When the World Didn't End
A Memoir
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult—and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she’d ever known
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
On January 5, 1975, the world was supposed to end. Under strict instructions, six-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited with the rest of her community for salvation—a spaceship that would take them to live on Venus. But the spaceship never came.
Guinevere did not understand that her family was a cult. She spent most of her days on a compound in Kansas, living apart from her mother with dozens of other children who worked in the sorghum fields and roved freely through the surrounding pastures, eating mulberries and tending to farm animals. But there was a dark side to this bucolic existence. Guinevere was part of the Lyman Family, a secluded cult spearheaded by Mel Lyman, a self-proclaimed savior, committed to isolation from a World he declared had lost its way. When Guinevere caught the attention of Jessie, the woman everyone in the Family called the Queen, her status was elevated—suddenly she was traveling with the inner circle among communities in Los Angeles, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard.
But before long, the life Guinevere had known ended. Her mother, from whom she had been separated since age three, left the Family with another disgraced member, and Guinevere and her four-year-old sister were forced to leave with them. Traveling outside the bounds of her cloistered existence, Guinevere was thrust into public school for the first time, a stranger in a strange land wearing homemade clothes, and clueless about social codes. Now out in the World she’d been raised to believe was evil, she faced challenges and horrors she couldn’t have imagined.
Drawing from the diaries that she kept throughout her youth, Guinevere Turner’s memoir is an intimate and heart-wrenching chronicle of a childhood touched with extraordinary beauty and unfathomable ugliness, the ache of yearning to return to a lost home—and the slow realization of how harmful that place really was.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American Psycho screenwriter Turner recalls an often-traumatic childhood in this affecting memoir, which covers her life from ages six to 18 in the 1970s and '80s, when she and her family were members of a cult centered on the apocalyptic teachings of Mel Lyman. Lyman prophesied that on Jan. 5, 1975, the world would end, but members of "the Family"—many of whom lived together on a single property in Los Angeles—would be transported to Venus in an alien spaceship. When the aliens didn't appear, Lyman explained that some of his followers were not spiritually ready, and Turner took that to heart, believing that her imperfections were what held the Family back ("I can't remember not living with the shame of it, and the mystery"). Eventually, she moves to New York City with her mother to join up with a Family sect there, after which she slowly comes to understand the depth of the Family's deception. Turner excels at making the cult's far-fetched beliefs and practices legible to outsiders, illustrating her mindset through occasional contemporaneous diary entries: "All we did all day in school was read Melvin's poems and memorize them. It is very hard to say them correctly." Her journey away from the cult and toward a successful screenwriting career is stirring and inspiring. This will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.
Customer Reviews
Typically nauseating
After the first few chapters I started skimming over the pages trying to find something interesting about the story. Nothing. Typical abusive men and weak, dependent women. Ugh.