alongside you. And I was just struck how well you could channel your
younger self. And I think the diaries must have provided a window for you.
Was it difficult to get into your old headspace?
Was it difficult? I sort of covered in
my author's note that because when I left the

(05:10):
Lyman family as an eleven and a half year Old. I always
feel like saying and a half, because in my mind, that mattered a lot.
You know, young then. It does. Yeah.
And because I always just wanted to be older. When I left the Lyman
family, I was incredibly,
incredibly devastated. And because

(05:30):
I was so devastated, I just replayed everything that
ever happened to me over and over in my head in this kind of desperation
to preserve the culture and the place that I came, came from and to not
forget any single detail, because I always wanted to be back. So I.
I just kind of made a hard archive in my brain as
a kid. And also I tried to write this book.

(05:52):
Well, I tried to write about this in my fiction workshop in college.
I just tried again in my 20s. I tried again in my 30s. I tried
again in my 40s. So this has been brewing for a long
time. And what the scenes would be and how
the story would unfold has been always on my back
burner. So it's something that's never let go of, because I always

(06:13):
knew I would write a book. I just didn't know when or how or if
I would ever have the courage. And by courage, I mean not
so much that I feel like the people I grew up with would come for
me in any literal way, but I was in good standing with them.
And there's something about knowing that I would get their disapproval and how
my generation would respond to me talking about this that

(06:34):
was very daunting. And I don't think they. I don't think they'll be able to
get the perspective of that. You did take a less sensationalistic
approach to it. Compared to other things that I've seen, other documentaries or
other books that I've read, it's as sympathetic, but not.
You're not excusing what they're doing, but you're also. Because you're
as you said, you're coming to it from how you thought about it as a

(06:54):
child. There's a lack of harsh judgment
throughout your childhood there. You're trying to make sense of it as a child.
So you're describing abusive situations or difficult things that I think would be embarrassing
to the group, but you're not doing it from the perspective of a scolding
or bitter adult, although you have every reason to scold or you had
every reason to feel bitter about certain things. And so there's a sympathy,

(07:17):
I guess, is what I'm saying, to your approach that comes through.
It's sort of an accidental sympathy. It's that
the. Of the people of my generation, from this family
that I that have reached out to me about the book 201.
They say you were so easy on them. You made it seem,
you know, like, so idyllic. And you didn't really get into that.

(07:38):
Like, some. I thought they were gonna be mad at me for writing at all,
but instead they were like, I was hoping for you to really skewer them.
And I. To that, I say you may have lost perspective
on what's normalized, what was normalized for us.
Right. And that's what you're doing. Yeah. A person outside
of us still sees, even though it's my kid perspective
and it's, you know, a lot of the bad stuff that's happening is behind closed

(08:00):
doors. They still see that this is disturbing. And what's even more
disturbing is that me, the protagonist, is like,
yeah, this is what life is like. I'm just trying to figure it out,
you know. Yeah. And it's brilliant to see how you grow. I mean,
even in the language you're using, like, there's a simplicity to your prose early
on in the book, as you're a child, there's a childlike innocence to it

(08:20):
and curiosity. And then as we get into your teenage years, the angst and
all of the emotion and your struggles come through. You start to swear,
like, even. Even the vocabulary you're using becomes
advanced later on in the book. Like, we. We see you, we kind of get
to grow along with you. And it kind of let me read it on
two levels. On the one, I could sort of imagine myself as a child in

(08:41):
those situations, but I also was like,
you know, obviously judging throughout and like, reacting to shocking
things from an adult perspective as well. But your book let me do both
of those things. It let me kind of experience what you as
a child experienced, but also, like, so I could feel really sympathetic
but also totally ticked off at what some of the

(09:01):
adults were doing. So we'll get into some details. We'll unwrap this for
people. Let's go to January 5, 1975. This is
the day that you were taught the world was definitely going to end. You were
six years old and you were told to get your favorite toy, put on your
favorite clothes. There was a spaceship coming to pick you all up.
The whole world was going to be destroyed because the world was wicked and

(09:23):
you waited all night and nothing. So what was
that like to wake up to a day that wasn't supposed to
exist? As a six year old, I think. Beyond the disappointment,
because I was really looking forward to going to Venus and Living there.
Yeah. There was just anxiety and fear because I knew,
and this is more like a gut feeling. It's like the adults all said

(09:46):
something was going to happen and it didn't.
This isn't going to be pretty, whatever it is, you know, that they're going to
have to save face. And I don't know that I was as sophisticated as
a six year old to think of it in those terms, but I knew it
wasn't going to be good and that the idea of being in trouble was a
huge kind of driving force for all of us as kids. Because sometimes we
would be in trouble for the most arbitrary things, you know, attributed to

(10:10):
our astrological sign or something our parents did or, you know,
whatever. Yeah, yeah. So in this case, and it turned out
to be true, we were all in trouble. And we found that out pretty
quickly. We were all in trouble because the leader of the cult said that
he. That it was our fault, our being the collective
family, because we were, our souls weren't ready. And so,

(10:31):
you know, after being up all night and being disappointed about not
moving to Venus, we also all had to contemplate, how is
it I in particular thought it was me because
it was like he didn't specify whose soul wasn't ready,
but the implication was that there are a few bad apples that are ruining it
for everyone and certainly that we all ruined it for him because he

(10:53):
was ready. And so it just kind of created this sort of collective
sense of being in trouble and guilt and this free floating anxiety
like, how do I make my soul ready to live on Venus? Is one thing
that most 6 year olds don't have to think about too much. You're right.
I felt so bad for you. I did.
Because you internalized so much and you carried these burdens

(11:13):
of guilt that were entirely out of proportion to who you actually were as a
person. And there was no real substance to it. It was sort of like you
said, it was very ethereal. It was like maybe an astrological sign thing or maybe
you were too defiant or, you know, the leader of the cult
had built this whole cosmology around. The purpose of life was for
you to come here and learn lessons and to like, you probably had lived

(11:35):
multiple times and were like, hadn't learned your lesson yet. And so you had this
idea of constantly failing and that your life itself was
again risking being a failure again. And now you've ruined the end
of the world, which maybe someone else might have been happy about,
like, oh, that's kind of good that like billions of people won't die.
We weren't raised to even have that level of empathy for billions of people.

(11:57):
Right, right. Yeah. To be clear
to your listeners, I had been already told that.
Me personally, not just any of the kids, but me.
But then, you know, that Earth was, we were all told earth is school.
And we all are put here to learn. When we learn our lesson and we
move on to fill in the blank. Don't know, don't know if it was Venus.
But I personally was told that I had kept coming

(12:19):
back. I was like, I made the joke. I was like the
Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused who's like the guy
in his 20s who still hangs out with the high school kids. I was just
like held back a grade, but several grades.
And so I was. The minute I was, you know,
conscious enough to understand that those concepts I was
looking for what it is that I kept failing at and

(12:42):
I would. And they called me the little 44 year old. And part. That was
part. And part of the fact that I was already. So I was just
behind. I was like, I was born behind. Like I was born getting
it wrong. Yeah. And you do come across as an old soul
too. It's funny, like when Jesse, who is kind of one of the main
authority figures, a woman who you quite loved in,

(13:03):
in many ways, when she called, coined that little 44
year old, she was reacting to statements you had made and ways
that you would write. And I have to say, like the excerpts you include from
your diaries, really, do you come across as such an old
soul? Like it's true. Like it seemed like they tapped into something about
your personality and then fit it into their cosmology. Like it would

(13:24):
have made sense. You know, some kids do just kind of seem ahead
of the other kids or they, they're having thoughts that you wouldn't expect that kid
to have. You seem like that kind of kid. Yeah. And that's what's confusing about
it. I was like, I do feel different from other kids. I do
feel kind of more serious and more studious and more
like, you know, it's chicken egg, I guess really. But I definitely

(13:45):
moved right into the 44 year old identity. It's funny
because there's a website called Goodreads where just lay people can read your book
and, and write reviews and, you know,
rate it and stuff. And this, it's very different from films, which is what I
usually do where you, you get a review from a critic. You get a bunch
of reviews from a critic. This is Just hundreds of people giving their opinion on
my book, which is good and bad, hard to look away. And one

(14:08):
of the, one of the reviews, I just went and read all the one star
reviews. I just got it out of the way and one of the reviews said,
I feel like I'm just listening to the ramblings of a nine
year old with a really good vocabulary.
I guess the subject there being that I made myself look smarter,
more articulate, which would be such a corrupt thing to do in a,
in this project to invent like a brainy little nine year old.

(14:31):
I'm like, no, that's really what I wrote. I would never be so foolish
as to even edit. Mostly not edited, it's just
excerpted. Do you still have the physical diaries too, like the ones that
you're quoting from? Oh yeah, it's sitting right over there. Yeah.
So there you go. I mean, I quite enjoyed living in that headspace with you.
You really took me to that age. And you know, okay, so when you

(14:52):
don't go to Venus later on, you asked your mom what
she was thinking because now you know, okay, actually Venus isn't even habitable.
Like, even if you could have gotten there, you all would have immediately
died. Like, you can't survive there. And you asked her about this years later and
the only thing she could give you was, it's complicated. Like she couldn't really go
into it. So people might wonder how your own mom came to join this cult,

(15:14):
which obviously got you into it as well. My mother was
18 and pregnant with me in the
fall of 67 and she was going to college in
Boston. And the Lyman family, which is the name of the cult that I grew
up in, had a magazine called the Avatar that they passed out.
It was like a free magazine on the street newsletter kind of Vibe.

(15:35):
And she started reading it and then she started working for the magazine.
And then she realized that she was pregnant and that she
could not go home. It would not be okay with her family. And I
think that tipped the scales into her just living with, with the family,
I think out of necessity, but also like, everybody needs to be
forgiving and think about 1969 and

(15:57):
choices that any 19 year old made. And you were either counterculture
or you were the man. And you know, in an effort
to be empathetic toward her choices, I often think to myself, If I
was 19, pregnant or not, I probably would have done
something very alternative rather than just, you know, live the straight life,
you know. Yeah. And so she gets into this and you talk about

(16:18):
how the idea of family with the Lyman family was
different. How was family defined? These are your formative
years and your mom brings you into this place. And this was not
the typical nuclear household at all. What was family like for
the Lyman family? Well, almost all of us kids weren't
with our biological parents, like. No, they were. They had compounds

(16:41):
around the country and we would move among them
willy nilly, really. And, and so by the
time I was three or four, I was separated from my mom. My mom
worked on Wall Street. I know this is. That sounds very incongruous,
but she did, she. A lot of people led double lives like that. They worked
one job and pretended to be just normies and then came

(17:01):
home to listen. That, like funded the group, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was partially.
What funded the group was people's incomes. And so what family meant
was everyone, all 160
of us and discipline,
authority, et cetera, coming from anyone, if you're a kid
and you know, big group meals every night,

(17:25):
a lot of amazingly, even though it was the 70s,
just such a tight knit network of information and
gossip and, you know, edicts that would come down,
I guess all from the phone. And when your family is
also your only authority figures and are also your only
source of education, it gets very murky very

(17:46):
quickly. The boundaries, there are no boundaries, you know. Yeah, you don't have an external
world to really compare it against. So like when my kids started going to school,
they're introduced to other authority figures that are very contextualized.
There's teachers at school, there's other kids that they didn't grow up with
and they're able to sort of get different perspectives and like they can bring that

(18:06):
home and say, oh, my home's like this, school's like this. You didn't really get
that early on, really. I mean, your world was just bound into
those people. That family was your world. And the
teachings about the external world were that it was wicked and
shameful and to be avoided. Soulless. Yeah. And I mean, this is
kind of what these high control groups do, right, Is. Is disconnected people

(18:27):
from outside disconnect people from the ability to triangulate and
maybe get a sense of their own identity. Compared to the group,
your identity really seemed subsumed by the group. And as you
said, your mom was distant from you and you in some ways
were kind of taught to be, well, not taught, but you came to be ashamed
of your mom because of power relationships that existed in the group.

(18:48):
Talk about that a little bit. That, that seems to play a pretty big part
in how you related to your mother. So in the family, there was a
very clear hierarchy, I should say. Those people at the top were always at
the top. And then there was sort of like a mid range of people who
would be in and out of favor, but they still had more power. And then
there were people like my mom and fp, the guy that she
eventually left the family with, who were

(19:11):
just kind of worker bees who had no power.
And so for me, even though I was never with her, whatever her
social status was, was kind of baggage. It's kind of like the military, really.
I went to high school in the town adjacent to West Point. And it's
weird because I was so familiar with the hierarchy because I would be like,
that woman is so popular, but she's not that cute.

(19:32):
She's nice. And I'm like, oh, her dad is the commandant
of the military base. And like, I would watch all these military kids
and how they treated each other according to their parents rank, usually their fathers.
And I was. It was. It's so familiar to me. So in my case,
she was a social liability because if she did something that was
not approved of, everybody knew about it and it would come back on me.

(19:53):
And because her kind of rival, the woman who's
kind of stole her man and then, you know, she got, she got him back,
hated me because of it because I look a lot like my mom and
I was always around. And so this woman just kind of, you know,
did everything in her power to undermine me as a kid and to get me
away from Jesse's orbit, which was the preferable place to be so very complicated

(20:15):
to have all of this kind of social status hanging
on your mother, who you barely know. And in my
case, to have a higher social status than my mother when I was 11.
Right. So these power relations play out through the book and the adults are kind
of playing the kids off of their own issues.
You became a pawn in this bigger game, really. And in the

(20:35):
middle of that, you were on the farm. This is one of the properties.
There was properties in Boston, New York, Kansas,
I believe, and then also in Los Angeles,
you were on the farm. So it's kind of a middle tier status
place there. Things were going well and Jesse, one of the highest power
authorities, would travel amongst the communities kind of with this little caravan.

(20:57):
And they came through and a young girl, Daria,
was drawn to you. And you talk about how this is
how you got pulled into the higher orbit, was this young girl took a shine
to You. And so suddenly you found yourself leaving the farm,
which it seemed like you quite loved. But now you're
recognizing an elevation in your status, and that's exciting.

(21:18):
You're actually going to go to Los Angeles with Jesse. This is a big career
move for childhood. You, yeah, definitely step up.
And so in that process, your fate changes,
and then you get wrapped up in all these other power relations. Right. So let's
talk about. In la, you became more aware of some troubling things
that were going on in the family, especially when it came to the leader,

(21:39):
Melvin Lyman, and underage girls. Throughout your
life, you'd already been reading his writings and listen. They would listen to tapes that
he had made. So the ideology had already sort of been planted
with you by the time you found out that he was involved with underage
girls. And I thought it would be helpful if you could read an excerpt from
one of Melvin's books to give people a sense of what you

(22:00):
were being taught. This is on. This is on page 70 at the
beginning of chapter 12, you excerpt something that Melvin wrote
in Avatar, that publication that you had mentioned earlier. So if you can,
it gets us Melvin's voice and also kind of his.
His ideology here in. In really important ways. All right, this is from
Avatar, the publication I. I mentioned earlier of

(22:23):
December 2, 1972. If a
woman is really a woman and not just an old girl, then everything she
does is for her man. And her only satisfaction is in making her man a
greater man. She is his quiet conscience. She is his home.
She's his inspiration, and she is his living proof that his life, his labors,
are worthwhile. A woman who seeks to satisfy herself is

(22:44):
the loneliest being in God's creation. A woman who
seeks to surpass her man is only leaving herself behind.
A man can only look ahead. He must have somewhere to look from.
A woman can only look at her man. So as a
child, what was this doing for you as you're encountering these
ideas? How did you feel about this? I believed it.

(23:06):
I didn't dare not believe it. I think obviously my
perspective on it changed as I got older. But I mean, the funniest
thing about all of his writing, because that's the kind of the most coherent
or linear or whatever of the pieces that I
choose, is that I always thought I would understand them when I
was older. And it was funny and interesting

(23:28):
to go back and reread this book and a lot of his writings as I
was writing my own book. I mean, like, you know what, little girl,
you're going to be 55 years old and you're still not going to know what
the spirit's talking about. Lay yourself
off the hook. It doesn't really fully make sense, but in this
case, which is very. It's very clear and obviously incredibly sexist and

(23:49):
misogynist and patriarchal. I think I was at that point just
thought, you know, oh, someday I'll have a man
that I can be all of that for. Yeah, It's a benevolent
patriarchy thing. Right. It's presuming to elevate women by infantilizing and
making them subservient to men, but praising them for that.
Right. This is your purpose. This is how you can excel.

(24:12):
Yeah. I just can't imagine what that would be like as a kid to imbibe
that sort of thing. I mean, and the crazy thing about this story is
that Jesse, who was really the. Had the most power as when I
was growing up, would say similar things. I think when
Jesse said things, I think often the subtext was, except me,
but I'm special because she. She served no man. I mean,

(24:34):
she sort of. She would make a big performance out of serving the guy that
she was with. And you know what I mean? Like, you know, like, I made
Richie lunch. But you know what I mean? It was not. In no way was
it required of her. It was kind of like, this is my man in quotes,
or I could fire him and have any man I want.
Exactly. A ton of power at the top. I also wanted to have you
read a little excerpt here from your diary on page 95.

(24:56):
This will give people a sense of your young voice. And again, as we talked
about, you're an old soul. This, you're an 11 year old in this. This is
in April of the year four.
Yes. And the year four, because that was four years after the world didn't end.
4-10-04, which was actually 1979.
Life is an eternal passage of change. Every time you take a step,

(25:19):
you think, oh, God, this has to be the last one. I can't go any
further. But there is always something more that you haven't discovered.
Tomorrow will be yesterday. Once yesterday was tomorrow,
and tomorrow and yesterday are sometimes today. And today goes
on in the same way until it is yesterday again.
I loved it. It's so like there's. It's actually pretty beautiful.

(25:41):
It's pretty moving stuff. I know it's. It's a little cliche and
silly in some ways too, but I don't know,
there's something about your voice here. It's funny to me that they were having you
read the ramblings of Melvin Lyman that were just, as you said,
some of them are just like bonkers. And here you are able to string
together some really beautiful stuff. I think it's really touching. But to be honest,

(26:02):
sometimes when I read pieces like this in my diary, I feel like
I'm actually emulating his writing. So it's performative,
you know, I'm like. I can be a little bit deep and a little bit
obtuse too. Like, that's what I'm, I mean, that's like what everybody, the writing that
everybody reveres. So let me, let me take a hand at a stab at this
genre. I mean, I Wish as an 11 year old, you could have just

(26:22):
been watching cartoons or something too. Like, oh, man. Yeah, this, this does
get a little deep. That's interesting. Like, as you read it back, you get to
remember you see your performance, right? You get to see your performance a
little better. Yes. And one interesting and important thing to note about
these diaries is that there was always the possibility that someone
else would be reading them. So there's. It's sort of a weird document

(26:44):
because it's performative and yet it needs
to feel like it isn't. So at a very young
age, I was really tweaking a very, very tricky little genre
slash toe in this line between making it seem personal, but also if
anyone read it, being like, wow, she's really, she feels really bad for what she
did or she really loves so and so or whatever.

(27:05):
Do you know what I mean? Somewhere in the book I. Somewhere in my journals
and I put it in the book I wrote. I really, I said, I really
missed someone. And I said, not in the way that you,
not in the way that you do when you just write it in a letter
to fill up space. And I was like, wow, I must have told a lot
of people I missed them at the end when I did it.
Yeah, I totally miss you. Well, one person you might have said it to was

(27:28):
your, your biological mom, right? Because they had you visit her
sometimes and it was such an awkward thing for you because you really
didn't know this woman. And for all intents and purposes
she wasn't really your mom, but yet she kind of was.
And so you had to enact a sort of like love and regard for her
when you didn't genuinely feel it. So maybe that was one of the people that
you'd be like, I miss you. I'm sure I don't know you I'm.

(27:50):
Sure that we said, especially when I had to talk to her on the phone,
I always. Whenever people ask me, oh, yeah, the phone. I'm very
avoidant of talking on the phone. And way before this digital age we're in,
because the only time I would ever talk on the phone would be awkward conversations
with my mother. When I was a kid, we had no shared experience.
And so it would just be like, hi, what'd you do today?

(28:11):
I miss you. We had, like. It was.
It was really tense. Yeah. It was a very.
The biggest shock to me. One of the times they sent me to visit
her in New York was seeing a photo of me framed on her
office desk. At work.
Yeah, at her job. And how it never occurred to me that

(28:31):
she was openly lying about her
real life to her coworkers and, you know, which was most of
her life. It was a Wall street job. She worked insane hours. And I
just thought it was one of my first reckonings with the fact that we were
raised to believe that truth was the ultimate.
It was just essential to living, you know, a real life, a connected life,

(28:54):
the right kind of life. And yet they were lying all around us to
the outside world. So, you know, this is so important. Do as
I say, not as I do. Right. And you walk us through how your
11 or, you know, young mind sort of dealt with that
cognitive dissonance. You're saying here in the book, you said it had been drilled
into our heads, that lying was bad, but it was okay to

(29:15):
lie to world people. Like, you were trying to make sense. Oh, so maybe
this is the. You had to make sense of it. It had to make sense.
And so you. Here you are making meaning while you were so confused
and seeing the world people would blow your mind.
Like, one time you were watching Sesame street and you saw them
talking about this, the most important person. Like this little segment,

(29:38):
and it showed little kids playing and blowing up birthday candles and things like
this. And the song said, the most important person in the whole wide world is
you, and you hardly even know you. And you said, like, you were so scandalized.
You're like, oh, wow. Like, how egotistical.
Like, that did not land. I think anyone who's my age who
had access to television will remember this song. The most important person in the

(29:59):
whole wide world is you, and you're to really know it.
Something like that. It was very catchy. And then. Yeah, but I just
thought, God, these world people are messed up.
Like, they're just, like, telling kids how important they are. Like, What?
No wonder the world is a mess.
Yeah. Oh. And so, yes, you're. You're experiencing

(30:20):
the world in these little glimpses. But then back home. So now you're with Jesse's
group. You're in the internal circle there, and you're really getting elevated there. There's a
night when Jesse is so affectionate towards you and just says
that you're gonna be Miss America. She's really praising you and
saying that you're beautiful and that you'll be Miss America. And it became like a
real thing. It wasn't like a thing you might say to play with a kid.
It seemed like you kind of got it into your head that that was an

(30:43):
actual possibility. It seemed like. And they meant it.
They meant it. They were just waiting for me to be old enough. Yeah.
And that ticked off Delia. This was the other woman who was
really jealous of you. And as you said, there was some things between your mom
and a partner that they had both had and infidelity
that was happening. And so Delia wants you out,

(31:03):
basically. She's going to do everything she can to get you out of this inner
circle. Well, and Delia was really, she. She was
Jesse's kind of right hand woman in slash,
lady in waiting in the way that I was Daria, as Jesse's daughter.
You know, we were sort of the lesser beings who were invited to be
in this orbit. And I think she also just didn't want any

(31:25):
more lowly people to be elevated and be standing next to her, just like,
get out of here. I'm the, I'm the success story. It's a scarcity
mindset. It sounds like too, if her story is that she was an elevated lower
person, then you would be a direct threat to that. Like, you might displace
her. This is how power relations and this is how family
relationships seemed to work within this family. And I think people who

(31:47):
didn't grow up in a cult or people who grew up sort of in a
dysfunctional family will actually relate a lot to some of the dynamics that
you describe here. The way that adults can play kids off of each other.
Parents do this sometimes in their own power struggles.
And so seeing her from this scarcity mindset,
seeing you as a threat, a child as a threat, and treating you

(32:08):
so poorly, some of the things she did to you, I'm telling you, I would
get so mad reading your book. And what was
powerful was you weren't connecting the dots about it. You weren't saying,
look how abusive this was, look how messed up this was. Or saying
like, this is how it affected my life today or I still have a trouble
maintaining intimacy or whatever. You don't get into that. You just tell us

(32:30):
from your kid perspective and you let us as the reader have to process it.
And I think that's a, that was a really powerful authorial choice
on your part because I'm just hearing you say it and then
I have to process it. You're not doing that work for me. I feel like
a part of the reason I chose to tell the story this way also is
that I just didn't want. I didn't want sympathy and

(32:51):
I didn't want to feel self indulgent or
for the reader to feel that it was self indulgent. Pardon me, poor me.
And I feel like letting the reader fill in the blanks. I'm like
this as a screenwriter too. Letting the absorber of the art fill
in the blanks has more power in a way because you're bringing,
I'm sure, a lot of what you personally brought and how you would feel.

(33:12):
Yeah, exactly. I think there's catharsis in hearing you talk
about what it was like. So I think people that have experienced abusive situations
can find catharsis here. And it's not a self help book. You're not
giving advice about how people can reckon with their violence in their
past. You're just bearing witness to it. And sometimes bearing witness
and telling the story is enough. I think that is the power of film because

(33:35):
otherwise it gets preachy. I think it gets a lot more dated.
It probably can reach fewer people overall because you're
not giving space. This is actually where Melvin Lyman was kind of brilliant.
I think, like his opaqueness and sort of throwing all
these ideas out gave people the ability to fill some of it in,
even though he was so high, controlling. I think that's how stories work

(33:57):
best. I think. Yeah, it's interesting. It really is.
I have had an incredible response from survivors
of all kinds and that has been gratifying. And then
from a category of response too is from
friendly acquaintances, people I know who've read the book writing. Me, like,
you know, I had to put it down because I was sobbing too hard.

(34:19):
And I'm thinking to myself is like, on the one
hand that means I wrote it effectively. On the other hand, am I
out here writing books to make acquaintances sob?
Yeah. What did you think about that then? Like, if people
are reacting to that, what would you say to your friend to be like,
oh, you're crying. Oh, sorry about that. I say, sorry, I say, I make

(34:40):
the joke that I wanted to call the book Trigger warning.
My editor wasn't having it. Yeah. And I think that the
sneaky thing about my book is that you're kind of braced
in the first half for what horrible thing is going to happen in this cult
and nothing. A lot of emotionally devastating things happen,
but they're just emotionally devastating things that are, you know,

(35:03):
not. They're not physical and they're not like what we associate with what the,
you know, the salacious details of a cult would be. But then my life
gets so much worse and it is full of abuse and violence
and, you know, at the hands of, you know, ostensibly a nuclear shaped family.
And that's exactly where we're going. This is like the second family model
that you lived in was more the traditional,

(35:25):
seemingly nuclear family. So you're going to get kicked out. You are
going to get kicked out of the family. And this is because your mom decides
to leave and you tell the story of how you found out. And since she
decided to leave with her then partner who is called FP in
the book. And by the way, is that what they went by, really, or is
that a pseudonym? FP was not his name. He said,
okay, I just didn't want to look at his name and then say

(35:49):
his name in a million interviews and conversations. And so I just named
him fp, which is a personal joke to me because it stands for Psycho.
Oh, okay, okay. And as people
will find out, it's also very. It's kind of on the nose. Actually, as a
writer, I'm surprised. I really. I have days and days of workshopping
to come up with initials that would amuse me. But now it's

(36:11):
kind of great because also in my family, his name comes up because he's the
father of two of my siblings. And so now everyone calls him fp. So now
I. In my life, so I don't have to hear his name ever again.
It was, it was a particularly effective little decision that I made.
Okay, so you're called up to the big house. You know, you're in trouble.
They tell you there that you have to go and because your mom is leaving.

(36:31):
And so now they say if you don't have a biological parent here, we can't,
we can't keep you here. You can choose to come back. They left the door
open in a way. And then so you're being sent to live with a
mother who you didn't really know and you were actually kind of ashamed of.
And this Is where you introduce us to fp. She was your mom's partner,
and they left the group together. Here you are in this nuclear family, and this,

(36:51):
as you said, is where the real abuse begins. When you get into this
seemingly more normal family, things actually got a lot worse for
you. Not only are you beginning to be abused at home, but you're
also expected to just jump right into public school as well.
This must have been just a. An overwhelming
transition for you. Talk a little bit about what it was like

(37:13):
to be in this new family structure and to be thrown into the,
quote, world, which you had always been taught to have contempt for.
Well, I immediately. And I mean, like, the night of
the day that I was dropped off out into the world and with my mom,
I immediately wanted to go back. And I
knew it. And I. Everything that was happening to me, I was

(37:35):
telling. I was saying, it doesn't really matter. I'm leaving anyway. I'm leaving anyway.
And then, you know, a couple months go by, and it's finally.
They've got it all together, so I can enroll in a school, and I'm like,
I'm just gonna go for a couple weeks. Especially once I got
to the school, because I was such a weirdo.
So I was immediately bullied. I mean, the girls

(37:56):
were really nice to me. The boys were really mean, and some of the girls
were mean. But also, I just looked really different. I acted
really different. I didn't know things that were really basic.
I didn't know pop music. I didn't know pop culture. My hair was down to
my butt. In an era in 1979 when everyone's hair was
aspirational to Farrah Fawcett. I didn't have any designer jeans. I wore skirts

(38:17):
all the time. So culty. And I stood out
like a sore thumb, not only because I was the new girl in late October,
but I was. And then I was very conflicted because I loved
the fact that there was school and it was structured and
I was learning things, and I was, yes, clearly emerged
as a smart. The kid who would get the best grade, which,

(38:39):
you know, bored resentment, but also just attention and sometimes a
request to cheat. It was social currency, in a way.
And also because the home life was. Had already
revealed itself to be on a path to hell, was already violent
and was moving into some sort of sexual violence. I was just
so happy to be at school because it was. I was free.

(39:02):
I could pretend that my life wasn't my life and that I just focus on
learning and making friends, and I was also just
kind of being like world people. Seem, some of them are really nice.
Like I don't understand. Like I don't, I don't feel like I'm in a dangerous
place when I'm here at school. I feel like I'm in
a great place and you know, and I was a little too self possessed

(39:23):
to really take the bullying very personally. It was kind of a bummer.
But I didn't care if they called me Gwen a queer, whatever. How did they
know I was gonna grow up to be gay? I don't know. I don't think
they meant queer in that sense. But they definitely called me Gwyneth Queer. And it
definitely, it didn't hurt my feelings. I, I thought it was funny.
I just was, it was a little like aggravating because the
boys just worked so hard to make my life miserable and I'm just like,

(39:45):
oh, I don't, I don't want to think about boys. Grew up to be gay.
Yeah, we get to see you really find yourself and you have diaries
from this part of your life too. And it's so interesting to see you kind
of going back and forth about like, oh, the world people. And then saying
stuff like, oh, the world people. And also

(40:05):
I feel like the Lyman group sort of tried to poison the well. Like they
would say, like, oh, you're probably going to become a world person. Just as a
heads up, you're totally going to do it. And that of
course motivated you to be like, no, I'm not. Like you were gonna hang onto
it. But we see you start to let go of the rope and you say
stuff like, well, you know, I'm gonna start wearing pants and
I'm gonna do this and you know, I think it's gonna be okay,

(40:29):
but I'm definitely gonna go back to the fan. Like, I'm not losing
myself. And so we see you justifying to yourself
and talking to yourself through your diaries about these
changes in your life. And again, this parallels
the increasing violence at home. So this is where you're pretty
specific about how FP began to sexually assault you.

(40:49):
You're coming into your teenage years. Here's what was it
like writing about this? Did you know that this was something you wanted
to share or did you have to come to terms with that as
you were writing the book? I always knew I wanted to share
the, the abuse and share it in kind of as
sort of non expletive but bald

(41:11):
truth as I could style wise. I just feel like
I don't like narratives about Abuse, especially when it's girls,
when it's female people at the hands of men.
I don't like the vague language. Doesn't feel. It feels like
a complicity in the power structure and the, you know, the transgression.

(41:31):
Whereas just being like, you know what, if you're flinching right now
as you're reading this, imagine what it actually felt like,
and imagine trying to keep that. Having to keep that secret, or imagine
your mother knowing about it and. And letting it continue.
I just felt like an unflinching look at the actual details.
You know, people just say sexual abuse. And, you know, everyone in their mind is

(41:52):
being like, what kind? At what level? You know, what. What is?
And make people think to themselves, like, what's my idea of rape? Like, what is.
What. What's the line? What's. What's worse?
This sex act or this sex act? Or isn't it all bad?
So I feel like there's a power in naming it really specifically and
saying, you know, if. If you don't think this was that bad,

(42:13):
then you're wrong that you can't. You know,
again, it's just diving into it. So. I always knew I wanted to write about
it. It was very hard to write, but just because
I had to go back there and just finding the words for it was
hard. You know what I mean? It's just. It's so hard to not make it
creepy. It is creepy. When I was writing the proposal for the book,

(42:35):
I deliberately made myself write a chapter that explicitly
included abusive moments to see if I could do it.
And then, because, you know, the editors that I met with when I eventually chose
the editor, that I have to see how they would handle it,
because I did, because I was ready to write this book. What I was not
ready for was handling someone else's feelings. Well. I needed. Well, all I needed was

(42:57):
an editor. So it was. And so it was hard to write. But I
was also like, yeah, I can do that and I'm still alive.
Like, okay, well, that was one of the hardest things. And it's already partially
written, and here we are. I mean,
the only voice in my head as I'm writing these things, voices in my head
as I'm writing those particular things are my younger brother and sister, because it's

(43:18):
their father I'm talking about. I mean, this book is their horrible parents that I'm
talking about one of them being mine. And so that was
a reckoning that took. I wrote it, you know, in 2020,
probably. I didn't get they didn't read it till this year,
obviously, because I wasn't done yet. And luckily they're both dealing
with it. Did they experience any abuse like that themselves or

(43:40):
a lot of violence? I guess maybe that's not their story to tell, but.
Oh, yeah, no, I don't think that either of them would mind if I said
that. He was. He was very violent and controlling with them, but,
you know, a very different brand of psychopathy,
really, you know, a cousin to it. They didn't have a great experience
with him at all growing up, and they had to live with him even more
than I did because they actually grew up with him. He passed away

(44:03):
in December of 2021.
And at first I was like, bummer. Kind of wanted this book to be out
in the world with him having to deal with it. And then I was like,
actually, no. Yeah,
actually, it's. He probably. Of everyone that
I mentioned in this book that might take issue, he might be the only one
who would actually try to sue. So that would just been a hot mess.

(44:26):
Off topic. Although I think anyone. I've been living with this
hope, anyone who would try to sue me for this would
know that that would just be really good publicity.
Yes, the Barbra Streisand effect is real.
So, again, so you are clear about what. What happened to you. I also
appreciate it. Again, you're writing from your teenage perspective, so we get to see the

(44:49):
struggle, internal struggles that you had about, like, in some ways,
engaging in some of the sexual abuse or being there for
that could forestall physical violence or other types of problems.
And you learned and were groomed to sort
of participate that way, which could. Could make someone
feel guilty or complicit. And you talk about all the mixed feelings that

(45:11):
you had. Obviously you were always disgusted and always hated it. But to
see what it does to a young person was
really powerful. It's a powerful witness. I think it certainly
shed more light on what that kind of abuse would be like.
As a reader, I was appreciative and it was hard to read,
but I was appreciative because it helped me understand even more the kind

(45:32):
of things that happen to real people in the world. What's interesting
to me is that I don't know. I don't know what made
me so afraid of the foster care system,
but I did know that if I went to some kind of authority and
talked about the abuse that I was suffering, that I would.
Worst case scenario, no one would believe me, nothing would happen, and then I would

(45:53):
live in a household where I had tried to get out, which would have made
it exponentially worse, or I would be put into foster care.
And I don't know how I knew this, but I knew that it might
be the same thing all over again, but just with New Devil,
the devil I didn't know. And so it's
a mystery to me what my decisions were, except that I know that I lived

(46:16):
an incredibly compartmentalized life in which I spent my time at school
and anywhere but home, not just pretending it wasn't happening,
like believing it wasn't happening, like, knowing it in my bones, like, just.
Just put that away, because I. It's so much more fun to
be this version. I also think that the family models
that you were living in, you now, you had a comparison.

(46:36):
Like, you had your previous family sort of system and structure,
which had its own dysfunctions and issues, but it was safer than
what you experienced in this apparently nuclear family situation.
So I can't imagine that that would be a very
ringing endorsement of your stereotypical American family
life. Now that you had lived that yourself, you're probably looking back at the

(46:58):
family and saying, I really do want to get back there. That was better for
me. I think one of the things that emerged for me as what I was
writing about, aside from just myself and my life,
was that the nuclear family can be
just as destructive as a cult, and that.
That the average cult is just patriarchy on

(47:19):
steroids, especially because FP was really trying to replicate that
life, but in microcosm and in the middle of the. The real world,
that it's, you know, it's kind of an indictment of the nuclear family accidentally.
Yeah. Yeah. Or at least a call to. A call to reckon,
I think, is what I would call it. It's like at no point did I
feel like any sort of wholesale condemnation of any particular structure.

(47:43):
What you were doing was calling attention to the kind of power dynamics and abuses
that can play out regardless of the structure and how they might be different based
on what the structure is. So when we're thinking about what family
means to someone, even someone like me, who I didn't grow
up in a cult, but I could. Like you did. I could recognize certain
things in what you described in how adults in my life acted,

(48:04):
or some of them acted, or in elements of what your.
Your little mom, dad, kid, family, how that looked.
So I wanted you to read one excerpt before we get to
the last part of the interview here on page 242.
This is the last paragraph in this chapter, and this is when you finally decide
to really leave. FP had physically

(48:26):
assaulted you. He had slammed your head into.
Against a bedboard repeatedly and just really physically
harmed you. And your mom had kind
of begun blaming you or being even jealous of you when she found
out the abuse was happening or thinking that you were maybe egging it on or
something. You were just done at that point. So if you can read that last

(48:49):
paragraph. The thing about violence
is that it's not something that can be happening every second.
Lives have to be lived. Houses of cards have to be reconstructed.
I imagine they both told themselves lies to get up the next morning. I imagine
I told myself a few as well. Who will I call to get the homework
assignment while I miss school? Was an easier question than what's to become of

(49:10):
us? The deep undercurrent of my defiance
informed every moment inside the house. After that, I knew I'd upset
the balance, but I still didn't know how to escape. I want to say
there was no more sexual abuse, but that would be a lie. I probably did
what I was coerced into doing because though the violence saved me
from sexual abuse, it kept me from school, and school was my

(49:31):
only portal to freedom. I had to go to school.
A few days later, I was allowed to wear makeup for the first time to
cover up what was left of the bruises.
I was pretty good. That line,
the thing about violence is that it's not something that can be happening every second.
Lives have to be lived. I could apply that line to not just violence,

(49:52):
but to so many things. I think that applies to grief when you're grieving the
loss of. Of a loved one. Like, lives have to be lived.
It can even be. Your joy can be interrupted by the everyday thing.
Like every strong thing we experience, lives still have to be lived.
And when it came to violence, I think it was such an important point
for you to make, and it really stopped me in my tracks because

(50:13):
we're in the violence with you so much. You're describing it in
depth, but you're also saying, look, I'm also living a life. Like, there was school,
there were friends that I had. There was other stuff. And it just.
I just loved that line especially. Very powerful.
Thank you. It's a thing that I have thought about a
lot. Sort of the mundanity of, you know,

(50:37):
and it applies too, to the family that I grew up and, you know,
the cult. Part of it is that,
you know, I was thinking about. I'm doing an adaptation now,
a screenplay of this book. And I was Like I,
I kind of just want a 20 minute scene where we're just doing laundry.
Well, better. So many this really. Well, there are shows that do

(50:57):
these slow burn things because streaming, I guess they can like do
these sprawling episodes. I love that though. Sitting in
the mundane aspects of a life really. I think this
is the power of prestige TV today that they, that they can do
that. And I don't know if you've seen the bear. They do it a little
bit differently. They do all these like jump cuts of just scene, scene,
scene, scene. So you see like building, building, building, cutting food, do, do,

(51:20):
do. And it's super rapid, but it's making you think of like all
the other stuff that's happening while the story of the bear is happening. So there's
different ways, I think, to do it in film. There's the better call Solway,
which is like they're gonna show him doing something for like three minutes
and you're just gonna be like, okay, like why are we still here?
Or there's the super jump cut in your book. I think you're able to do

(51:42):
it in a paragraph like the one you just read where you remind us like,
okay, step out of the book for a second and recognize that you're getting a
snapshot of what was going on here. So there's a lot of power to that.
Yeah, I feel like also there's power as I think about
the, the, the cinematic version of this in
if you already know you're in an environment that could erupt in violence at

(52:04):
any time, you can imagine that a five minute scene watching
a bunch of kids do laundry, if you've set it up properly, can feel
menacing. Totally. Like any second now the hammer's going to come down and
we're not really sure from where or why, but like these kids are always kind
of in danger. And by the way, how exhausting. I kept thinking to myself
what an exhausting life that must be for fp. The amount

(52:25):
of control he leveraged and how you and your mom
had to, had to walk on eggshells and think of him in so
many ways, how just controlling he was. I feel like that
would be an exhausting life to live to try
to exercise that level of psychological control over
other people. I can't really wrap my head around that. Yeah, I think

(52:46):
about that sometimes and I think about how much he plotted
and schemed and how much what
it felt like was it was like an, like a sociopathic
animal. Like it's just instinct. He's just going on
this Sort of weird, you know, manipulative person that probably
comes from his own messed up childhood. And he's not even doing

(53:08):
it on a fully conscious level. Like it's a. He's surviving
too. Yeah. He believed. I think it
comes from this place where he just believed that he was right. And he believed
that he was doing what the Lyman family would have done,
but in microcosm. And his model, because,
you know, he was 19 when he joined that family, his model was all

(53:29):
powerful men who do whatever they want and women serve them. There's one
more family model that you introduce us to in the book that you encountered,
and this is a boyfriend that you had in high school.
And this is one of the ways you escaped is you were able to go
to this home. His father, Lloyd spears, he was 65
years old. And they take you in. How did that family

(53:50):
contrast with the other family structures that you had encountered so
far in your life? That family,
Lloyd was divorced, and so their mom lived far away. But it was Lloyd,
Brian, my boyfriend, and his brother and sister who were in
and out of the house. They didn't really live there. I mean, they were slightly
dysfunctional in the sense that, you know,

(54:11):
the dad drank a lot and everybody was always fighting
with the sister. But mostly my experience was it was
just me and Lloyd in the house. And Lloyd was a lovely man. And so
suddenly I had this utterly benign,
benevolent man who agreed to adopt
me and barely asked me any questions and never did

(54:32):
and never did again. And it was nothing but lovely to me.
And, you know, for me, a safe man
was almost an oxymoron. Yeah. And so I
was, I was just moved and thrilled. And I
mean, if I. If I was wr. This story and it was fiction,
I would say, God, that just that, that, that particular thing where

(54:53):
someone did. She. Her boyfriend's father just decides to operate. It comes a
little too easily. Didn't really work that hard for that. And I mean,
it did because I worked so hard to find something. Yes. And I finally found
that. But. But that was just. I did not know this man. And he agreed
to let me come live with them. And then on the spot, when cops came
to take me away, he said he was going to adopt me. And then he
did. Like that's just magic fairy tale ending, you know? Yeah.

(55:16):
And it's funny to me that the so called, like, you know,
stereotypical broken home, right. This is a divorced man, a little bit
dysfunctional with his kids. He maybe has a problem with alcohol, but he
ends up being such A safe place for you. And so as we're going through
the book and seeing these different families, we have the Lyman family with all its
dysfunction and difficulties. You introduce us to some nuance there for all

(55:36):
of its real serious problems. But then your nuclear family,
quote, unquote, that's also. That's just not safe for you at all.
And then this, what you'd look at is a, quote, broken home that
becomes such a good place for you and a safe place for you. Which to
me, again, says, don't judge a family by its cover. Like,
looking at the outside. If we just look at the numbers and

(55:57):
what was statistically likely to happen within those family
structures, we would not have predicted the experience
that you actually had. Your experience shows
that different families work differently. And then we've got
to take each family one at a time to see what it's really like for
people. Yeah, my editor, when I wrote the piece
about Lloyd and the cops coming, and at some point, he puts his hand

(56:20):
on my. Lloyd puts his hand on my shoulder just
for reassurance. And my editor was like. I was.
She was. You got it. You gotta let the audience off the hook. You gotta
let him know that this is not also gonna be a predator. She's like,
my heart jumped into my throat when he put his hand on your shoulder.
And I was like, ah. But that means I did my job.
Because that means that at this point in the reader's

(56:44):
experience, you know, like, I should. I need to be careful of all men.
See, that's so funny, because from a. This shows my male
perspective here, because that was a moment of relief for me. I remember reading
that part and thinking, my initial thought was, at last, like,
someone is giving her, like, an actual genuine, affectionate touch here.
That is one of safety. And so to have other

(57:06):
readers react that their alarm bells would go off, I think says a lot
about my own privilege and about, like, the kind of things that I don't
really have to worry about, because that was a moment of relief for me.
Like, you set Lloyd up to be the character that he was. And I think
maybe I just needed that relief of, like, okay, things are finally going to be
okay for Guinevere. Please. Like, I wanted it to

(57:26):
be okay so much. One friend of mine who's a woman said
that she's like. I resisted crying for the whole book, but I cried with relief
once. Lloyd said he was going to adopt you. Yeah,
that's quite the moment in the book. And I want listeners to
know, too. There's so much that we obviously didn't have time to cover throughout.
And I was so engrossed, I forgot to reintroduce you to our listeners,

(57:48):
too. So right now I'll just remind people. This is Guinevere Turner.
She's an acclaimed screenwriter and director. She co wrote screenplays for American
Psycho and the Notorious Bettie Page, and more recently
the screenplay for Charlie Says. She also wrote and starred
in the film Go Fish and was a writer and actor on Showtime's the L
Word, which is a title that she came up with herself as well.

(58:09):
And she wrote an essay about these life experiences in
the New Yorker that became the inspiration for this memoir that we're talking
about today. The memoir is called when the World Didn't End. It is
a powerful book. I quite enjoyed reading it.
Guinevere. And before we go, it's time to talk about
regrets, challenges and surprises. So this is

(58:31):
when you can choose to speak to one, two, or all three of these things.
Is there something you would change about the book now that it's out? Is there
something that was most challenging in writing it? And we kind of talked
a little bit about that, perhaps. And then was there any new revelations
for yourself? Any surprises as you were writing the book that you discovered
in that process? Regrets I

(58:53):
wish that I had changed more of the names of
my generation, the girls that I talk about,
specifically the ones who experienced some form of abuse,
or so I thought, because one of them called me and said,
I wish you'd change. You know, she liked the book a lot, but she's like,
I wish you'd change my name. And then she called me two weeks later and

(59:13):
said, I'm glad you used my name.
One of the challenges that I had,
it's not this is the challenge regret hybrid. One of the challenges
I had was there are two things that I didn't put in
the book because they are information that would hurt,

(59:34):
hurt people's feelings who are still alive and who
I still care about. I know that's hard to imagine. If you
read the book, like, what the heck did you not put in there?
But there are two different instances where I obscure the truth
because it's, you know, someone's dad that
I'm talking about, but it's someone that, you know,

(59:55):
I'm in touch with today or because not
my my siblings dad, obviously, FBI just went for
it. And so that part, like, it still
hurts a little bit because I had to make a choice there between the artist
who knows that this would just make the story better because it just,
like, really, really.

(01:00:16):
And just saying, like, you know what? They just. I can't. Like, that it's not
worth it to hurt these feelings and potentially rupture
these friendships. That was a challenge because
the storyteller in me was like, no, don't come this far,
and then not say it all. And that's a. That's sort of an ethical thing
that I think happens when you're, you know, writing memoir and

(01:00:38):
surprises. I'll tell you, the.
My friend Claire giving me, like, like, oh, do you think these
letters that you wrote to me when you were 15 and all these
audio tapes would be useful to writing your book? Like,
that was an incredible surprise. And she, she. I was already, you know,
toward the end of writing the book when she. I was like,

(01:00:59):
yes. And there's just incredible. One of her letters. One of the
letters I wrote to her is I published in its entirety in the book.
Because my voice, I'm so. I got so snarky by the time
I was 15. Even though my life was absolute hell,
I'm still kind of like, what the.
And the audio tapes are priceless. They're just priceless.

(01:01:21):
I will definitely give them to whatever young actor ends up playing teenage
me. That was a surprise.
I'm trying to think. I had one other thing. Oh, I was really surprised.
This is maybe off topic, but it's not because I learned something.
When you have a book like this and with a big publisher,
you go through a legal process with, you know, like a legal read where

(01:01:43):
they say, you know, who can verify this? Who can verify that this. You should
change this name for, you know, fear of being sued. And a thing I learned,
I did not know. So Delia, who's kind of an important figure in the book,
that is not her real name. This is Jesse's number two that we talked about
that had the power struggle and wanted to. And she, you know, she was kind
of forced to get an abortion that she didn't want. And the legal team

(01:02:04):
said, you need to obscure her name because.
And I was like, but everybody knew this. Like, literally 160
people knew this. It's not like, you know. And I learned she said
the most actionable thing in terms of people suing
for a memoir is revealing medical history.
Who knew? Probably, like, hip a lot. Maybe there's probably

(01:02:27):
just law around protected health info that is more
robust. And. Yeah, so I was surprised to learn that.
I was surprised to learn what the subtleties are. I was surprised at myself in
that process, too, because I changed the name of a
couple of people who were abusive just
because I didn't want it to come back at me.

(01:02:50):
And she said, why would you change the name of the abusers and not the
victims or survivors? And I was like, oh,
God, yeah, right. I'm going to do that, too.
Yeah. That again, speaks to, like, these ingrained power dynamics
that happen of, like, people being more
ready to protect abusers or to, you know, or to

(01:03:11):
think of or to protect ourselves from abusers, even,
like. Yeah. And I'm keenly and
in great complexity aware of predator and survivor
dynamics and, you know, cultural moments and all of it. And even I was,
like, out here protecting,
not on purpose, but. But actually enacting behavior

(01:03:33):
that was protecting perpetrators and not victims.
And I was. I was like, who am I?
Yeah, well, as I said, there's so much we didn't cover. You get
a swing by the family at the end of the book for one more pass
to see maybe, if maybe you'll go back and stick around.
It doesn't pan out. Readers can pick up a book to find out what happened

(01:03:53):
in your last journey back through the family. The book's
called when the World Didn't End. I highly recommend it. And Guinevere,
this was such a great conversation and I loved your book and
I appreciate you taking time to visit us on family proclamations.
We're not. Thank you so much, Blair. I really love the
idea of your podcast. And as a person who has had so many

(01:04:14):
different kinds of families and family structures and it goes on. I went on to
go to Sarah Lawrence College, which is a very small school where all sorts of
intricate family structures. And then I work in
film production, where a very intense team becomes a family.
I seem to seek out different kinds of family structures, and then the queer community
and families we choose. Yes. You know, there's just. Family is such a juicy.

(01:04:34):
A fertile ground for conversation and talking about our society in
general. Yeah. So. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to
talk about family and my very special relationship to it.
You bet.
Thanks for listening to Relations Capes. It's a journey through the terrain of family,
gender, and sexuality. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape how

(01:04:58):
we connect with each other. And speaking of connecting with each other, go to Apple
Podcasts, leave a review so that other people might connect with
the show. You can also rate the show in Spotify. Would really appreciate that.
Any kind of feedback is great. I love hearing from you. Thanks to Mates of
State for providing the theme song. It's called Somewhere. You can find that
in Apple Music or wherever else you get your music. It's a great new single

(01:05:18):
from them. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair
Hodges, and I'll see you next time.