A brilliant, personal take on the pernicious power of cults.
Breaking away.
When Dinavahi was an overachieving sophomore in high school, a friend in her math class took her own life. The tragedy was the latest in a series of incidents at Severna Park High, a Blue Ribbon school in Maryland with a suicide epidemic so severe that when Dinavahi was admitted to a psychological ward after her own suicide attempt, she ran into a classmate she presumes was there for the same reason. Dinavahi continued attempting to take her own life throughout her teens. Desperate to keep her daughter alive, Dinavahi’s mother took her to see a man named Bob Lyon, who ran the True Happiness Company (the names are pseudonyms). Although he was a former ophthalmologist with no background in psychology, Lyon diagnosed Dinavahi with borderline personality disorder and said that the only way for her to stop her self-destructive behavior was to speak to him daily. Over the course of the next decade, Lyon insidiously took over Dinavahi’s life, manipulating her into dropping out of college, getting married, and joining the Mormon church. It was not until Lyon molested Dinavahi that she found the courage to leave. “Sometimes conformity can be a protective mechanism,” she writes. “If everyone is heading in the same direction, you figure someone must know what they’re doing. They can’t all be wrong. But this overwhelming psychological pressure to conform kept me in True Happiness for so long, doubting my own instincts.” Dinavahi is a talented writer with a dark sense of humor. Her intensely vulnerable storytelling vividly illustrates the ways in which society preys on the insecurity of neurodiverse women and, in particular, neurodiverse women of color.
A brilliant, personal take on the pernicious power of cults.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593447659
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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