Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!)

Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show While Also in an Actual Cult! (2024) by Bethany Joy Lenz—who goes by “Joy”—is a New York Times bestselling memoir about Joy’s experiences on the set of the 2000s teen drama One Tree Hill while being a member of a small Christian cult called the Family. The memoir describes how the cult leader, Les, and other members manipulated Joy’s desire for community and Christian faith to draw her deeper into the toxic, controlling, patriarchal group while isolating her from her family and coworkers. Joy, who played the character Haley James Scott on the show, was in an abusive marriage with Les’s son that contrasted sharply with the fairy tale romance she had on the show. After the birth of her daughter, Rosie, Joy finally made the difficult decision to leave her husband and the cult.

This guide references the 2024 Simon and Schuster hardcover edition of Dinner for Vampires.

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and stigmatization of mental health issues. The text also includes a brief mention of substance abuse and an offensive term for Latinos.

Plot Summary

In the Prologue, Joy describes a fight between her husband, whom she refers to throughout as the Quiet Boy or QB or Q, and herself. In the midst of the fight, QB threw a sweatshirt at her. Lenz notes it wasn’t the first time he had acted out in that way—he often broke things in anger, but this was the final straw for Joy. While QB took a shower, Joy picked up their infant daughter, Rosie, and left him.

In Part 1, Joy describes her childhood and early career as an actress. She was born in Florida, but her family soon moved to Texas for her father’s job as a teacher at an expensive Christian private school. Her family moved around a lot, which made it difficult for Joy to make friends. Instead, she found community in the theater at age seven and discovered her love for acting. She had early success as a child actor, even as her family’s circumstances deteriorated. Following the death of her grandmother, the family moved to New Jersey and her parents soon divorced. After she graduated high school, Joy moved to New York City to work on the soap opera Guiding Light.

When her contract with Guiding Light was up, Joy’s friend Camille urged her to move to LA. There, she became close with her roommate Mina. Mina began taking Joy to a weekly Bible study group at the apartment of her friends and former Seventh-Day Adventists, Abe and Harker Van Hewitt, and their mother, Pamela. One day, a pastor named Les arrived and slowly began to take over the group. Les preached that Joy needed to fully surrender to God and embrace her “authentic” self. After she ended things with a longtime crush she calls Blue Eyes, Joy accepted Pamela’s invitation to spend time at the Van Hewitt home in Idaho. Joy felt excited by the sense of belonging she found there, despite her parents’ growing concerns about the group. That Christmas, Joy spent the holiday with the Family, as the group came to be known, instead of with her parents. She was thrilled by the love and acceptance the group showed her.

In Part Two, Joy describes being cast and working on One Tree Hill while becoming increasingly ensconced in the Family cult. Joy initially resisted auditioning for One Tree Hill, because she wasn’t sure if it fit in with her dream of advancing her career to act in movies. However, the producers were insistent, and Joy was drawn to the “wholesome” character of Haley James Scott, so she eventually agreed. After an initial audition, she did a screen test with star Chad Michael Murray, and they hit it off. Joy was cast. The Family took her out to dinner to celebrate and she moved to Wilmington, North Carolina soon after to begin filming.

Les warned Joy to avoid becoming too close to the cast and crew of One Tree Hill, because they were not “spiritually safe.” Joy rented a beach house far from the other actors and spent a lot of time on her own. During this time, Les convinced Joy to invest $10,000 into a motel that that Family was buying as part of their “ministry.” On One Tree Hill, Joy found that occasionally her religious convictions came into conflict with the show creator’s desire to show her character in risqué situations, but she insisted on not, for example, being filmed wearing only a bra.

After some time on the show, Joy decided to move into a house in downtown Wilmington. When Les found out, he chastised Joy for not asking the Family about this decision and told her to come to the Big House in Idaho for a “struggle session” where they would address this and other “challenges” of Joy’s. At the struggle session, Les, Pamela, and other Family members had Joy read from her personal journal and criticized her for hours, leaving her in tears.

Tensions in the Family increased. The motel was struggling, and Harker Van Hewitt began openly challenging Les’s teachings. Joy came to Les and told him she wanted to get married. She mentioned a passing interest in Les’s son, QB. He encouraged the match, and they were engaged and then married soon after. Joy dreaded the wedding, which her father refused to attend. After they were married, QB grew increasingly controlling and aggressive toward Joy. He moved in with her in Wilmington and closely scrutinized her every move. He would grow angry and possessive when she spent time with male coworkers. Eventually, he moved back to the Van Hewitt house in Idaho, but he continued to control Joy. He had access to all of her finances and even dictated what she could wear. To channel her creative impulses and find a degree of freedom, Joy spent her free time writing a musical version of The Notebook by Nicolas Sparks. It was not picked up for legal reasons, but they were able to stage six performances in Wilmington.

The Family’s motel eventually failed and had to be sold. Les decided to buy a restaurant instead. He convinced Joy to invest large amounts of money into the restaurant.

In Part Three, Joy describes leaving One Tree Hill and the Family. The section opens with a member of the Family, Gretchen, telling Joy and QB that she had stolen their money and lost it gambling. Joy was furious. Soon after, Joy got pregnant. It was a difficult time because of QB’s frequent violent outbursts. She gave birth to her daughter Rosie in Wilmington. Soon after, she delivered her last line on One Tree Hill after seven seasons on the show.

After a long period of discontent with the Les and the Family, Harker Van Hewitt and Mina, his wife and Joy’s friend, decided to leave the group. Their departure created tension that boiled over into a fistfight at a Family softball match. Joy was shocked by the instability and intensity of the situation.

Wanting to audition for new roles, Joy traveled to LA with Rosie and QB where the argument described in the Prologue took place. Joy left QB, taking Rosie with her. The Family stopped talking to her. After reconnecting with her friends and family and distancing herself from the Family, Joy realized she was in a cult and had to leave. She went back to Idaho to prepare her exit. Pamela and QB served her with divorce papers. She learned that QB had stolen approximately two million dollars from her account, nearly everything she had earned during her time on One Tree Hill. She was obligated to stay there until the courts processed the divorce and allowed her to take Rosie back to LA. During that time, members of the Family tried to intimidate her into coming back.

When she was finally granted permission to leave, a One Tree Hill superfan named Danielle who had joined the Family helped Joy pack up her things in Idaho and return to LA. From Danielle, Joy learned that the restaurant was failing, and many members had left the Family after the softball fight. After returning to LA, Joy repaired her relationships with her parents and other friends. She wound up in a three-year custody battle with QB over her daughter, Rosie. In the course of preparing for the trial, she learned that Les had a history of financial and sexual misconduct. Eventually, Joy won full custody of her daughter, but she was unable to recoup her financial losses.

Joy decided to write Dinner for Vampires to share her story about being in a small cult that differed from more sensationalized media coverage of cults and to combat the stigmatization cult survivors face.