The first impression you will get in the early pages of Guinevere Turner’s memoir is simply the literary quality of the work itself. Descriptions are lush and seem to pop right onto the visual cortex. You can see the room in Chapter 1 with its table for twelve so polished that the chandelier above it reflects on the wood. Left unspoken, but not unnoticed, is the labor that would have gone into keeping this museum-quality room looking as it does.
When the God of Guinevere’s early world, Melvin Lyman, is first described in some depth in Chapter 2 we get the impression of a hippie type, one who spouts cosmic or banal pronouncements which he expects to be received as holy nuggets. And due to the circumstances of the environment here, they are. Melvin’s one-time wife, Jessie, is given a memorable introduction as the queen of this place. She is heavily involved in the lives of everyone, while Melvin is reclusive and never seen. They actually rejected the label of hippie, identifying more with the Woody Guthrie folk music tradition of earlier years.
I was reminded of another counter-culture guru of the time, Steven Gaskins, who also presided over a communal society which he also called “The Farm.” How many like this would there have been in those days? Not that they were identical, or that any and all hippie communes were cultic: Gaskins’ Farm did not have the accusations of abusive practices that Lyman’s did. Did the hippies produce more cultic groups than the clean-cut, necktie & business suit-wearing, squared-away squares? The latter would have had a much longer head start.
Chapter 2 tells of the interrelated nature of the people in this group. Members in intimate relationships are said to be “married,” but these are disposable arrangements of usually short duration. The babies born are essentially children of the cult, though their biological parents were known to them, and sometimes they would have meet-ups. Most of the time, Guinevere’s mother lived in another community within the Lyman Family in another state. Guinevere’s descriptions of their long-distance relationship are particularly moving.
The progeny of Melvin and Jessie are considered royalty. The Lyman Family is entirely hierarchical. The children of the leaders were deferred to in every instance: Being closer to the Godhead, they were superior to the other children.
The early part of the book gives us memories of Guinevere’s strange but sometimes idyllic early childhood on the Farm in Kansas. There are recurring notes of menace when certain adults, like Jessie, show up. Jessie, in her travels from compound to compound, capriciously takes Guinevere with her one day as she leaves the Farm. She has been randomly selected to go live in Los Angeles.
This review will take pains to avoid spoilers, and not reveal too much, but at a tender age Guinevere learns to tailor her thoughts to dovetail with those of the authorities she lives under—her expressed thoughts, anyway. It is not yet clear how much of her inner life is molded into a shape to suit them. She was born into the Lyman Family. Her first-ever thoughts would have been about fitting in with this milieu.
Part of the gut appeal of this book is how she takes us back to the world of childhood. Not that what she describes may resemble your own childhood, but the way that a child thinks, any child, is found in these pages. Guinevere has been living her formative years on a farm which featured times of inappropriate psychological manipulations, psychological abuse, some would call it. Education was sporadic to non-existent. Unspecified amounts of child labor were involved. Certainly, a suboptimal environment for child development. But moments in nature, with the fresh air, big sky, and creative playtime with other kids, also figured in.
Among the harshest criticisms one could face in the Lyman Family was being self-absorbed, or “too deep in your own trip.” That would tend to take you out of the Lyman trip, of course. The queen, Jessie, is described at one point as having “proprietorship” over their lives. Certainly, their lives were lived according to the whims of Jessie and others of high rank.
Guinevere’s move to Los Angeles was only the first in an erratic shuttling around to the various compounds of the Lyman Family, most of which were in the Northeast US. Moves were sometimes arbitrary, with maybe a day’s notice.
In Chapter 15 we get our first indication how the Family financed their lifestyle when we learn they had started a construction business. Likely there would have been other small businesses. This is not uncommon with cults of a certain size. No telling who is getting the proceeds of your local deli, website builder, lawn care service, etc. Members also held down jobs out amongst the unenlightened, so a certain amount of tithing would have been going on. During Guinevere’s visit to see her mother in New York City, we find that she works on Wall Street.
A mixed bag of supernatural beliefs was part of the package at the Lyman Family, all of which seemed to work to the aggrandizement of Melvin. Astrology was big. Spirits spoke. An alien spacecraft was supposed to show up and take everyone to planet Venus just before the end of the world on January 5th, 1974. (Its cosmic no-show was blamed on a lack of spiritual preparedness on the part of certain members of the Family and gives us the title of the book.) And of course, due to various events in his youth, Melvin became Lord.
An earthquake hits Guinevere when, at the age of 11, she is gently ejected from the community. She is assured she can come back some day, but not until she is 16 or thereabouts. Her distant mother has defected from the group with a male member she had taken up with. The rules of the cult were arcane and arbitrary, but one of them was that children had to have at least one parent who was an active member. Guinevere was uprooted yet again, torn away from those that she loved, and packed off to live with people she barely knew.
Poignancy is never far away in this memoir, and the author goes through good times and bad with a kind of trust in tomorrow that is far less common in grown-ups. The author’s grasp of children’s ways of speaking is remarkable.
Though she dreams of nothing but returning to the Farm as soon as she can get back there, she is placed in a public school, which triggers new changes in her formative mind. It is her first experience of a proper school. Guinevere has landed in a real world community, or as the Family always called it – the “World People”.
Her struggles to fit in give a solid insight into the struggles that those born into cults must go through in transitioning to the outside world, and as emotionally wrenching as her struggles were, she at least had some supportive World People at the school to help her. Not so much on the home front, where her experiences living with her mother—and the increasingly menacing lummox she has thrown in with—cause continual heartache. The Lyman Family was yet another religious order that decreed women must be subservient to men, and even though they have left it, these two continue living that way.
Over time, both the positives of the school experience and the negatives of her home life increase dramatically for Guinevere.
She experiences greater hardship and trauma after leaving the Lyman Family than she did while in it. Of course, the people involved in her dysfunctional home were of the Family, just cast out from it. The man who was living with her mother, a sadistic tyrant known as FP, made at least one visit to Jessie (uninvited) during this time, despite his outcast status. Believing that he had turned Jessie against her, Guinevere dispenses with all of her previous dreams of returning to the Family. She is 15 and has a school life, and that is about all. How impossible it must have been at times to keep up with the demands of school in the face of adjusting to the new culture along with her trials at home.
She persisted, and prevailed, and attended college on the way to attaining World Personhood. Guinevere Turner’s survivor story is one you should experience.
