Book Review
Dinner for Vampires
Overall Review:
As a long time One Tree Hill fan, this audiobook is a must. Bethany shares her experience of being in a cult in a way that is so unglamorous. It isn’t some huge or over the top. She isn’t erratic and continues live a ‘normal’ life during her involvement. This book does a great job of showing that yes, cults are scary, but they are also a lot easier to fall into than most of us think.
This book takes place mainly from Bethany’s early career (late teens) to the wrapping and few years after OTH (early 30s). We get to dive into her passion for her career and success on a soap opera before joining the One Tree Hill cast. I actually really enjoyed hearing how she spoke about acting – truly as a craft. I watched both the series and listened to part of the Drama Queens podcast and it made me realize that even while the show is cheesy (and amazing) that the actors were still doing a pretty good job!
She didn’t go into as much detail about her childhood and her relationship with her high school crush ‘Blue Eyes’ as much as I would have liked. I feel like the lack of depth, made me misunderstand references back to her childhood and early teens. It didn’t seem like she had such a strained relationship with her parents as she was alluding to.
The years that she was in the cult she did provide a lot of detail and context. How she was feeling at the time, the good parts of the people in the ‘family’, and ultimately the craving for belonging. It is so sick and twisted how manipulative people can be and the coercion of the rest of the group just fuels the culty fire.
I wish she used actual names. It took me so long to realize that all the aliases for the people in her life were characters from Dracula. Clever, since the book is titled ‘Dinner for Vampires’, but it was lost on me until about halfway through the book.
This book also made me pretty sad and frustrated. I have sympathy for the situation she found herself in and would never be one to blame a victim, but I was screaming at the pages to LEAVE. You just want her to get out so bad and know that she is worth so much more than this ‘family’ tells her. It was also pretty devastating that she lost millions of dollars to this cult, especially with her having a newborn baby by the end of the book.
I can’t imagine how difficult it will be to explain that to her daughter, Rosie, when she is older. “Hey your dad is the son of a cult leader that ruined a decade of my life!”
Entertaining and sad. Again, I think as far as memoirs go, this is a pretty good one!