‘American Psycho’ writer reveals childhood in notorious Lyman Family doomsday cult

Guinevere Turner woke up Jan. 5, 1975, feeling fine.

It was the morning of the last day on Earth, the end of the world.

But all was OK. After all, Mel Lyman — lord and savior — had said a spaceship was coming to take her and everyone she cared about to Venus, where they would spend the rest of their days.

“This seemed completely plausible to my six-year-old self — exciting even,” Turner writes in her new memoir, “When The World Didn’t End” (Crown), out Tuesday and about her childhood growing up in the Lyman Family cult. “We were going to live on the planet of love!”

That day, Turner did her chores and prepared for the rapture. Each of the 20 or so children who lived in their Los Angeles commune was allowed to pick out one toy to bring on their journey.

Turner put on a party dress and wondered how her mother — living in a separate Lyman compound, in San Francisco — was doing. 

After dinner, all the cult kids sat in a circle, singing and calling the spaceship for hours.

As dawn began to break, they heard the intercom buzz. Mel said the spaceships weren’t coming after all, because some of their “souls” weren’t “ready.”

“I felt anxious, as if it was possibly my fault,” Turner, now 54, told The Post. “I’d been told I’d been on this planet too many times because I hadn’t learned my lesson … I thought maybe it might be me who was dragging everyone else down.”

Turner is a screenwriter and actress, best known for writing the movies “American Psycho” and “The Notorious Bettie Page,” as well as her 1994 breakout lesbian romance, “Go Fish,” which she also starred in. 

But in 2018, while getting ready to promote “Charlie Says,” her movie about the Manson Family girls, Turner felt she needed to come forward with her own cult experience. 

“I’d spent my professional life pivoting away from questions about my childhood,” Turner said at her studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “But then when ‘Charlie Says’ came out, I was like, ‘No, it’s relevant.’” 

Now she’s telling it all: life in the Lyman Family, her horrific teen years after her expulsion from the cult — and how she almost got sucked back in. 

“It’s funny, because I thought writing this book would be some sort of cathartic experience or whatever,” Turner said, with a laugh. “And then at some point, I was like, ‘I’m just re-traumatizing myself. Why am I doing this?’”

But she does not want to stay silent.

“No one I grew up with — and there’s like 60 of us [in] my generation — has ever written about it or spoken publicly about it,” she said. “[The Family] has all been so confident that we wouldn’t talk about it. And rightfully so — no one has. But all these f–ked-up things happened to us. The one thing we do have is that it’s our story to tell. They can’t actually own our experience.”

Turner was born in Boston in 1968.

Her mother, Bess, joined The Lyman Family when she was 19 years old, a college drop-out, alone and pregnant with Turner. Returning home was not an option.

“She just didn’t know where to go,” Turner said. 

The Lyman Family — with its pseudo-utopian ideals, communal living and free-love attitude — looked pretty good, the whole spaceship thing notwithstanding. 

“It was the culture at the time,” said Turner. “People wanted to be seekers of change and knowledge and spirituality and alternative ideas to what the ’50s generation taught them. But it made everyone kind of vulnerable to being manipulated.” 

(Years later, Turner asked her mother how she could have possibly believed they could live on a scorching-hot planet with no water. “It’s complicated,” Bess replied and walked off.) 

“I have studied … and written a lot about cults and coercion, and it’s like an abusive relationship,” Turner said. “You get to a certain point where this is your life now and to disrupt that would be so scary. And it’s not all bad: There [are] just lovely-enough things. And of course, people become friends and they become family. And then people have kids. You know, it’s baby steps. Maybe half of those people thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just hang out here for a year,’ and then five years went by.”

Lyman, a folk musician and writer, started The Family in Boston’s Fort Hill, in 1966.

The group lived in isolation, away from the “World People” — meaning the rest of civilization — who were believed to evil and capable of contaminating their souls.

Children were homeschooled (history class involved analyzing the presidents’ astrological charts), or made to work the sorghum fields on the Family Farm in Kansas. 

Lyman made members listen to tapes of his favorite songs and watch his favorite movies — compiled in The Lord’s List — every time one was on TV. Literally: Turner remembers being woken at 2 a.m. to see Bette Davis in “Dark Victory.”

“It took me years to watch things that weren’t on the Lord’s List and not feel bad about myself,” Turner said.

Devotees were shuffled around to the Family’s various properties based on the whims of Mel or his “queen,” Jessie, who traveled from the Lyman properties in Martha’s Vineyard to Los Angeles with her “caravan” of favorites.

She soon took Turner — a natural ham and performer — along with her. The Family tended to separate children from their biological parents; Turner hadn’t lived with Bess until she was 3 and “hardly knew her.”

Turner was happy, even if things were weird.

The adults took LSD and talked about sex.

Punishments were harsh and arbitrary and could involve getting locked in a closet or being shunned.

Turner’s 13- and 14-year-old friends were being groomed for marriage to adult men.

And Mel’s teen wife told her that Mel was dead but nobody seemed to know. 

At 11 years old — banished from Jessie’s caravan and working once again on the farm — Turner was told she had to leave.

Her mother had run off with a boyfriend, an unsavory guy who Turner calls F.P.

Forced to move in with them, Turner was devastated.

“I never asked them [why they left], and they never told me,” Turner said. “Because at the time, it didn’t matter to me. I was like, ‘You’re just monsters,’ and whatever they would have said I would have been like, ‘Whatever — you’re dead to me.’”

Turner moved to upstate New York with her mother, F.P. and her four-year-old half-sister Annalee, who was also a stranger to her.

She dreamed of going back to The Family and over her diaries from her time there to savor and remember every detail.

F.P. had violent outbursts and treated Bess and her daughters like his servants. He also began sexually abusing Turner, she said.

When she refused to do what he wanted, she writes, he would beat her, and then she couldn’t go to school, her one oasis from her home life.

Eventually, she decided it wasn’t worth saying no.

The screenwriter said that rereading her diaries from this period — which she quotes from in the book — was painful but powerful.

“It really showed the slow progression, the grooming, the tiny baby steps that were moving toward abuse,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh he’s weird. I don’t like to be left alone with him. He is always hugging me.’ But as a kid, I couldn’t see where it was going.”

Eventually, with Turner’s cooperation, she said, F.P. ended up in jail

She then moved in with her boyfriend and his father, who became Turner’s guardian.

She made Honor Society, performed in three plays and worked two jobs.

She became good, she said, at impersonating a normal teen.

Turner went to Sarah Lawrence College, where she kissed a girl for the first time and realized she was gay.

“There’s some benefit to having no parents and no one around to judge you,” she said. “I had a very easy coming-out situation.”

While she never talked about the Lyman Family with her high school friends, her background made her intriguing to college classmates.

“The crazier your backstory, the better — and I had the best story,” Turner said. “It was social currency.”

Still, once she began writing screenplays, she didn’t want her background to define her. She moved on.

Turner now lives in Greenpoint with her partner, filmmaker Isabelle Mecattaf, and 5-year-old rescue chihuahua Marbles.

She’s adapting her book into a film and working on a TV series about cult deprogrammers.

“It’s fascinating,” she said.

She described her relationship with her mother as civil.

But she’s close with her half-siblings from Bess: Annalee (a graphic designer), Julie (an executive assistant, and Turner’s unofficial social media manager — she’s teaching her how to use TikTok) and Benjamin (a paralegal). 

Still there was a time, right before she went to Sarah Lawrence, when she visited the Lyman Family again in Martha’s Vineyard.

As she reunited with her childhood friends, the ones who shared her taste in movies and knitting and crocheting, she wondered if she had made the right choice.

Then one night, when everyone was drinking wine and talking in the living room, one of the men put his empty glass in front of her, for her to refill it.

Suddenly, she noticed that most of the women were doing the dishes, putting the kids to bed and flitting about serving the guys. It was the dynamic that her mom and F.P. were trying to replicate at home. 

“Obviously,” Turner said, “I could not stay.”