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Title details for The True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi - Available

The True Happiness Company

A Memoir

by Veena Dinavahi
Veena Dinavahi
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 20, 2025

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593909058
      • File size: 287451 KB
      • Duration: 09:58:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 31, 2025
      How could an intelligent woman, with robust family support, be sucked into a cult? Dinavahi explores that question in her poignant debut, which traces her path from a comfortable Maryland upbringing through multiple suicide attempts, her time under the spell of an abusive charlatan, and her eventual escape from his control. After a high school classmate died by suicide in 2007, Dinavahi became obsessed with the tragedy, and soon tried to take her own life. That led her desperate mother to scour the internet for help, landing on True Happiness Company founder Bob Lyon, who claimed he could reinvigorate Dinavahi’s love of life (later, Dinavahi would find out Lyon was a former eye surgeon with no training in psychology). When Dinavahi and her parents visited Lyon in his Georgia home, his calmness impressed Dinavahi, kicking off her eight years “in his orbit.” Though Lyon’s treatments could be disturbing—he insisted a 19-year-old Dinavahi call him “Daddy” and allow him to cradle her like an infant—she pushed down her misgivings. Her apprehension grew after she learned that Lyon was a proselytizing Mormon, and an episode in which Lyon asked her to remove her clothes so he could touch her finally broke the spell, moving her to cut ties with him and enroll in a college psychology program. Dinavahi’s conversational tone and clear-eyed sense of her own vulnerability make for a powerful self-portrait. It’s equal parts fascinating and edifying. Agent: Maria Stovall, Trellis Literary.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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