January 2026 Open Secrets Book Club Pick: 'The True Happiness Company' by Veena Dinavahi
Join us as we read about how Veena Dinavahi went from troubled teen to married Mormon mom of 3 under the guidance of a cult leader
Our next Open Secrets Book Club pick for January 2026 is memoir The True Happiness Company: How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That by Veena Dinavahi. You can read an excerpt below:
We’ve been experimenting with the best way to host our discussions, and for now, we are going to host the reader-focused part of our book club discussions in Substack chats, with this one starting today, January 8, 2026. Subscribers will receive an email when the chat starts.
You don’t have to have read the entire book to participate. Going forward, we will announce each new book club pick and chat schedule approximately two months prior. You can always check our about page to see which book club titles are coming up.
Then, for a personal perspective on writing inspiration, craft, and the story behind the story, after our subscriber chat has been going for a little while, we’ll host a live author Q&A in which our editor Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews the author, with room for audience questions too.
On Thursday, January 29, at 8:30 pm ET, check out our Substack Live interview with Veena and bring your questions! You can watch Substack Live interviews in the Substack app or on your desktop by clicking the link above. Subscribers will receive an email when the interview starts. We will post the full video interview soon afterward at the bottom of this post.
You’ll have the opportunity to ask Veena your own questions during the Q&A, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will do our best to ask them.
An exclusive note from The True Happiness Company author Veena Dinavahi:
I never thought I’d one day say the words: I was in a self-help cult. When I first met its leader, Bob Lyon, I was a nineteen-year-old physics and philosophy double major who owned an autographed collection of Hillary Clinton campaign buttons. I’d swallowed the model minority myth hook, line, and sinker, so I thought that someone like me—a high-achieving daughter of Indian immigrants—was immune to coercive influence. And then my trajectory broke every trope I knew: I wound up a college dropout, Mormon convert, and married stay-at-home mom of three, asking: What just happened? And what will it mean to move forward?
This book is both my attempt to capture the disorientation I felt when faced with these questions and to unravel their complicated, messy answers. I take you along, in real time, as I fall under Bob’s influence, and then, as I slowly begin to extricate and reclaim my identity. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I would never fall for something like that,” I hope my story complicates that assumption, and that it inspires tenderness and compassion for those who wind up in cults or abusive relationships. This is my love letter to anyone seeking answers to life’s big questions and a tribute to the strange, unexpected places the journey can take us.
About memoir The True Happiness Company:
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.
About the author:
Veena Dinavahi is an Indian American writer who divides her time between Connecticut and New York. Her personal essays have appeared in The Rumpus and Pulp Magazine. She holds a degree in psychology from Columbia University and currently works in the fashion industry. The True Happiness Company is her first book.
Where to buy The True Happiness Company:
Below are buy links for print, ebook, and audiobook editions. You can also borrow or request at your local library or order it from your local independent bookstore. When you shop from these Bookshop Open Secrets Book Club links or our Bookshop storefront, we get a small percentage of each sale, which goes toward paying our writers.
Ebook
Audiobook narrated by Veena Dinavahi
Other Open Secrets Book Club happenings
March 24, 7 p.m. ET: Interview with Jesse James Rose, author of sorry i keep crying during sex: a memoir
May 2026 (date/time TBD): Interview with Arianna Rebolini, author of Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die
July 2026 (date/time TBD): Interview with Jess H. Gutierrez, author of Adulting for Amateurs: Misdventures of a Geriatric Millennial
Note: We don’t accept pitches or submissions for our book club, but authors who subscribe to Open Secrets (and anyone else who subscribes) are welcome to submit to our latest call for personal essay submissions.
Questions about the Open Secrets Book Club? Reply if you’re receiving this via email, or contact opensecretsmag at gmail dot com