About a year after she was sectioned, Hannah Murray went to Venice Film Festival to promote what would turn out to be her last film, Charlie Says. In it, she played Leslie Van Houten, one of the many female followers of cult leader Charles Manson. “And the question almost every journalist asked,” recalls the 36-year-old now, “was, ‘How can you possibly empathise with these women?’ Part of me wanted to scream, ‘Because I really understand this intimately.’ But I wasn’t ready, at all, to share that story.”
Now, she is. Murray’s new memoir, The Make-Believe, is startling, honest and deeply moving. It tells of how during a period of mental instability, a session with an “energy healer” led Murray deeper and deeper into a wellness cult. How it culminated in a psychotic break and forced hospitalisation, during which she was convinced she was the messiah. And how the cult’s leader, the only man at the top of a pyramid of female “healers”, encouraged her delusions, told her that she had been possessed by the devil and that he could talk to her inside her mind. It is one of the clearest accounts I’ve ever read of how someone can become incrementally brainwashed.
“Something big happened to me, but I didn’t think I would ever want to tell it publicly,” says Murray now. “So I thought, I have all these memories, I’ll write them all out, and then I can turn it into a film or something. And then I read it back, and thought, ‘Oh shit, this is a memoir.’”
