True Happiness Company: A Memoir [Kietas viršelis]

"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. She tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing works. Then, on one late-night Google search, her mom finds Bob Lyon-a 60-year-old man in the backwoods of Georgia who says he can make Veena want to live again. He calls himself "The True Happiness Company" and, as their relationship progresses... "Daddy." As Veena is sucked into his strangely close-knit community, Bob's "suggestions" start to feel less and less optional. Before she knows it, she's a college dropout, married mother of three, and a Mormon convert whohas gotten way too good at dismissing her gut feeling that something is wrong. But when Bob finally pushes her too far, Veena slowly begins to realize that true happiness cannot be one-size-fits-all. She cuts ties with Bob, only to reckon with what it means to build a life outside of his influence. Driven to understand her journey, she re-enrolls in college, where studying psychology proves revelatory as she considers her experience through the broader contexts of gender, race, religion. Told with unflinching clarity and shot through with incisive wit, The True Happiness Company is Dinavahi's singular debut about losing and reclaiming your identity, rethinking mental illness, and learning to trust your intuition in a world determined to annihilate it"--

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.