True Happiness: An Interview with Veena Dinavahi
“As a teenager, I used to think there were two kinds of people: the intelligent and the naïve. I assumed intelligent people were immune to things like marketing scams, toxic friendships, and any kind of emotionally or physically abusive relationship. I certainly would have categorized anyone who winds up in a cult as naïve. But then I realized I was in one.” – Veena Dinavahi, The True Happiness Company (Random House, May 2025)
Veena Dinavahi’s teenage life seemed ordinary enough: loving parents, good grades, a stable home life in an affluent Maryland suburb. Curious, driven, and college-bound, she was poised for success. Then her classmates began dying by suicide.
After her own initial suicide attempt at the age of 15, Dinavahi’s parents turned to psychiatry, seeking licensed professionals capable of convincing their daughter to stay alive. As Dinavahi’s struggles with mental health deepened over the next few years, her family’s desperation eventually led them on a twelve-hour road trip to meet a stranger in a Georgia basement: a former eye doctor and recovering addict who called himself the True Happiness Company.
At first, Bob’s influence was welcome — to Dinavahi, to her parents, to her boyfriend. But over time, Bob began to exert his authority in increasingly dangerous and unethical ways. In The True Happiness Company, Dinavahi skillfully explores the slow burn of her immersion in Bob’s world and her growing suspicion that she might be in a cult.
I first encountered Dinavahi’s work at The Rumpus in her vulnerable, honest essay about grappling with body image as a newly-divorced 27-year-old mother of three. An author search led me to Columbia Spectator, where she penned a thoughtful piece about the complexities of being a nontraditional student. Dinavahi’s writing talent was obvious, and as a fellow member of the too-young-to-be-a-mom club, her essays resonated with me. So when I found out that she was writing a book, I jumped at the chance to read it.
Dinavahi and I spoke in late May via Zoom. We discussed her memoir, the insidious dynamics of control, and what it takes to break free. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. – Jen Bryant
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JEN BRYANT: What made you decide to tell this story now?
VEENA DINAVAHI: I immediately started writing after I realized I was in a cult — not necessarily with the intention of turning it into a book, but because I was like, “What happened?” There wasn’t one specific moment. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. Some of it ended up just being for my own processing experience, and then I pieced the rest of it together, and I was like, “Oh, I think this is a book.” So it was more about my timeline than anything else.
JB: The subtitle of your book is “How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That.” Had you already figured out the how of it all before you started writing your memoir or did writing help uncover aspects of the situation you hadn’t thought about before?
VD: I definitely had not known before I started writing. I thought that this cult leader was a great person who had made one mistake, basically, when I started writing this. But I had also gone back to college to get my degree in psychology, and I started learning more about coercive tactics and manipulative techniques. So then, looking at my words on the page combined with this new knowledge, I realized, “Oh, so that’s what happened. It’s not actually the case that I was this horrible, manipulative person; I was clearly a vulnerable young woman, and these were all of the techniques that he used.” And so that was incredibly eye-opening.
As my mindset shifted, I had to rewrite the book multiple times. Originally, I tried to portray Bob in this incredibly positive, generous light, and I tried to portray myself in this terrible way. That changed as I gained more insight to balance things out.
JB: I can totally see how going to college and studying psychology would be helpful when you’re putting all of the pieces together. It also gives your story a larger context – it’s not just you, there are all of these other factors, plus this incredibly manipulative person.
VD: Unfortunately, cult leaders are so stereotypical. They all use the same tactics. Even now as I’m reading fictional stories about cult leaders, I’m like, “Yep, there’s that one, and there’s that one…” But in the moment, there was always something that made it compelling enough for me to believe, even though I’m a pretty smart person and have good taste in people. So when I was revising the book, that was something I really wanted to preserve.
I know that now, on paper, it looks super obvious. Yes, the fact that he made me call him Daddy should be a huge red flag! But I wanted to communicate why, in that moment, there was some plausibility, and why I was willing to believe. Which wasn’t just because I was vulnerable; there were other factors.
During the process of filing a lawsuit and writing a book, going through the emails Bob had sent me was incredibly eye-opening. That felt like proof that wasn’t just reliant on my memory. I thought that the decision to become a mother was entirely my decision, and I believed what Bob had told me: “I would never tell someone what to do.” But there’s the email where he told me exactly what to do in a numbered list! So that was an experience where I was like, okay, maybe my memory is not the objective record.
JB: One of the things that makes your cult experience unique is that it happened in the digital age, so you have the receipts — you have texts, you have emails — and you can look back at them with this new perspective and put things into context. Did that feel validating?
VD: It did, because memory is a subjective thing. There are so many different factors at play, so if I just had my memory alone, it would be incredibly difficult to untangle. But having thousands of emails from Bob where he’s clearly manipulating me and pressuring me was incredibly helpful. That allowed me to take a step back and release some of the shame that I was carrying.
JB: At the beginning of your memoir, you wrote that you made the deliberate decision to present events to the reader as they happened to you, using only the knowledge you had at the time, without the benefit of your present perspective. In addition to going through old emails, was there a specific process or technique that helped you remember what your mindset was like back when the events in the book were unfolding?
VD: I drew on a lot of journals I had kept from those times. From high school on, I had written those scenes as they were happening, so it was very helpful to have that record. Later, I started talking to people in my life who had known me at that time — my parents, my brother, my ex-husband — and asking, “How do you remember this?” Hearing their side of it was incredibly unnerving. There were so many gaps in our communication; it was like ships in the night, where they had been told one thing, I had been told something else, and we didn’t put together exactly what was happening until I was writing the book.
JB: In the book, you describe how you began seeing a series of mental health professionals after your first suicide attempt at 15. Unfortunately, they were largely ineffective. By the time your parents took you to meet Bob, you were skeptical that anyone would be able to help you. But Bob promised something completely different: unconditional love. Why do you think this tactic was so effective?
VD: I don’t know that it was the unconditional love itself that spoke to me; that part was honestly a little off-putting and did register as a red flag. I think it was more his authority at first, and the fact that he seemed to not have an agenda. Everyone else seemed to be saying, “Obviously, life is good, living is great,” and as a skeptical teenager I was like, “Really? Have you looked around? Because I feel like that’s debatable.”
Bob was the first person who didn’t present things in a black and white way: I’m gonna try to convince you to live, because living is good. The fact that he wasn’t overly simplistic in his approach to the depression that I was facing (which sounds silly to say, because obviously he was overly simplistic in saying that love would solve everything) gave him some kind of credibility. He told me, “I get it. I have been there. I used to lay out on the street at night, waiting for cars to run me over, and now I’m happy, and I can show you how to recreate those steps.”
That was incredibly compelling for me, because when I was faced with these other adults and mental health care professionals, they didn’t share anything of their own lives, so I had this naïve assumption that they hadn’t faced any difficulty. My thought was, “Well, these people have never struggled. What would they know?” So the fact that Bob was willing to share that with me opened up the possibility that there was a way for someone who feels that low to change and to experience happiness.
JB: As your relationship with Bob and the True Happiness Company deepened, your goals began to shift. You started off as a college student with these very specific aspirations, but before long, Bob was manipulating many of your personal decisions, even going so far as to dictate how you should handle an unplanned pregnancy and urging you to get married at 20 years old. In hindsight, do you think that anyone in your life realized the full extent of the control he exerted over you at the time?
VD: I don’t think anyone did, except for my ex-husband, because Bob was very careful with what he would say to people. He was able to convince my parents that being in contact with me would damage my mental health, so they backed off, and that created enough distance that we weren’t able to really understand exactly how involved the other was. I didn’t know that my parents were still in contact with him and had gone to see him separately. He was very strategic about how he would isolate people and who he would allow within that circle — it was only people he knew would support that extreme kind of relationship. Which my ex did.
JB: Early in motherhood, you joined the Mormon church. Were there parallels between your experience with organized religion and what you found in your relationship with Bob — the structure, the absolutes, the idea that there was something about you that needed to be absolved or redeemed?
VD: For sure. I think part of why I was in this situation is that the difficulty of making decisions was so overwhelming for me. I was coming from a place where I was depressed and wanted to die. I needed someone to tell me how to put one foot in front of the other to get to the next stage. But then when that changed, when I was no longer suicidal, I was still in that dynamic with Bob.
The church fit very naturally into that because they have rules for everything: how you dress, how you interact with your family, how you spend your time. Your role as a family provider for men, or staying home and raising children for women. So that did seem to fit with everything that Bob had been teaching me up to that point.
He was Mormon the whole time, so I think he intentionally took these approaches from the Mormon church and changed them a little and embedded them into how he approached people. It felt like a natural transition: “Here, why don’t you try reading these scriptures if you want to be happy and have a fulfilled life?”
JB: During your pregnancy with your third child, you began to experience complications. Before that, there were a couple of things that made you start to pull back from Bob. But it seemed like it was really during your pregnancy with your son that you began to take back control of your own life. Do you feel that advocating for your son, both during pregnancy and after he was born with medically complex needs, also helped you to advocate for yourself?
VD: The stakes were so high at that point, when I was like “This child might die,” that I was no longer willing to accept anyone else’s rationalizations or attempts to convince me that I was crazy. When it had been my own well-being, I was willing to suppress my needs and convince myself that my desires and my perspective were wrong and didn’t matter. But when I had this helpless little baby and everyone — my parents, my ex-husband, Bob, even our first pediatrician — was trying to convince me that I was overreacting, it was easier to say, “I think all of you are wrong.”
It also helped that the situation didn’t feel ambiguous to me. There was a baby who wasn’t eating. It wasn’t a crazy position to have or a complicated stance. I had concerns and they were valid. So that was my first step in being able to trust my own perceptions, which I had been suppressing for so long.
JB: Now that the book is out in the world, what sort of reactions are you getting from readers?
VD: The responses have been incredible. I’ve actually been shocked because it’s only been out for a day and a half, and people have already finished reading the book. The one thing I feel really proud of is people telling me that I made this very bizarre experience feel relatable, which was my goal. So that has been really gratifying.
Every time I had heard stories of cults or abuse, it had been with this perspective of othering them, where we all gather together and point and look: “That’s so crazy, who knows how that happened to them, they must be really dumb.” What I was hoping to bring to the table was the ability to make the experience relatable. You may not have been in this particular situation, but let me explain the feelings that were involved so you can understand the situation. And even asking the reader directly sometimes: What would you do in this circumstance, when it doesn’t seem like there are any alternatives?
JB: What do you hope readers take away from your memoir?
VD: I hope that it resonates with people in similar circumstances. I hope that it’s a non-threatening way to identify what these coercive tactics look like. For example, we all know that isolation is one of these tactics, but Bob presented it as “Oh, your family is toxic, so you need to separate yourself from them, but it’s just temporary, and then you’ll be stronger and you’ll be able to handle them.”
Even if people haven’t been there, this could help them understand why others might be susceptible to situations like these. I hope that I was able to provide a little more context and make this story accessible.
About the Author
Jen Bryant is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Ms., BUST, Hip Mama, Matter News, and elsewhere. She has participated in readings and storytelling events at the Columbus Arts Fest, Wild Goose Creative, and Two Dollar Radio. Originally from the South, she currently lives in the Midwest.
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