53 pages • 1 hour read
Bethany Joy LenzDinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!)
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Psychological Mechanisms of Cult Influence
Dinner for Vampires covers the variety of psychological mechanisms cults use to entice, entrap, and control their members. Initially, the cult uses “love bombing,” “cold reads,” and the allure of acceptance and community to Joy when she is lonely and vulnerable to recruit her into the group. Once she has committed to them, they use “struggle sessions,” isolation from family and friends, the threat of eternal damnation, and financial control to keep her in the fold. When she leaves, they use intimidation and shunning to attempt to convince her to return—all tactics typical of high-control groups.
The Family’s leadership uses specific tactics on Joy at strategic moments in her life when she is particularly vulnerable. For example, Joy initially joins the Saturday Bible study which becomes the Family cult when she’s new to LA and her only friends are Mina and Camille. She’s devastated and depressed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in NYC. In response, Mina brings her to the Bible study. There, Joy finds the maternal attention (in the form of Pam), community, and loving support that she’s missing in her life. She emphasizes the group’s use of “love bombing,” or overwhelming Joy with affection, to make her feel wanted. Les then employs a “cold read” technique on Joy, using a combination of inference and prior knowledge to assess her. He singles her out, saying: “I feel like you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that you’re second best” (49). Notably, con artists often use a similar tactic to win the confidence of their marks. At Les’s words, Joy feels as if “his words hit [her] core with surgical precision” (50). After feeling so “seen” by him and loved by the group, Joy redoubles her commitment to them, as shown in her decision to stay for dinner afterward because she “wasn’t about to leave early […] to miss a second of this unconditional love” (51). In another instance, Pam invites Joy to spend time at their isolated Big House in Idaho to recover during another vulnerable season just after Joy cuts things off with Blue Eyes.
Once she’s a member of the group, the Family isolates and financially controls Joy. They encourage her to distance herself from her family and friends outside of the community. Les explicitly counsels Joy to avoid forming close relationships with the cast and crew of One Tree Hill with whom she spends the majority of her time in Wilmington, forcing Joy to rely exclusively on the Family. Les, Pamela, and QB take progressive control over Joy’s finances through “the worst [financial management] firm in Idaho, TRIAD” making it financially challenging for Joy to leave if she ever decided to do so. The Family preaches following Les’s teachings about the scripture as a central tenet of salvation, framing the members’ acceptance of his control over their lives as spiritual devotion. If Joy challenges these teachings, she believes her “eternal salvation” is at stake. Les uses this dynamic as leverage to keep Joy subservient and tied to the group.
After Joy leaves the Family, all the members are ordered to cut off contact with her including her husband, QB. The ostracization is coupled with threats of having her daughter taken from her and physical intimidation. Collectively, these tactics are designed to force Joy to return to the Family. However, Joy is able to find a new support network in her biological family, the One Tree Hill cast, and her therapist, all of whom help her definitively leave the cult. In the memoir’s resolution, Joy emphasizes the fact that overcoming the psychological pressures of the cult took courage and was motivated by Joy’s desire to protect her daughter.
The Role of Faith in Personal Development
Throughout her life, Joy relies on her Christian faith for support and to direct her growth. During her time in the Family, her understanding of scripture becomes distorted by the cult’s idiosyncratic spiritual interpretation, which leads her to grapple with the disconnect between Les’s version of Christianity and her personal faith. However, she notes that before, during, and after her time with the Family, her faith in God and Jesus lead to positive growth in her life.
Joy’s discussion of her childhood as turbulent and characterized by frequent moves and tension between her parents contextualizes the comfort she finds in her religious faith, both material and spiritual. She describes feeling “extremely relieved to discover that Jesus would be my permanent friend” (10). She also imbues her connection to Blue Eyes, whom she meets at a church youth group meeting as a teenager, with additional significance because of her religious context. These friendships, both spiritual and material, helped Joy feel less alone at a difficult time in her life.
As an independent young adult, Joy finds comfort and community in various Christian communities and uses her understanding of scripture to comfort others, as well. For instance, when Mina laments to Joy about losing her job, Joy shares a piece of advice from her father “where he explained a core tenet of our faith: ‘Jesus never said life would be easy […] But He did promise that He’d be with us through it all and give us peace’” (28). Throughout her memoir, Joy notes the ways her Christian faith guides her career as well. When the producers of One Tree Hill ask Joy to read for a part as a “vixen next door,” her “internal Christian-purity-culture alarms [go] off” and she deliberately bombs the performance (119). When she goes in for the screen test for Haley James Scott, she uses what she’s learned from her new understanding of Christianity cultivated by the Bible study sessions to guide her performance. She writes, “Trying to become more childlike in my spiritual life, however, was allowing me to be more childlike in my acting life” (125). She adheres to her faith to help guide her decisions about what scenes she feels comfortable with when shooting the show. For instance, she refuses to shoot a scene in her bra, because it goes against her principles of religious modesty.
The tension Joy’s personal faith and the religious teachings of the Family forms the central conflict of the memoir. For instance, Joy tells her father that she asks God what to wear before getting dressed because, “if I’m going to be surrendered to Jesus, I need to fully surrender” (53). Joy’s father expresses skepticism about this approach to faith, remarking, “Didn’t He give you the autonomy to make decisions like those yourself?” (53). Joy’s independence represents another symbolic battleground—an aspect of her authentic self that her parents encourage and valorize but the Family condemns and attempts to obliterate. Les tells her that part of the reason she is not married is because she comes from a line of “Jezebels” whose independence and lack of submission to their husbands lead to unhappiness. She attempts to counter this independent streak in herself as a result.
After the birth of her daughter and her decision to leave the Family, Joy learns to rely on her faith in a new way—slowly rejecting the teachings of the family and reaffirming her own personal beliefs. She recognizes that she still has faith in God despite her misgivings because “by the end of every day, however messy, [she does] always feel like [she’s] been thrown the rope [she] needed” (242). After leaving the group, Joy finds a new Christian community with a pastor who preaches “a voice of faith through reason […] that made [her] feel sane and empowered to scrutinize, question, and understand what [she] believe[s]” (301). This new understanding of faith helps Joy learn to trust again while retaining a self-reflective stance toward religion.
The Search for Community and Belonging
One of the major motivations in Joy’s life is her search for community and belonging. As a child, she often feels out-of-place and struggled to make friends. She finds a community in the theater and pursues it as a career in part because of the sense of belonging she feels there. As a young adult, she gets pulled into the Family cult because she initially believes it’s a community that understands and supports her. Upon leaving the cult, Joy feels a renewed sense of community with her parents and friends, realizing how much her fellow cast members on One Tree Hill are a source of support for her.
Joy’s sense of the need for community is established from a young age when her family moves from Florida to Texas. She feels a “profound disconnect” from the other kids at her wealthy Christian private school because her family is lower-middle-income. Afterward, she struggles to make friends at school because of her ADHD and OCD. Instead, she finds that “the Arlington community theatre [gives her the] first taste of really belonging somewhere” (13). While performing, she realizes that acting is a way she can be “welcomed” and her “eccentricities” are actually assets. This sense of belonging on stage and onscreen is part of what leads to Joy’s realization that acting is “what [she is] meant to do with [her] life” (15). This sense of belonging in a creative theater scene is compounded when Joy moves to NYC to work on a soap opera and feels at home there.
Joy positions her move to LA as a major obstacle in her search for belonging because “there was no sense of community” there (26). The Family—Les and Pam particularly—prey on Joy’s loneliness and insecurity. They encourage her to think of the Family as the place where she belongs. Joy responds emotionally to this; on Christmas Day, she breaks down crying in gratitude for having found a “family” that would support her unconditionally. During her time on the set of One Tree Hill, Joy begins to feel “on [her] own again, like [she] did before the group” (148). This motivates her to begin to find community with the cast and crew on set, particularly the “Mama Bears” in hair and makeup. However, the Family works to isolate Joy from her coworkers through “struggle sessions” and other forms of manipulation that cement her commitment to and dependence on the Family as her sole support system.
As her arc progresses across her memoir, Joy finds a community outside the Family that gives her a sense of belonging. She reconnects with her parents and builds stronger relationships with her former co-workers from One Tree Hill like Paul Johannson. She acknowledges how the fan community, particularly superfan Danielle, helps her escape and provides a new community to rely on after she left the cult and the show.
