The True Happiness Company: A Memoir

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In this wrenching, darkly funny memoir, a young Indian American woman’s quest for mental health is derailed by a charismatic alternative therapist who pulls her into his Mormon self-help cult. It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, she lives in a white American suburb like any other—except for its unusually high suicide rate. Veena tries everything to cure her own depression, but nothing works. Then, on one late-night Google search, her mom finds Bob Lyon—a sixty-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, a married mother of three, and a Mormon convert who has gotten way too good at dismissing her gut feeling that something is wrong. But when Bob finally pushes her too far, Veena knows she has to cut ties with him. Driven to understand her journey, she re-enrolls in college, studies psychology, and begins to understand that true happiness cannot be one-size-fits-all. Told with unflinching clarity and shot through with incisive wit, The True Happiness Company is a singular tale of learning to trust your intuition in a world determined to annihilate it.

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