EPISODE SHOW NOTES

Episode 78: Parents Who Leave for Cults featuring Lily Dunn
Author Lily Dunn’s father joined Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s movement about the same time that And Then Everything Changed host Ronit Plank’s mother followed him to India. They both grew up in the shadow of Bhagwan (also known at Osho, the guru at the center of Netflix’s docuseries Wild Wild Country), each with a parent more devoted to his teachings and the lifestyle he extolled than to them. Lily shares some of what she witnessed at the Rajneeshee house she visited on weekends and she and Ronit discuss how their relationships with their father and mother respectively irrevocably changed when they chose freedom over parenting. In this special episode to mark the release of Ronit’s memoir When She Comes Back and Lily’s forthcoming memoir, the authors discuss their books, writing about family, and how watching Wild Wild Country which became a media sensation affected them.
Lily Dunn is an author and mentor. Her personal essays have appeared in Granta, Hinterland, Litro and The Real Story in the UK and she is a regular writer for the international Aeon magazine. Her first novel, Shadowing the Sun was published by Portobello Books, and described by the Big Issue as ‘a vivid and meaningful portrait of innocence destroyed’. She is co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life: Addiction, physical and mental illness and its aftermath: a collection of stories and poetry from writers in recovery, due to be published by Unbound in April 2021. Her memoir about the legacy of her father’s various addictions will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in Spring 2022. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, UK, and co-runs London Lit Lab with friend and author Zoe Gilbert.

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