Guinevere Turner on her new memoir, about growing up in a cult, and why men can't believe she wrote the 'American Psycho' screenplay: 'Toxic masculinity'

Those who know anything about Guinevere Turner usually come from one of two camps: ’90s lesbians or mainstream bros. It’s something the actress and screenwriter is both aware of and amused by.

“There are so many weird aspects of my life — like, I have avid fans of Go Fish and I have avid fans of American Psycho, and I don’t think these two populations even know that these two movies exist,” says Turner, referring to both the pioneering 1994 lesbian rom-com that she co-wrote and starred in and to the 2000 film version of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, starring Christian Bale, that she appeared in and wrote the screenplay for.

Now Turner, 55, is making a name for herself in a whole new category — the literary world — with last month’s release of When the World Didn’t End: A Memoir. It’s a clear-eyed stunner, about her unconventional childhood growing up around the country in the Lyman Family doomsday cult and the struggles she faced, from isolation to sexual abuse, when she got out at age 11 to live with the mother she barely knew.

Turner first dipped her toe into writing about her childhood in a college fiction workshop, but put it aside when she realized the topic overshadowed her writing abilities. “You say the word ‘cult’ and mouths get frothy, you know?” she tells Yahoo Entertainment. While doing press for Go Fish, she let it slip to a journalist that she’d grown up in the Lyman Family, and though she asked him to keep this detail out of the story, he included it, and Turner found herself fielding “a whole bunch of crazy book deal offers.”

It was all very tempting, as Turner was in her 20s and “broke,” but she listened to her gut over fears that it would be sensationalized and turned them down. “I’m really proud of my 20-something-year-old self, because even though I really wanted the money, there was just no way I was ready to write it, and not on those terms,” she says. Later attempts at tackling the topic were thwarted by fears of what people in the still-thriving (to this day) cult might think.

In fact, it wasn’t until she took a screenwriting gig for the 2019 drama Charlie Says, about one of Charles Manson’s devotees — a story she felt keenly able to understand — that her past felt inescapable.

“I’ve got to talk about this,” she recalls telling director Mary Harron (also of American Psycho) at the start of the film’s press tour. “I’ve been pivoting away from my childhood for all these decades, but now it’s relevant — and if I don’t talk about it, it’ll just seem weird.”

Turner started by writing a story, published in the New Yorker. “So, I got over that hurdle and I was like, ‘Wow, no one died!’ And the response that I got from writing that piece was so intense and kind of beautiful and surprising.” A book deal followed. And reactions, from those whose responses she’d feared, have largely been supportive, including those of friends she’d grown up with and recently reconnected with.

After all, she says, “I didn't write this book to poke at people. What I really, really wanted to do, aside from just be a writer and tell a good story, is to create a voice for all the women that I grew up with.”

One of the trickiest parts to air, though, was the role Turner’s young mother played — or didn’t play — when it came to having her daughter’s back. “We’re not close,” she says of her mom, who told her that she “tried to read the book, but it was too traumatizing.” And she does feel for her there.

“That book is out in the world and she does not come out well at all,” she says. “But also, even though I have a lot of anger toward her, I was really conscious and conscientious of just presenting her — like I did or tried to do with everything in that book — as it was, as I saw it, and to let the reader decide.”

Turner has clearly flourished in spite of — because of? — her early years, though she’s often described herself as an “unintentional filmmaker,” bursting onto the scene when she made Go Fish with her ex, Rose Troche, as a response to the dearth of realistic lesbian representation on film.

“I still love it,” she says of the movie, made largely with friends on a $15,000 budget. The last time Turner watched it was with Troche at an LGBTQ film festival in 2014, she says, when “we were laughing and disrupting the screening so much that we removed ourselves to the lobby.”

But she’s often reminded of its lasting impact, including when she was at a screening event recently, and a woman in her early 20s approached her, saying that Go Fish was just taught in her class “and that she identifies as queer and it really spoke to her,” adding the sentiment is something she also hears regularly about an early lesbian film from the same canon that she appeared in, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman.

“I'm feeling that a lot now,” she says, “that all the work I did in the ’90s was good … but now suddenly it’s [appreciated by] a new generation — like people who weren’t even born when we made Go Fish!” She adds, “I’m really amazed that a new generation can handle me talking on a phone with a cord.”

What young queer women might have a harder time understanding is the extreme hunger lesbians had at the time for on-screen representation — something Turner is both nostalgic for and glad to see go the way of landlines. She calls her feelings on the mainstreaming of queer culture “complicated,” especially as she ponders the various lesbian “cultural marks” of her generation, starting with when Ellen DeGeneres’s character came out (the same month DeGeneres herself came out) on primetime TV in 1997.

“We all gathered at my best friend’s apartment and watched it — and we all cried,” she recalls. “And we’re like, queers in our 20s and we’re crying, and we’re tough guys. Like, people were probably doing cocaine in the bathroom! We’re drinking! And we’re just like, boo-hoo-hoo! And that surprised us. Like, we kind of didn’t realize what that validation felt like. And we didn’t know where it was going.”

Nor did Turner know what a pivotal role she’d continue to play, including with various other landmark queer indie films, including Chasing Amy (and the new documentary Chasing Chasing Amy), based on her friendship with filmmaker Kevin Smith — and with The L Word, for which she both wrote and acted, not to mention named.

“I do like to brag, always, whenever given an opportunity, that I made the title of that show,” which was originally to be called Earthlings, she says. Troche had directed the series pilot and eventually pulled Turner in to do some of the writing — a tough sell at first, as Turner had been rejected for the roles of both Tina and Bette in auditions, which she found “humiliating.”

“I was feeling a little crushed-ego, ’cause how dare they do a lesbian show on TV and not have me in it? Like, do you have any idea who I am?” she says, laughing at herself now, to which Troche told her, “‘You need to get over yourself … This is a landmark, potentially groundbreaking moment. Don’t you want to be with me to make sure it’s the best that it can be?’ And I was like, ‘Goddammit. Yes … the kids who made Go Fish!’ And so, I met with [series creator] Ilene [Chaiken] and she hired me.”

She says the whole experience was “a really exhilarating moment” — one that didn’t quite come again in her important-lesbian-representation timeline, Turner explains, until 2013.

That’s when she “had a beautiful moment where I heard about The Fosters, centered around a lesbian couple. And I watched the first episode and I was like, ‘I’m not the target audience. I’m not a parent and I don’t care that much. But I can afford to not watch it! There’s enough queer content on TV that it’s not my job to watch every single thing and be accountable-slash-have to comment on what it is.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, Fosters! I love you. Bye. Go forth!’ That’s nice. And that was a moment.”

As it was when she crossed over into mainstream filmmaking — most notably as the screenplay writer for American Psycho, an unpredictable gig for Turner as, she stresses, “I really hate scary movies.”

Turner was working on The Notorious Bettie Page, again with Harron, when the director asked her to consider doing the screenplay for the Ellis adaptation. “She said, ‘I know you’re going to hate this book, but I think we can make a smart movie,” recalls Turner; she agreed to be co-writer with Harron — an ironic twist, considering the novel was skewered by critics as being a riot of misogynistic violence.

Still, theirs would be the seventh and final attempt at a screenplay draft, says Turner, who notes that they “aggressively did not read any of the other attempts until we were done. And then we read Brett's draft, which is hilarious, because it ends … in Patrick Bateman doing a musical number.”

She and Ellis recently discussed on his podcast the enduring legacy it has been for both of them. “He was like, ‘Is this going to be on my gravestone?’” says Turner, who has felt similarly attached to the project for two decades now. It’s brought a mix of emotions and experiences — including the response from men who are often incredulous to learn she was the writer.

“‘You wrote American Psycho?’ Like, I’m a weird, weird woman who would claim that without it being true,” she says, laughing. “How crazy do you have to be to claim to have written that movie? What kind of bro sort of cred are you trying to get?” Besides, she notes about that reaction, “I’m like, ‘Yeah, here we are, right in the toxic masculinity that it was writing about!’”

Then, Turner says, men will more often than not start quoting the film to her. “And then they say, ‘I am Patrick Bateman.’ And this where I used to get freaked out, and then I got really excited, because that means that the entire population of people — and by that, I mean men, who we were sending up — actually love it,” she says, “which is the most incredible, meta-accomplishment that I can ever f***ing imagine.”