The True Happiness Company

A Memoir

A LILLY’S LIBRARY BOOK CLUB PICK • In this darkly humorous and wrenchingly sincere memoir, a young Indian American woman’s dreams of being a well-adjusted college student get wildly derailed when her struggles with mental health land her in the office of a charismatic alternative therapist and his self-help cult.

“Honest, brutal, funny, fascinating. A vital reminder of how important it is to trust ourselves.”—Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy

“Veena Dinavahi is a ferocious writer with a poetic left hook.”—Bethany Joy Lenz, New York Times bestselling author of Dinner for Vampires

It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a typical white American suburb—except for its unusually high suicide rate. For years, she tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing seems to work. Until, on a late-night Google search, Veena’s mom discovers Bob Lyon—a sixty-year-old white man in the backwoods of Georgia who claims he can make her want to live again. He calls himself “The True Happiness Company” and, as their relationship progresses, “Daddy.” Veena becomes increasingly enveloped in his strangely close-knit community, and before she knows it, she’s a college dropout, married mother of three, and Mormon convert who has gotten way too good at dismissing her gut feeling that something is wrong. But when Veena’s treatment goes too far, she slowly begins to question whether true happiness can even exist as an absolute.

In this revelatory debut, Veena traces the contours of her life to explore the question that plagued her in the years afterward: how did I fall for that? And what will it mean to move forward?

Told with unflinching clarity and shot through with incisive wit, The True Happiness Company is Veena Dinavahi’s singular exploration of what it means to lose and reclaim your identity, rethink mental illness, and learn to trust your intuition in a world determined to annihilate it.

Horrifying and relevant

Am I in a cult?
Life choices - how did we get here? This is a perfect storm and must read.

Blew My Mind!

Fantastic story, fantastic narration, fantastic insight!
You will not be disappointed!
I am a huge reader of cult memoirs and this one is different. You can see how she fell into it. You don't understand it, until you do.

Could not stop listening!

Read by the author. I found it so compelling I listened to it all in one go! Beautifully written, affecting and insightful.

A searingly honest story

Veena Dinavahi intentionally takes us on a journey as she was experiencing the pain and the manipulation (not retrospectively, when she could see the whole picture). That was a smart way to present her story — to underscore how this could happen to anyone. I also appreciated the psychological analysis interwoven. It rooted her story in the larger cultural context and attempted to question what’s normal and highlight how systems of care are often not designed to help vulnerable people.

Incredible

She does such a good job telling a horrifying story. Her analysis of cults and her situation is so refreshing at the end of such a harrowing tale.