Review: "When the World Didn't End" by Guinevere Turner

When the World Didn't End by Guinevere Turner
Published May 2023 via Crown
★★★★

There have been points in my life when keeping a record of what was happening to me felt like the only power I had, writes Turner in the author's note (loc. 95*). Raised in the Lyman Family, her childhood was in some ways idyllic: living with a pack of other children as playmates, making games out of chores, hours outside on the Farm. Singing and fishing and learning to play the banjo.

But also: no medical care. Doomsday prophecies. Almost no contact with "the World". Young girls chosen by adult men as "brides". Everyday life—the big things and the small—dictated by the whims of a few elite at the top. And then Turner's mother left the Lyman Family (not to be confused with the Family International), and Turner was thrust out into the World with her.

When the World Didn't End takes Turner up through her late teenage years, at which point she'd barely started to process her experience in the Lyman Family "commune"—barely started to process the knowledge that it hadn't been all idyll. Cults are so often something to escape, but for Turner, her upbringing represented a safer place than the World she found herself part of after leaving the Family. Turner holds close to the story as she lived it, choosing to bring in very little of her adult understanding, but I can only imagine that it took further years and years of processing to understand and frame her experience. It's a gripping story, and a sad one (what kind of person tells a child who basically deifies them that they no longer love that child?).

I quoted the author's note above, but it's interesting to note that although keeping a record was a source of power for Turner, those records and diaries were never private, nor expected to be. I'm speculating here, but I wonder whether there's any connection between that experience and her later work as an actress and screenwriter—a sense that any word or facial expression or movement would on some level be judged as a performance.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.