CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son.
Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time.
I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show fans should be warned that Lenz doesn’t go into her on-set experience very much.
I’ve read a lot of books about cults, and even a few written by former members of cults about their experiences. Of all of them, I feel that this is the one in which I’ve gotten a better understanding of how it feels to be move deeper and deeper within the isolation of the group, until one reaches the point where logic breaks down and an alternate reality consumes all.
At that point one can only laugh or cry, and Lenz made me feel like doing both. But at the same time, she writes with such compassion for her younger self and for those who became caught up in the cult alongside her that it really impressed me. And, as was one of her stated purposes for writing the book, I found it easy to understand how one might slip down the slope to end up in such a situation.
However, I did wish I learned a bit more about Lenz’s experiences on One Tree Hill and in Hollywood. While we do see how her experience in the cult affected her career, pulling her away from the cast and crew, these sections are fairly brief. Perhaps it was meant to preserve their privacy, but I wished we’d gotten a better sense of how being in the cult affected those in other parts of her life, and how she’d managed to rebuild the connections she nearly never had a chance to form.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.