Bethany Joy Lenz Admits Writing About Being in a Cult While on 'One Tree Hill' Was an 'Exhausting' Experience: 'I Learned So Much'

Bethany Joy Lenz put everything she had into writing her new book, Dinner for Vampires.

The One Tree Hill alum's memoir details her time in the Big House Family religious cult while starring on the hit CW series and how she finally escaped the group. However, it was not easy for Lenz, 43, to go back into her memory and relive her experiences.

"I’m proud of it. I know how hard I worked on it. I didn’t use a ghostwriter. I wrote that book," she explained in a recent interview. "It was exhausting, and it was like an information dump. Thank God I had an amazing editor who could help me talk my way through things and knew how to move things around to help me around. I learned so much in the process."

The actress, who married and later divorced the cult leader's son and shares a 13-year-old daughter, Rosie, with him, emphasized how she needed help to recall certain moments of her life because of how traumatic they were.

"The hardest part was when I started to get into after 2005 — after I got married, really. That chunk was really hard to write, not only just because of that, but because my daughter is 13 and it’s her father. And I want to be really respectful of that," Lenz pointed out. "I don’t necessarily believe in shielding children from a lot of things, but I think you give them the amount of information that they can handle. She’s old enough now that, if she wants to read it, she can, and I feel like we’d be able to talk about it. But I didn’t want to dishonor her dad."

Despite the group and her former spouse, whom she split from in 2012, inflicting painful memories onto her, the mother-of-one doesn't harbor resentment. "I don’t believe he’s a bad person. He’s on his own journey, and I don’t want to judge it, but I have to maintain that balance of me being authentic and telling the truth of what I experienced and also leaving space for their relationship," she added. "That was the hardest part in the whole book: making sure I created that balance."

Lenz also touched on whether or not her One Tree Hill castmates knew what she was going through while they were filming. According to the Pearson star, at the time, she confused their concern for them saying negative things about her.

"They weren’t making fun of me, and they weren’t scared of me,” she penned in the book. "They sensed I was being taken advantage of and might even be in danger. They were trying to figure out how they could help me."

Variety conducted the interview with Lenz.