Bethany Joy Lenz knows cults have gone a little mainstream. “When I tell someone I was in a cult, their first response is: ‘Which one?’” she writes in her sharp, confessional memoir, “Dinner for Vampires.” People are hoping she’ll say one they recognize from a Netflix documentary; “I see the disappointment on their faces when I say, ‘Just a small Bible-based group in the Pacific Northwest.’” It may not be a household name, but that group, known as the Big House Family, preyed upon Lenz’s psychological and financial well-being for a decade, leeching her of any perceived free will.
Before she became famous for her nine-year run as the geeky but charming overachiever Haley James on the 2000s TV drama “One Tree Hill,” Lenz was a Hollywood newcomer looking for community. “Dinner for Vampires” rejects the stereotype that only the naïve and broken can fall victim to a cult’s seduction: Raised by loving and devout hippie Christians who moved frequently (she spent most of her upbringing in Texas) and divorced when she was 16, Lenz remembers a household filled with prayer, Proverbs and “daily conversations about God.” Her father read a leather-bound King James Bible “with a highlighter and pen nearby, filling every inch of margin with impeccably written notations.” Committed, but never obsessive or manipulative, in their faith, her parents made room for their daughter’s aspirations — defending her, for instance, when the church took issue with her role on the “tawdry” daytime soap opera “Guiding Light.”
Lenz’s prose remains light and clear, and often funny, throughout the book, even when it takes a disturbing turn. Arriving in Los Angeles at 20 to pursue her acting career in earnest, she feels so isolated and unmoored that she seeks out other young Christians for companionship, one of whom leads her to a weekly Bible study in the home of two brothers, former Seventh-day Adventists.
There she meets a man she calls Les, a pastor without a flock from Idaho whose odiousness she describes vividly: “a short red-faced man in his late 40s with hair everywhere except the top of his head” and a stomach that “ballooned forward under apish arms.” Les visits the group regularly for months, wresting control of the L.A. Bible study group and turning it into a subsidiary of the church he is building back home. The denomination he practices is never specified, and the fuzzy details of his past and of his doomed business ventures propel the memoir, even if some mysteries remain unsolved.
Depressed after a heartbreak, Lenz has grown sympathetic enough to Les’s influence that she accepts an invitation to visit the “little God spa” Les and another leader, Pam, are building up in Idaho: “I needed to be surrounded by family.” As her trips there accumulate, this Family starts to take the place of her own so-called “bio-family”: “The more I folded into Les and Pam’s world,” Lenz writes, “the more misunderstood by my parents I felt and the less I trusted them.”
After a couple of years in L.A., Lenz moves to Wilmington, N.C., to shoot “One Tree Hill,” worrying her work will dilute her faith even as members of the Family start showing up in Wilmington for impromptu group sessions. As Les continues to infiltrate every aspect of Lenz’s life — her acting career funds his ministry and his motel, she manages his restaurant, she marries his son — rumors start to swirl among the show’s fans. When a Family member admits she’s been stealing money from her, Lenz thinks: “By now I’d been sufficiently groomed that the only correct response was to forgive her.” When she gives birth to her daughter, Rosie, Lenz’s “bio-mom” isn’t allowed to be there; only Les and his wife are present.
By the time “One Tree Hill” finishes shooting in 2011, Lenz dreads returning to Idaho: “Home was now a wayward ship with terror-stricken passengers.” By now conflict has erupted within the group and in her marriage. When another couple quits the Family, Lenz feels “permission to think differently.” This small awakening grows into the resolve to walk away from the Family once and for all in 2012. Her internal rebellion, self-conscious and faith-driven, turns outward: She takes the Family to court for custody of Rosie and for the money she lost on their poor investments.
Lenz movingly presents her awakening as a kind of baptism, and also a return. She feels subsumed by a “voice” she recognizes from her adolescence: “the same warm, loving presence it had been all those years ago. I’d know it anywhere. I had been chasing it for 10 years in all the wrong places.”
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