Coming of Age in a Cult and Beyond (with Guinevere Turner)

 

Note: This episode includes discussion of psychological manipulation and sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

 

Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. I'm Blair Hodges. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape how we connect with each other. In this episode, our guide is Guinevere Turner.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I think beyond the disappointment—because I was really looking forward to going to Venus and living there—there was just anxiety and fear because the adults all said something was going to happen and it didn't. This isn't going to be pretty, whatever it is.

BLAIR HODGES: One January day in 1975, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited for the spaceship to arrive. But the world didn't end that day after all. And even though the cult she was being raised in carried on, Guinevere would soon find herself thrust out into the world beyond the cult, where things would actually become more nightmarish than before.

In this episode, acclaimed screenwriter Guinevere Turner joins us to talk about her remarkable memoir, When the World Didn't End.

 

Inside the Mind of a Child – 01:36

 

BLAIR HODGES: Guinevere Turner, welcome to Relationscapes.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Hi Blair, thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: At the start of your book, there's an author's note where you let us know that you wrote the book from the perspective of your six-year-old self, up to your 18-year-old self. One of the most striking things about your memoir is how well you're able to tap into earlier eras of yourself. You're writing from that perspective, so I wanted you to tell us about the decision to write from there.

Instead of writing retrospectively from your present-day perspective, with all of the knowledge you've gained since then, we get to experience you learning things as the book goes. How did you decide to frame it that way?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Well, I decided to frame it that way after a lot of thinking and reading other memoirs and considering the specific challenges of my story, which is that the family that I grew up in, a cult, are still alive and well, predominantly. And I know, because I wrote this piece for The New Yorker on the same subject, that when the fact checker at The New Yorker called their lawyer, they said, “That's ridiculous. How can she remember any of this? She was just a kid.”

And so for one, I thought it would be a good idea to write from the perspective of being a kid because in some ways it's ironclad. If I'm saying this is how I remember it, you know, I'm not saying it's science, I'm not saying it's journalism. I'm saying this is what it felt like for me. You can't call it into question. I'm not saying this is the absolute truth. I'm saying this is my experience also.

Then when I read many, many memoirs, many of which are good and come from the perspective of, you know, adult hindsight, I personally just stylistically don't like the “If I only knew then what I know now,” or, “but things were about to get so much worse,” or, you know, any of that. It's just that it kind of takes you out of it and I think it sort of lowers the art profile of a book if you don't make a very conscious choice of a POV. This perhaps comes from my screenwriting background.

And also because I have these diaries that I wrote back then that are, you know, obviously in the first person and are very—you can't call them into question. They're real. That's really what I wrote. And so it was kind of already halfway there for me, you know, here I had this voice, and this voice is so present because I preserved it.

So for all of those reasons, I decided the best approach—Oh no, for one more reason, which is there's such a glut of quote unquote “cult content” in documentary, in memoir, in podcasts, for sure, right? There's something about telling it from the perspective of my childhood self that takes away a little bit of the sensationalism because obviously inside of it, as a kid, I didn't think I was in a cult. I didn't know what a cult was. And I wasn't shocked and scandalized by child brides and, you know, all the weird stuff they were doing because it just wasn't weird to me.

I also felt like it kind of created a buffer for that potential pitfall, which is that I didn't want to write a salacious tell-all memoir about that stuff. Because that's not how I experienced it.

BLAIR HODGES: It makes so much sense. And not to take anything away from other books of people telling their experience of coming out of abusive situations as children, but the way you framed it, readers are able to experience it alongside you.

And I was just struck by how well you could channel your younger self. I think the diaries must have provided a window for you. Was it difficult to get into your old headspace?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Um, was it difficult? I sort of covered in my author's note that, because when I left the Lyman family as an eleven-and-a-half-year-old—I always feel like saying and a half, because in my mind, that mattered a lot, you know!

BLAIR HODGES: It does when you’re a kid for sure! [laughter]

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah. And because I always just wanted to be older. But when I left the Lyman family, I was incredibly, incredibly devastated. And because I was so devastated, I just replayed everything that ever happened to me over and over in my head with this kind of desperation to preserve the culture and the place that I came from, and to not forget any single detail, because I always wanted to be back.

So I just kind of made an archive in my brain as a kid. And also I tried to write this book—well, I tried to write about this in my fiction workshop in college. Then I tried again in my 20s. I tried again in my 30s. I tried again in my 40s. So this has been brewing for a long time. Thinking about what the scenes would be and how the story would unfold has been always on my back burner. It's something that I never let go of, because I always knew I would write a book. I just didn't know when or how or if I would ever have the courage.

And by courage, I mean not so much that I feel like the people I grew up with would come for me in any literal way, but I was in good standing with them. And there's something about knowing that I would get their disapproval and how my generation would respond to me talking about this that was very daunting.

BLAIR HODGES: And I don't think they'll be able to get perspective on that. You did take a less sensationalistic approach to it compared to other things I've seen—other documentaries or other books I've read, it's as sympathetic—but not, you're not excusing what they're doing.

Because as you said, you're coming to it from how you thought about it as a child. There's a lack of harsh judgment throughout your childhood there. You're trying to make sense of it as a child. So you're describing abusive situations or difficult things that I think would be embarrassing now to the group, but you're not doing it from the perspective of a scolding or bitter adult, although you have every reason to scold or you had every reason to feel bitter about certain things.

I guess what I’m saying is there's a sympathy to your approach that comes through.

GUINEVERE TURNER: It's sort of an accidental sympathy. Of the people of my generation from this family who have reached out to me about the book, every one of them say “You were so easy on them! You made it seem, you know, so idyllic. And you didn't really get into the—”

I thought they were gonna be mad at me for writing at all, but instead they were like, “I was hoping for you to really skewer them.” And to that I say, you may have lost perspective on what's normalized, what was normalized for us.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And that's what you're doing.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah. A person outside of us still sees, even though it's my kid perspective and a lot of the bad stuff that's happening is behind closed doors, they still see that this is disturbing. And what's even more disturbing is that me, the protagonist, is like, “Yeah, this is what life is like. I'm just trying to figure it out,” you know?

BLAIR HODGES: It's brilliant to see how you grow. I mean, even in the language you're using, like, there's a simplicity to your prose early in the book, as you're a child, there's a childlike innocence to it, and curiosity.

Then as we get into your teenage years, the angst and all of the emotion and your struggles start to come through. You start to swear. [laughs] Even the vocabulary you're using becomes advanced later on in the book. Like we kind of get to grow along with you.

This kind of let me read on two levels. On the one, I could sort of imagine myself as a child in those situations, but I also was like, you know, obviously judging throughout and reacting to shocking things from an adult perspective as well.

But your book let me do both of those things. It let me kind of experience what you as a child experienced so I could feel sympathetic, but also totally ticked off at what some of the adults were doing. [laughs]

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah.

 

When the Prophecy Failed – 09:05

 

BLAIR HODGES: We'll get into some details and unwrap this for people as we go.

Let's go now to January 5, 1975. This is the day that you were taught the world was definitely going to end. You were six years old and you were told to get your favorite toy, put on your favorite clothes. There was a spaceship coming to pick you all up. The whole world was going to be destroyed because the world was wicked, and you waited all night and…nothing.

What was that like to wake up to a day that wasn't supposed to exist? As a six-year-old.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I think that, beyond the disappointment—because I was really looking forward to going to Venus and living there—there was just anxiety and fear. Because I knew, and this is more like a gut feeling, it's like the adults all said something was going to happen. And it didn't. This isn't going to be pretty, whatever it is. You know? They're going to have to save face.

And I don't know that I was as sophisticated as a six-year-old to think of it in those terms, but I knew it wasn't going to be good and that the idea of being in trouble was a huge driving force for all of us as kids. Because sometimes we would be in trouble for the most arbitrary things, you know, attributed to our astrological sign or something our parents did or, you know, whatever.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GUINEVERE TURNER: So in this case, and it turned out to be true, we were all in trouble. And we found that out pretty quickly. We were all in trouble because the leader of the cult said that it was our fault, “our” being the collective family, because our souls weren't ready.

And so, you know, after being up all night and being disappointed about not moving to Venus, we also all had to contemplate, how is it—I in particular thought it was me, because it was like he didn't specify whose soul wasn't ready, but the implication was that there are a few bad apples that are ruining it for everyone and certainly that we all ruined it for him because he was ready.

It just kind of created this sort of collective sense of being in trouble and guilt and this free-floating anxiety like, how do I make my soul ready to live on Venus? It’s one thing that most six-year-olds don't have to think about too much.

BLAIR HODGES: You're right. I felt so bad for you. I did. Because you internalized so much and you carried these burdens of guilt that were entirely out of proportion to who you actually were as a person. And there was no real substance to it.

It was sort of like you said, it was very ethereal. It was like maybe an astrological sign thing or maybe you were too defiant or, you know, the leader of the cult had built this whole cosmology around thee ideas: The purpose of life was for you to come here and learn lessons and that you probably had lived multiple times and hadn't learned your lesson yet.

So you had this idea of constantly failing and that your life itself was again at risk being a failure again. And now you've ruined the end of the world, which maybe someone else might have been happy about, like, “Oh, that's kind of good that like billions of people won't die!” [laughs]

GUINEVERE TURNER: We weren't raised to even have that level of empathy for billions of people! [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Right, right.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah. To be clear to your listeners, we were all told earth is school, and we are all put here to learn, and when we learn our lesson we move on to fill-in-the-blank, Venus or whatever. But for me, I personally was told that I had kept coming back. I was like—I made the joke, I was like the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused who's the guy in his 20s who still hangs out with the high school kids. I was just like held back a grade, but several grades. [laughter]

And so the minute I was conscious enough to understand those concepts, I was looking for what it was that I kept failing at. And they called me the little 44-year-old, which was part and parcel of the fact that I was already just so behind. I was born behind. Like I was born getting it wrong. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you do come across as an old soul too. It's funny, like when Jesse—who is kind of one of the main authority figures, a woman who you quite loved in many ways—when she coined that “little 44 year old” thing she was reacting to statements you had made and ways that you would write.

And I have to say, in the excerpts you include from your diaries, you really do come across as such an old soul. Like it seemed like they tapped into something about your personality and then fit it into their cosmology. It would have made sense. You know, some kids do just kind of seem ahead of other kids or they're having thoughts you wouldn't expect that kid to have. You seem like that kind of kid.

GUINEVERE TURNER: And that's what's confusing about it. I was like, I do feel different from other kids. I do feel kind of more serious and more studious and more like, you know, it's chicken and egg I guess really. But I definitely moved right into the 44-year-old identity.

It's funny because on Goodreads where anyone can read your book and write reviews and rate it and stuff—And this is very different from films, which is what I usually do where you get a review from a critic. You get a bunch of reviews from critics. But this is just hundreds of people giving their opinion on my book, which is good and bad.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

GUINEVERE TURNER: It’s hard to look away. And I just went and read all the one-star reviews. I just got it out of the way. And one of the reviews said, “I feel like I'm just listening to the ramblings of a nine-year-old with a really good vocabulary.” [laughter]

I guess the idea there being that I made myself look smarter, more articulate as a child? Which would be such a corrupt thing to do in this project, to invent like a brainy little nine-year-old. I'm like, no, that's really what I wrote.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s so funny.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I would never be so foolish as to even edit. It’s mostly not edited, it's just excerpted.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you still have the physical diaries too, like the ones you're quoting from?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Oh yeah, it's sitting right over there.

BLAIR HODGES: So there you go. I mean, I quite enjoyed living in that headspace with you. You really took me back to that age.

Okay, so when you don't go to Venus, later on you asked your mom what she was thinking, because now you know, okay, actually Venus isn't even habitable. Like, even if you could have gotten there, you all would have immediately died. [laughs] Like, you can't survive there. And you asked her about this years later and the only thing she could give you was, “It's complicated.”

Like she couldn't really go into it. People might wonder how your own mom came to join this cult, which obviously got you into it as well.

GUINEVERE TURNER: My mother was 18 and pregnant with me in the fall of 1967 and she was going to college in Boston. And the Lyman family, which is the name of the cult I grew up in, had a magazine called The Avatar that they passed out. It was like a free magazine on the street, a newsletter kind of vibe.

And she started reading it and then she started working for the magazine. And then she realized she was pregnant and that she could not go home. It would not be okay with her family. And I think that tipped the scales into her just living with the family, I think out of necessity.

But also like, everybody needs to be forgiving and think about 1969 and choices that any 19 year old might make. You were either counterculture or you were The Man. And you know, in an effort to be empathetic toward her choices, I often think to myself, If I was 19, pregnant or not, I probably would have done something very alternative rather than just, you know, live the straight life.

 

Identity and Power in the Lyman Family – 16:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. She gets into this family. And you talk about how the idea of family with the Lymans was different. How family was defined. These are your formative years, and your mom brings you into this place which was not the typical nuclear household at all. What was family like for the Lyman family?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Well, almost all of us kids weren't with our biological parents. They had compounds around the country, and we would move among them willy-nilly, really. And so by the time I was three or four, I was separated from my mom.

My mom worked on Wall Street. I know that sounds very incongruous, but she did. A lot of people in the group led double lives like that. They worked one job and pretended to be just normies and then came home.

BLAIR HODGES: That funded the group, right?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, yeah, that was partially what funded the group was people's incomes. And so what family meant was everyone. All 160 of us. And discipline, authority, et cetera, coming from anyone. And you know, big group meals every night. A lot of amazingly, even though it was the 70s, just such a tight knit network of information and gossip and, you know, edicts that would come down, I guess all from the phone.

And when your family is also your only authority figures and are also your only source of education, it gets very murky very quickly. The boundaries, well there are no boundaries, you know.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you don't have an external world to really compare your life against. So like when my kids start going to school, they're introduced to other authority figures that are very contextualized. There's teachers at school, there's other kids that they didn't grow up with, and they're able to sort of get different perspectives and they can bring that home and say, “Oh, my home's like this, and my school's like this.”

You didn't get that early on, really. I mean, your world was just bound into those people. That family was your world. And the teachings about the external world were that it was wicked and shameful and to be avoided.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Soulless.

BLAIR HODGES: And I mean, this is kind of what high control groups do, right, is disconnect people from outside, disconnect people from the ability to triangulate and maybe get a sense of their own identity compared to the group. Your identity really seemed subsumed by the group.

And as you said, your mom was distant from you, and in some ways you were kind of taught to be—well, not taught, but you came to be ashamed of your mom because of power relationships that existed in the group. Talk about that a little bit because it seems like it played a big part in how you related to your mother.

GUINEVERE TURNER: So in the family there was a very clear hierarchy. Or I should say those people at the top were always at the top. And then there was sort of like a mid-range of people who would be in and out of favor, but they still had more power. And then there were people like my mom and FP, the guy that she eventually left the family with, who were just kind of worker bees who had no power.

For me, even though I was never with her, whatever her social status was, was kind of baggage. It's kind of like the military, really. I went to high school in the town adjacent to West Point. And it's weird because I was so familiar with the hierarchy because I would be like, “That woman is so popular, but she's not that cute. She's nice.” And then I'm like, “Oh, her dad is the commandant of the military base.” And like, I would watch all these military kids and how they treated each other according to their parents’ rank, usually their fathers. And it was so familiar to me.

In my case, my mom was a social liability because if she did something that was not approved of, everybody knew about it and it would come back on me. And because her rival—the woman who kind of stole her man and then, you know, she got him back—hated me because of it, because I look a lot like my mom and I was always around. And so this woman just kind of did everything in her power to undermine me as a kid and to get me away from Jesse's orbit, which was the preferable place to be.

It was very complicated to have all of this social status hanging on your mother, who you barely know. And in my case, to have a higher social status than my mother when I was 11.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. So these power relations play out throughout the book and the adults are kind of playing the kids off of their own issues. You became a pawn in this bigger game, really. And in the middle of that, you were on the farm. This is one of the properties. There were properties in Boston, New York, Kansas, I believe, and then also in Los Angeles. And you were on the farm.

That was kind of a middle tier status place. Things were going well. Meanwhile, Jesse, one of the highest power authorities, would travel amongst the communities with this little caravan. And they came to the farm and a young girl in that group, Daria, was drawn to you. And you say this is how you got pulled into the higher orbit, because this young girl took a shine to you.

Suddenly you found yourself leaving the farm, which it seemed like you quite loved. But now you're recognizing an elevation in your status, and that's exciting. You're actually going to go to Los Angeles with Jesse. This is a big career move for your childhood!

GUINEVERE TURNER: Definitely a step up.

 

Sexism, Misogyny, Patriarchy, and Abuse – 21:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: In that process, your fate changes, and then you get wrapped up in all these other power relations.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about it. In LA, you became more aware of some troubling things going on in the family, especially when it came to the leader, Melvin Lyman, and underage girls.

Throughout your life, you'd already been reading his writings and listening to his voice. You would all listen to audio tapes he had made. So the ideology had already sort of been planted with you by the time you found out he was involved with underage girls. And I thought it would be helpful if you could read an excerpt from one of Melvin's books to give people a sense of what you were being taught. This is on page 70 at the beginning of chapter 12, you include something Melvin wrote in Avatar, that publication you mentioned earlier. So if you can, it gives us Melvin's voice and also kind of his ideology here in really important ways.

GUINEVERE TURNER: All right, this is Avatar, the publication I mentioned earlier, of December 2, 1972.

“If a woman is really a woman and not just an old girl, then everything she does is for her man. And her only satisfaction is in making her man a greater man. She is his quiet conscience. She is his home. She's his inspiration, and she is his living proof that his life, his labors, are worthwhile. A woman who seeks to satisfy herself is the loneliest being in God's creation. A woman who seeks to surpass her man is only leaving herself behind. A man can only look ahead. He must have somewhere to look from. A woman can only look at her man.”

BLAIR HODGES: So as a child, what was this doing for you as you're encountering these ideas? How did you feel about this?

GUINEVERE TURNER: I believed it. I didn't dare not believe it. I think obviously my perspective on it changed as I got older. But I mean, the funniest thing about all of his writing—because that's kind of the most coherent or linear or whatever of the pieces I chose, is that I always thought I would understand them when I was older.

And it was funny and interesting to go back and reread this book and a lot of his writings as I was writing my own book. I mean, like, you know what, little girl? You're going to be 55 years old and you're still not going to know what the f*ck he’s talking about! Let yourself off the hook. [laughter] It doesn't really fully make sense, but in this case, which is very clear and obviously incredibly sexist and misogynist and patriarchal, I think at that point I just thought, “Oh, someday I'll have a man that I can be all of that for.”

BLAIR HODGES: It's a benevolent patriarchy thing, right? It's presuming to elevate women by infantilizing and making them subservient to men, while praising them for that. This is your purpose. This is how you can excel. I just can't imagine what that would be like as a kid to imbibe that sort of thing.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I mean, and the crazy thing about this story is that Jesse, who really had the most power when I was growing up, would say similar things. I think when Jesse said things, I think often the subtext was, “Except me. I'm special.” Because she served no man.

I mean, she would make a big performance out of serving the guy she was with, you know what I mean? Like, “I made Richie lunch.” But it was not, in no way was it required of her. It was kind of like, this is “my man” in quotes, or I could fire him and have any man I want.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. A ton of power at the top. I also wanted to have you read a little excerpt here from your diary on page 95. This will give people a sense of your young voice. And again, as we talked about, you're an old soul. You're an 11-year-old here. This is in April of “the year Four.”

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: The year four, because that was four years after the world didn't end.

GUINEVERE TURNER: April 10, 04. Which was actually 1979.

“Life is an eternal passage of change. Every time you take a step, you think, oh, God, this has to be the last one. I can't go any further. But there is always something more that you haven't discovered. Tomorrow will be yesterday. Once yesterday was tomorrow, and tomorrow and yesterday are sometimes today. And today goes on in the same way until it is yesterday again.”

BLAIR HODGES: [laughter] I loved it. It's actually pretty beautiful, pretty moving stuff. I know it's a little cliche and silly in some ways too, but I don't know, there's something about your voice here.

It's funny to me that they were having you read the ramblings of Melvin Lyman that were just, as you said, some of them are just bonkers. And here you are, able to string together some really beautiful stuff. I think it's really touching.

GUINEVERE TURNER: But to be honest, sometimes when I read pieces like this in my diary, I feel like I'm actually emulating his writing.

BLAIR HODGES: So it's performative.

GUINEVERE TURNER: You know, I can be a little bit deep and a little bit obtuse too. Like, that's what I'm, I mean, that's the writing everybody reveres. So let me take a stab at this genre.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, I wish as an 11-year-old you could have just been watching cartoons or something too. Like, yeah, this does get a little deep.

But that's interesting. Like, as you read it back, you get to remember and you see your performance, right? You get to see your performance a little better.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yes. And one interesting and important thing to note about these diaries is that there was always the possibility that someone else would be reading them. So it's sort of a weird document because it's performative and yet it needs to feel like it isn't.

So at a very young age, I was really tweaking a very, very tricky little genre, toeing this line between making it seem personal, but also if anyone read it, being like, wow, she feels really bad for what she did, or she really loves so and so or whatever. Do you know what I mean?

Somewhere in my journals, and I put it in the book, I wrote that I really missed someone. And I said “not in the way that you do when you just write it in a letter to fill up space.” And I was like, wow, I must have told a lot of people I missed them then when I didn’t. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, “I totally miss you!”

Well, one person you might have said it to was your biological mom, right? Because they had you visit her sometimes and it was such an awkward thing for you because you really didn't know this woman. And for all intents and purposes she wasn't really your mom, but yet she kind of was.

And you had to enact a sort of love and regard for her when you didn't genuinely feel it. Maybe that was one of the people that you'd be like, “I miss you. And in reality, you’re like “I don't know you.”

GUINEVERE TURNER: I'm sure. I’m sure that we said it, especially when I had to talk to her on the phone. Whenever people ask me—

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah, the phone!

GUINEVERE TURNER: I'm very avoidant of talking on the phone. And way before this digital age we're in, because the only time I would ever talk on the phone would be awkward conversations with my mother when I was a kid. We had no shared experience. And so it would just be like, “Hi, what'd you do today? I miss you.”

It was really tense. The biggest shock to me, one of the times they sent me to visit her in New York, was seeing a photo of me framed on her office desk.

BLAIR HODGES: At work.

GUINEVERE TURNER: At her job. And it never occurred to me that she was openly lying about her real life to her coworkers, you know, which was most of her life. It was a Wall Street job. She worked insane hours. And I just thought, it was one of my first reckonings with the fact that we were raised to believe that truth was the ultimate. It was just essential to living a real life, a connected life, the right kind of life. And yet they were lying all around us to the outside world. So, you know, “Truth is so important.” But really, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

 

Leaving the Family and Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance – 29:02

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And you walk us through how your young mind sort of dealt with that cognitive dissonance. You're saying here in the book, you said “It had been drilled into our heads, that lying was bad, but it was okay to lie to world people.”

Like, you were trying to make sense of it. You had to make sense of it. It had to make sense. Here you are making meaning while you were so confused and seeing the “world people” would blow your mind. Like, one time you were watching Sesame Street [actually a different children’s program], and you saw them singing about “the most important person.” Like this little segment that showed little kids playing and blowing out birthday candles and things like this. And the song said, “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you.”

 And you said you were so scandalized. You're like, “oh, wow. Like, how egotistical!” Like, that message did not land.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I think anyone who's my age who had access to television will remember this song. “The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you ought to really know it.” Something like that. It was very catchy. But I just thought, “God, these world people are messed up! Like, they're just telling kids how important they are?! What? No wonder the world is a mess.” [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You're experiencing the world in these little glimpses. But then back home, now you're with Jesse's group. You're in the internal circle there, and you're really getting elevated. There's a night when Jesse is so affectionate towards you and just says that you're gonna be Miss America. She's really praising you and saying that you're beautiful and that you'll be Miss America. And it became like a real thing. It wasn't like a thing you might say to play with a kid. It seemed like you kind of got it into your head that that was an actual possibility, it seemed like.

GUINEVERE TURNER: And they meant it. They meant it. They were just waiting for me to be old enough. Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And that ticked off Delia. This was the other woman who was really jealous of you. And as you said, there were some things between your mom and a partner they had both been with and infidelity was happening. So Delia wants you out, basically. She's going to do everything she can to get you out of this inner circle.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Well, and Delia was really, she was Jesse's right-hand woman/lady in waiting in the way that I was Daria’s, Jesse's daughter. You know, we were sort of the lesser beings who were invited to be in this orbit. And I think she also just didn't want any more lowly people to be elevated and be standing next to her, just like, “Get out of here! I'm the success story.”

BLAIR HODGES: It's a scarcity mindset. It sounds like if her story is that she was an elevated lower person, then you would be a direct threat to that. Like, you might displace her. This is how power relations seemed to work within this family. And I think people who didn't grow up in a cult, people who grew up sort of in a dysfunctional family, will relate a lot to some of the dynamics that you describe here.

The way adults can play kids off each other. Parents do this sometimes in their own power struggles. And so she’s coming from this scarcity mindset, seeing you as a threat—a child as a threat!—and treating you so poorly, some of the things she did to you, I'm telling you, I would get so mad reading your book.

And what was powerful was you weren't connecting the dots about it for the reader. You weren't saying, “Look how abusive this was, look how messed up this was.” Or saying like, “this is how it affected my life today” or “I still have trouble maintaining intimacy” or whatever. You don't get into that. You just tell us from your kid perspective and you let us as readers have to process it.

I think that was a powerful authorial choice on your part because I'm just hearing you say it and then I have to process it. You're not doing that work for me.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I feel like part of the reason I chose to tell the story this way also is that I just didn't want sympathy, and I didn't want to feel self-indulgent or for the reader to feel that it was self-indulgent. “Poor me.” And I feel like letting the reader fill in the blanks.

I'm like this as a screenwriter too. Letting the absorber of the art fill in the blanks has more power in a way because you're bringing, I'm sure, a lot of what you personally brought and how you would feel in that circumstance.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly. I think there's catharsis in hearing you talk about what it was like. I think people who have experienced abusive situations can find catharsis here. It's not a self-help book. You're not giving advice about how people can reckon with violence in their past. You're just bearing witness to it.

And I think sometimes bearing witness and telling the story is enough. I think that is the power of film, because otherwise it gets preachy. I think it gets a lot more dated. It probably can reach fewer people overall because you're not giving space.

Maybe this is actually where Melvin Lyman was kind of brilliant. I think, like his opaqueness and sort of throwing all these ideas out gave people the ability to fill some of it in, even though he was so controlling. I think that's how stories work best.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, it's interesting. It really is.

I have had an incredible response from survivors of all kinds. And that has been gratifying. And then another category of response is from friendly acquaintances, people I know who've read the book, writing me, like, “I had to put it down because I was sobbing too hard.” And I'm thinking to myself is like, on the one hand that means I wrote it effectively. On the other hand, am I out here writing books to make acquaintances sob? [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! What do you think about that? Like, if people are reacting that way, what would you say to your friend to be like, “Oh, you're crying. Oh, sorry about that.” [laughs]

GUINEVERE TURNER: I say, sorry. I make the joke that I wanted to call the book Trigger Warning. My editor wasn't having it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!

GUINEVERE TURNER: And I think that the sneaky thing about my book is that you're kind of braced in the first half for what horrible thing is going to happen in this cult, and a lot of emotionally devastating things happen, but they're just emotionally devastating things. They're not physical and they're not like what we associate with what the salacious details of a cult would be.

But then my life gets so much worse and it is full of abuse and violence and, you know, at the hands of, you know, ostensibly a nuclear shaped family after I’m out.

 

Tossed Out into the Evil World – 35:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: And that's exactly where we're going. This is the second family model you lived in, more the traditional, seemingly, nuclear family. You're kicked out of the family. And this is because your mom decides to leave. And you tell the story of how you found out. And since she decided to leave with her then partner who is called FP in the book—And by the way, is that what they went by, really, or is that a pseudonym?

GUINEVERE TURNER: FP was not his name. He’s dead.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I just didn't want to look at his name and then say his name in a million interviews and conversations. And so I just named him “FP,” which is a personal joke to me because it stands for “F*cking Psycho.”

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, okay, okay. [laughs] And as people will find out, it's also kind of on the nose. Actually, as a writer, I'm surprised you went with that. [laughs]

GUINEVERE TURNER: Really. I have days and days of workshopping to come up with initials that would amuse me. But now it's kind of great because also in my family, his name comes up because he's the father of two of my siblings. And so now everyone calls him FP. So now in my life I don't have to hear his name ever again. It was a particularly effective little decision I made. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so you're called up to the big house. You know you're in trouble. They tell you there that you have to go because your mom is leaving. They say if you don't have a biological parent here, we can't keep you here.

They also say you can choose to come back. They left the door open in a way. Then you're being sent to live with a mother who you didn't really know and who you were actually kind of ashamed of. And this is where you introduce us to FP. He was your mom's partner, and they left the group together. Here you are in this nuclear family, and this, as you said, is where the real abuse begins.

When you get into this seemingly more normal family, things actually got a lot worse for you. Not only are you beginning to be abused at home, but you're also expected to just jump right into public school as well. This must have been just an overwhelming transition for you. Talk a little bit about what it was like to be in this new family structure and to be thrown into “the world,” which you had always been taught to have contempt for.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Well, I immediately—and I mean, like, the night of the day that I was dropped out into the world and with my mom, I immediately wanted to go back. And I knew it. Everything that was happening to me, I was saying, it doesn't really matter. I'm leaving anyway. I'm leaving anyway.

And then, you know, a couple months go by, and finally they've got it all together, so I can enroll in a school, and I'm like, I'm just gonna go for a couple weeks. Especially once I got to the school, because I was such a weirdo. So I was immediately bullied. I mean, the girls were really nice to me. The boys were really mean, and some of the girls were mean. But also, I just looked really different. I acted really different. I didn't know things that were really basic. I didn't know pop music. I didn't know pop culture. My hair was down to my butt in an era in 1979 when everyone's hair was aspirational to Farrah Fawcett. I didn't have any designer jeans. I wore skirts all the time. So culty. I stood out like a sore thumb, not only because I was the new girl in late October.

And then I was very conflicted because I loved the fact that there was school and it was structured and I was learning things, and I clearly emerged as a smart person, the kid who would get the best grades, which, you know, brought resentment, but also just attention and sometimes a request to cheat. It was social currency, in a way.

And also because the home life had already revealed itself to be on a path to hell, was already violent and was moving into some sort of sexual violence, I was just so happy to be at school because I was free. I could pretend that my life wasn't my life and that I just focus on learning and making friends, and I was also just kind of being like, “World people? Some of them are really nice. Like I don't understand, I don't feel like I'm in a dangerous place when I'm here at school. I feel like I'm in a great place. And you know, I was a little too self-possessed to really take the bullying very personally. It was kind of a bummer, but I didn't care if they called me “Gwen-a-queer.” Whatever.

How did they know I was gonna grow up to be gay? I don't know. [laughter] I don't think they meant queer in that sense. But they definitely called me Gwen-a-Queer. And it definitely, it didn't hurt my feelings. I thought it was funny. It was a little like aggravating because the boys just worked so hard to make my life miserable and I'm just like, “Oh, I don't want to think about boys.” Grew up to be gay.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, we get to see you really find yourself. And you have diaries from this part of your life, too. It's so interesting to see you kind of going back and forth about like, “oh, the world people, ugh” And then saying stuff like, “Oh, the world people!”

I feel like the Lyman group sort of tried to poison the well for you. Like they would say, “Oh, you're probably going to become a world person. Just as a heads up, you're totally going to do it.” And that of course motivated you to be like, “No, I'm not.” Like you were gonna hang onto it.

But we see you start to let go of the rope and you say stuff like, “Well, you know, I'm gonna start wearing pants and I'm gonna do this,” and you know, “I think it's gonna be okay, but I'm definitely gonna go back to the family. Like, I'm not losing myself.” And so we see you justifying things to yourself and talking to yourself through your diaries about these changes in your life.

 

Writing About Sexual Abuse – 40:56

 

BLAIR HODGES: And again, this parallels the increasing violence at home. This is where you're pretty specific about how FP began to sexually assault you as you're growing into your teenage years. What was it like writing about this? Did you know this was something you wanted to share, or did you have to come to terms with that as you were writing the book?

GUINEVERE TURNER: I always knew I wanted to share about the abuse and share it in kind of as sort of non-exploitive but bald truth, as much as I could style-wise. I just feel like I don't like narratives about abuse, especially when it's female people at the hands of men. I don't like vague language. It feels like a complicity in the power structure and the, you know, the transgression. Whereas just being like, “You know what? If you're flinching right now as you're reading this, imagine what it actually felt like, and imagine trying to keep that, or having to keep that secret.” Or, “Imagine your mother knowing about it and letting it continue.”

I just felt like taking an unflinching look at the actual details. You know, people just say “sexual abuse.” And, you know everyone in their mind is being like, what kind? At what level? You know, what is it? And make people think to themselves, like, what's my idea of rape? Like, what’s the line? What's worse? This sex act or this sex act? Or isn't it all bad?

So I feel like there's a power in naming it really specifically and saying, “If you don't think this was that bad, then you're wrong.” You know, again, just diving into it.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

GUINEVERE TURNER: So I always knew I wanted to write about it. It was very hard to write, because I had to go back there and just finding the words for it was hard. You know what I mean? It's just. It's so hard to not make it creepy. It is creepy.

When I was writing the proposal for the book, I deliberately made myself write a chapter that explicitly included abusive moments to see if I could do it. And then, with the editors I met with when I eventually chose the editor, I had to see how they would handle it, because I was ready to write this book. But what I was not ready for was handling someone else's feelings while all I needed was an editor.

And so it was hard to write. But I was also like, yeah, I can do that and I'm still alive. Like, okay, well, that was one of the hardest things. And it's already partially written, and here we are. I mean, the only voices in my head as I'm writing these particular things are my younger brother and sister, because it's their father I'm talking about. I mean, this book is their horrible parents that I'm talking about—one of them being mine.

And so that was a reckoning that took. I wrote it, you know, in 2020. They didn't read it till this year, obviously, because I wasn't done yet. And luckily, they're both dealing with it.

BLAIR HODGES: Did they experience any abuse like that themselves or a lot of violence? I guess maybe that's not your story to tell, but.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Oh, no, I don't think either of them would mind if I said that he was very violent and controlling with them, but, you know, a very different brand of psychopathy, really, you know, a cousin to it. They didn't have a great experience with him at all growing up, and they had to live with him even more than I did because they actually grew up with him from birth.

He passed away in December of 2021. And at first I was like, “Bummer. Kind of wanted this book to be out in the world with him having to deal with it.” And then I was like, “Actually, no.” Actually, of everyone that I mentioned in this book that might take issue, he might be the only one who would actually try to sue. So that would have just been a hot mess.

Although I think anyone—and I've been living with this hope—anyone who would try to sue me for this would know that that would just be really good publicity. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, the Barbra Streisand effect is real!

So yes, you are clear about what happened to you. I appreciated how, again, you're writing from your teenage perspective, so we get to see the internal struggles you had about it in some ways. Engaging in some of the sexual abuse or how “being there” for that could forestall physical violence or other types of problems.

And you learned and were groomed to sort of participate that way, which could make someone feel guilty or complicit in the abuse. And you talk about all the mixed feelings you had. Obviously, you were always disgusted and always hated it. But to see what it does to a young person and the wrestling you did with yourself was really powerful. It's a powerful witness. I think it certainly shed more light on what that kind of abuse would be like. As a reader, I was appreciative. It was hard to read, but I was appreciative because it helped me understand even more the kind of things that happen to real people.

GUINEVERE TURNER: What's interesting to me is that I don't know what made me so afraid of the foster care system, but I did know that if I went to some kind of authority and talked about the abuse I was suffering, that I would—Worst case scenario, no one would believe me, nothing would happen, and then I would live in a household where I had tried to get out, which would have made it exponentially worse, or I would be put into foster care.

And I don't know how I knew this, but I knew that it might be the same thing all over again, but just with a new Devil, the devil I didn't know. And so it's a mystery to me what my decisions were, except that I know that I lived an incredibly compartmentalized life in which I spent my time at school and anywhere but home not just pretending it wasn't happening, but like believing it wasn't happening, like, knowing it in my bones, like, just put that away, because it's so much more fun to be this other person.

BLAIR HODGES: I also think with the family models you were living in, now you had a comparison. Like, you had your previous family sort of system and structure, which had its own dysfunctions and issues, but it was safer than what you experienced in this apparently nuclear family situation. So I can't imagine that would be a very ringing endorsement of your stereotypical American family life. Now that you had lived that yourself, you're probably looking back at the Lyman family and saying, I really do want to get back there. That was better for me.

GUINEVERE TURNER: I think one of the things that emerged for me as what I was writing about, aside from just myself and my life, was that the nuclear family can be just as destructive as a cult, and that the average cult is just patriarchy on steroids, especially because FP was really trying to replicate that life, but in microcosm and in the middle of the real world, that it's, you know, it's kind of an indictment of the nuclear family, accidentally. [laughs]

 

Fleeing Another Family – 47:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Or at least a call to reckon, I think, is what I would call it. It's like at no point in the book did I feel any sort of wholesale condemnation of any particular family structure. It seemed what you were doing was calling attention to the kind of power dynamics and abuses that can play out regardless of the structure and how they might be different based on what the structure is.

So when we're thinking about what family means to someone, even someone like me, who didn't grow up in a cult, but I could recognize certain things in what you described, in how adults in my life acted, or some of them acted, or in elements of what your mom, dad, family, did, and how that looked.

I wanted you to read one excerpt before we get to the last part of the interview, it’s here on page 242. This is the last paragraph in this chapter, and this is when you finally decide to really leave. FP had physically assaulted you. He had slammed your against a bed board repeatedly and really physically harmed you. And your mom had kind of begun blaming you or being even jealous of you when she found out the sexual abuse was happening. You were just done at that point. So if you can read that last paragraph.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Sure.

“The thing about violence is that it's not something that can be happening every second. Lives have to be lived. Houses of cards have to be reconstructed. I imagine they both told themselves lies to get up the next morning. I imagine I told myself a few as well. ‘Who will I call to get the homework assignment while I miss school’ was an easier question than ‘What's to become of us?’ The deep undercurrent of my defiance informed every moment inside the house. After that, I knew I'd upset the balance, but I still didn't know how to escape.

I want to say there was no more sexual abuse, but that would be a lie. I probably did what I was coerced into doing because, though the violence saved me from sexual abuse, it kept me from school, and school was my only portal to freedom. I had to go to school. A few days later, I was allowed to wear makeup for the first time to cover up what was left of the bruises.”

BLAIR HODGES: Ugh.

GUINEVERE TURNER: That was pretty good. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: That line, “The thing about violence is that it's not something that can be happening every second. Lives have to be lived.” I could apply that line to not just violence, but to so many things. I think that applies to grief when you're grieving the loss of a loved one. Like, lives have to be lived.

It can even be your joy that can be interrupted by everyday things. Every strong thing we experience, lives still have to be lived. And when it came to violence, I think it was such an important point for you to make, and it really stopped me in my tracks because we're in the violence with you so much. You're describing it in depth, but you're also saying, look, I'm also living a life. Like, there was school, there were friends that I had. There was other stuff. And I just loved that line especially. Very powerful.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Thank you. It's something I have thought about a lot. Sort of the mundanity of, you know, and it also applies to the family I grew up in, you know, the cult part of, it is that, you know, I was thinking about—I'm doing an adaptation now, a screenplay of this book, and I was like I, I kind of just want a 20 minute scene where we're just doing laundry. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I think Better Call Saul does this. So many shows do these slow burn things because streaming, I guess they can do these sprawling episodes. I love that though. Sitting in the mundane aspects of a life, really. I think this is the power of prestige TV today that they can do that.

And I don't know if you've seen The Bear. They do it a little bit differently. They do all these like jump cuts of just, scene, scene, scene, scene. So you see like building, building, building, cutting food, do, do, do. And it's super rapid, but it's making you think of all the other stuff that's happening while the story of The Bear is happening.

So there's different ways, I think, to do it in film. There's the Better Call Saul way, which is like they're gonna show him doing something for like three minutes and you're just gonna be like, “Okay, like why are we still here?” Or there's the super jump cut way, like The Bear. In your book. I think you're able to do it in a paragraph like the one you just read where you remind us like, okay, step out of the book for a second and recognize that you're getting a snapshot of what was going on here. There's a lot of power to that.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, I feel like there's also power, as I think about the cinematic version of this, if you already know you're in an environment that could erupt in violence at any time, you can imagine that a five minute scene watching a bunch of kids do laundry, if you've set it up properly, can feel menacing.

BLAIR HODGES: Totally.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Like any second now the hammer's going to come down and we're not really sure from where or why, but like these kids are always kind of in danger.

BLAIR HODGES: And by the way, how exhausting. I kept thinking to myself what an exhausting life that must be even for FP. The amount of control he leveraged and how you and your mom had to walk on eggshells and think of him in so many ways, how just controlling he was. I feel like that would be an exhausting life to live, to try to exercise that level of psychological control over other people. I can't really wrap my head around that.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, I think about that sometimes. And I think about how much he plotted and schemed and how much what it felt like was, it was like a sociopathic animal. Like it's just instinct. He's just going on as this sort of weird, you know, manipulative person that probably comes from his own messed up childhood. And he's not even doing it on a fully conscious level.

BLAIR HODGES: Like it's a—He's surviving too.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah. He believed—I think it comes from this place where he just believed that he was right. And he believed that he was doing what the Lyman family would have done, but in microcosm. And his model, because, you know, he was 19 when he joined that family, his model was all powerful men who do whatever they want and women serve them.

 

Finding a Safer Sort of Family – 53:46

 

BLAIR HODGES: There's one more family model you encountered that you introduce us to in the book, and this is a boyfriend you had in high school. And this is one of the ways you escaped is you were able to go to this home. His father, Lloyd Spears, he was 65 years old. And they take you in.

How did that family contrast with the other family structures you had encountered so far in your life?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Lloyd was divorced, and so their mom lived far away. But it was Lloyd, Brian my boyfriend, and his brother and sister who were in and out of the house. They didn't really live there. I mean, they were slightly dysfunctional in the sense that, you know, the dad drank a lot and everybody was always fighting with the sister.

But mostly my experience was, it was just me and Lloyd in the house. And Lloyd was a lovely man. And so suddenly I had this utterly benign, benevolent man who agreed to adopt me and barely asked me any questions and never did, and never did again. And it was nothing but lovely to me. And, you know, for me, a safe man was almost an oxymoron.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GUINEVERE TURNER: And so I was just moved and thrilled. And I mean, if I was writing this story and it was fiction, I would say, God, that particular thing where someone—her boyfriend's father just decides to adopt her? It comes a little too easily.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah.

GUINEVERE TURNER: She didn't really work that hard for that. And I mean, I did because I worked so hard to find something else—

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

GUINEVERE TURNER: And I finally found that. But that was just—I did not know this man. And he agreed to let me come live with them. And then on the spot, when cops came to take me away, he said he was going to adopt me. And then he did. Like that's just magic fairy tale ending, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: And it's funny to me that the so-called, like, you know, stereotypical broken home, right? This is a divorced man, a little bit dysfunctional with his kids. He maybe has a problem with alcohol, but he ends up being such a safe place for you.

And so as we're going through the book and seeing these different families, we have the Lyman family with all its dysfunction and difficulties. You introduce us to some nuance there for all of its real serious problems. But then your nuclear family, quote, unquote, that's also just not safe for you at all. And then this, what you'd look at is a, quote, “broken home” that becomes such a good place for you and a safe place for you.

Which to me, again, says, don't judge a family by its cover. Like, looking at the outside. If we just look at the numbers and what was statistically likely to happen within those family structures, we would not have predicted the experiences you actually had. Your experience shows that different families work differently. And we've got to take each family one at a time to see what it's really like for people.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, my editor, when I wrote the piece about Lloyd when the cops came, and at some point Lloyd puts his hand on my shoulder just for reassurance, and my editor was like, “You gotta let the audience off the hook. You gotta let them know that this is not also gonna be a predator.” She's like, “my heart jumped into my throat when he put his hand on your shoulder.”

And I was like, “Ah. But that means I did my job. Because that means that at this point in the reader's experience, you know, I should, I need to be careful of all men.”

BLAIR HODGES: See, that's so funny, because this shows my stereotypically male perspective here, because that was a moment of relief for me. I remember reading that part and thinking, my initial thought was, “At last, someone is giving her an actual genuine, affectionate touch here that is one of safety.”

So to have other readers react that way, their alarm bells would go off, I think says a lot about my own privilege and about the kind of things I don't really have to worry about, because that was a moment of relief for me. Like, you set Lloyd up to be the character that he was. And I think maybe I just needed that relief of, like, “Okay, things are finally going to be okay for Guinevere. Please.” Like, I wanted it to be okay so much.

GUINEVERE TURNER: One friend of mine who's a woman said that she's like, “I resisted crying for the whole book, but I cried with relief once Lloyd said he was going to adopt you.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's quite the moment in the book. And I want listeners to know, too, there's so much we obviously didn't have time to cover. And I was so engrossed, I forgot to reintroduce you to our listeners, too. So right now I'll just remind people.

This is Guinevere Turner. She's an acclaimed screenwriter and director. She co-wrote screenplays for American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, and more recently the screenplay for Charlie Says. She also wrote and starred in the film Go Fish and was a writer and actor on Showtime's The L Word, which is a title that she came up with herself. And she wrote an essay about these life experiences in The New Yorker that became the inspiration for the memoir that we're talking about today, When the World Didn't End.

It is a powerful book. I quite enjoyed reading it, Guinevere.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 58:40

 

BLAIR HODGES: Before we go, it's time to talk about regrets, challenges and surprises. So this is when you can choose to speak to one, two, or all three of these things. Is there something you would change about the book now that it's out? Is there something that was most challenging in writing it? We kind of talked a little bit about that, perhaps. And then, was there any new revelations for yourself? Any surprises as you were writing the book that you discovered in that process?

GUINEVERE TURNER: Regrets. I wish that I had changed more of the names of my generation, the girls I talk about—specifically the ones who experienced some form of abuse, or so I thought. Because one of them called me and said she liked the book a lot, but she's like, “I wish you'd change my name.”

And then she called me two weeks later and said, “F*ck it! I'm glad you used my name!” [laughter]

One of the challenges I had—this is a challenge/regret hybrid. One of the challenges I had was, there are two things that I didn't put in the book because they are information that would hurt people's feelings who are still alive and who I still care about. I know that's hard to imagine. If you read the book, like, what the heck did you not put in there?

But there are two different instances where I obscure the truth because it's about someone's dad that I'm talking about, but it's someone that I'm in touch with today or because—not my my siblings dad, obviously with FPI just went for it.

And so that part, like, it still hurts a little bit because I had to make a choice there between the artist who knows that this would just make the story better because it was just, like, really? Really!? And just saying, like, you know what? I can't. Like, that it's not worth it to hurt these feelings and potentially rupture these friendships.

That was a challenge because the storyteller in me was like, “No, don't come this far and then not say it all!” And that's sort of an ethical thing that I think happens when you're writing memoir.

Surprises. I'll tell you, my friend Claire giving me sources— like, “oh, do you think these letters that you wrote to me when you were 15 and all these audio tapes would be useful to writing your book?”

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Like, that was an incredible surprise. And I was already, you know, toward the end of writing the book. But I was like, “yes!” And there's just incredible stuff. One of the letters I wrote to her I published in its entirety in the book, because my voice, I got so snarky by the time I was 15. Even though my life was absolute hell, I'm still kind of like, “What the f*ck?!” [laughter]

And the audio tapes are priceless. They're just priceless. I will definitely give them to whatever young actor ends up playing teenage me.

That was a surprise. I'm trying to think. I had one other thing. Oh, I was really surprised—This is maybe off topic, but it's not because I learned something. When you have a book like this and with a big publisher, you go through a legal process with, you know, like a legal read where they say, who can verify this? Who can verify that? You should change this name for fear of being sued. And a thing I learned, I did not know—So Delia, who's kind of an important figure in the book, is not her real name.

BLAIR HODGES: This is Jesse's number two that we talked about that had the power struggle and wanted to get rid of you.

GUINEVERE TURNER: And she was kind of forced to get an abortion that she didn't want. And the legal team said, you need to obscure her name. And I was like, but everybody knew this. Like, literally 160 people knew this. It's not like, you know? And I learned, she said the most actionable thing in terms of people suing for a memoir is revealing medical history. Who knew?

BLAIR HODGES: Probably, like, HIPPA laws? Laws around protected health info that are more robust.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah, so I was surprised to learn that. I was surprised to learn what the subtleties are.

I was surprised at myself in that process, too, because I changed the name of a couple of people who were abusive just because I didn't want it to come back at me. And she said, “Why would you change the name of the abusers and not the victims or survivors?” And I was like, “oh, God, yeah, right. I'm going to do that, too. Yeah.”

BLAIR HODGES: That again, speaks to these ingrained power dynamics that happen of, like, people being more ready to protect abusers or, you know, to think of or to protect ourselves from abusers first.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Yeah. And I'm keenly, and in great complexity, aware of predator and survivor dynamics and, you know, cultural moments and all of it. And even I was, like, out here protecting—not on purpose, but actually enacting behavior that was protecting perpetrators and not victims. And I was like, “who am I?” [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Well, as I said, there's so much we didn't cover. You get to swing by the family at the end of the book for one more pass to see if maybe you'll go back and stick around. It doesn't pan out. Readers can pick up a copy to find out what happened in your last journey back to the family.

The book is called When the World Didn't End. I highly recommend it. And Guinevere, this was such a great conversation. I loved your book and I appreciate you taking time to visit us.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Thank you so much, Blair. I really love the idea of your podcast. And as a person who has had so many different kinds of families and family structures—And it goes on. I went on to go to Sarah Lawrence College, which is a very small school where all sorts of intricate family structures, and then I work in film production, where a very intense team becomes a family. I seem to seek out different kinds of family structures, and then the queer community and the families we choose.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

GUINEVERE TURNER: You know, there's just, family is such a juicy and fertile ground for conversation and talking about our society in general.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

GUINEVERE TURNER: So thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about family and my very special relationship to it.

BLAIR HODGES: You bet.

 

Outro Begging You to Rate and Review – 1:05:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. It's a journey through the terrain of family, gender, and sexuality. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape how we connect with each other.

And speaking of connecting with each other, go to Apple Podcasts, leave a review so that other people might connect with the show. You can also rate the show in Spotify. I would really appreciate that. Any kind of feedback is great. I love hearing from you.

Thanks to Mates of State for providing the new theme song. It's called “Somewhere.” You can find it in Apple Music or wherever else you get your music. It's a great new single from them.

Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.