The True Happiness Company

A Memoir

By: Veena Dinavahi

In this darkly humorous and wrenchingly sincere memoir, a young Indian American woman’s dreams of being a well-adjusted college student get wildly derailed when her struggles with mental health land her in the office of a charismatic alternative therapist and his self-help cult.

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.

©2025 Veena Dinavahi (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Honest, brutal, funny, fascinating. An important reminder of how vital it is to trust ourselves.”—Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy

“Dinavahi is a ferocious writer with a poetic left-hook. The True Happiness Company relates a courageous and relentless pursuit of the deep human need to be known and loved. Dinavahi deftly uses her story to expose how easily our longing can become leverage—and no one is immune. This vital memoir wrestles with the question: 'If our decisions are always borne of a social script, what exactly is free will?’”—Bethany Joy Lenz, New York Times bestselling author of Dinner for Vampires

“Dinavahi has hacked her way through a forest of horrors, and emerged funnier, wiser, and more optimistic than most. I loved this big-hearted debut and look forward to reading more from her astonishing voice.”—Priyanka Mattoo, author of Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones