Hannah Murray’s account of being drawn into a wellness cult is not an easy read. It includes the slow seduction, the escalating costs, the charismatic leader with his giant Starbucks cup and symbolic necklace, and Murray’s eventual psychotic break and sectioning. It’s a story that really demands to be taken seriously, and Murray tells it with remarkable honesty and dark humour. For me, it also came with a strange sense of recognition. When a reader sent me the Guardian piece, I had to put my phone down for a minute. Not because I was shocked, exactly, but because the mechanisms she described (the promise of healing, the escalation, the language of surrender, the way care can become control) were unnervingly close to the territory I had been writing into.

My novel The Wellness Retreat is set at Saoghal Spa, an ultra-exclusive healing retreat on a remote Scottish island, where a charismatic founder named Cyan Blanche promises transformation, restoration, and transcendence to wealthy, broken guests willing to surrender completely. The book is fiction. Horror-tinted fiction, at that. And yet reading Murray’s account about the “energy healer” who offered something “for people who want to get in there and sort their shit out,” and the pyramid of courses that promised ever-deeper wisdom at ever-steeper prices, I felt an awful familiarity. Then came the moment she started hearing the leader’s voice in her head and believed he controlled the weather. I kept thinking, with mounting unease, that these were the same mechanisms I had built into Cyan’s spa.

Murray describes being drawn in through what she calls “the gateway drug”: the personal growth section of the bookshop. Meditation. Gratitude diaries. The promise of a magic wand. “I was looking for something to fix me entirely,” she says. My protagonist Jaimie arrives at Saoghal in almost identical circumstances: chronically ill, professionally finished, newly bereaved, desperate for relief that the medical establishment has repeatedly failed to provide. She doesn’t go looking for transformation. Transformation finds her, in the form of a voucher sent by her missing sister. But the vulnerability is the same. The opening is the same.

What Murray’s account illuminates, and what I was trying to get at in the novel, is that wellness culture is so effective at predation precisely because its entry points are indistinguishable from genuine care. Someone listens to you. Really listens. They validate what others have dismissed. They offer a framework that makes your suffering feel meaningful rather than random. Murray’s “energy healer” Grace didn’t storm in with a clipboard and a sales pitch. She asked Murray to talk, and Murray, who was exhausted, and traumatized by a gruelling shoot, and a self-described oversharer, had a lot to say. The healing session that followed felt magical. And then came the courses, the initiation levels, the mounting fees, the pyramid.

In The Wellness Retreat, I built Saoghal around the same escalation. Guests arrive and experience genuine relief. The island’s mud baths really do work, the treatments really do soothe, and that authentic benefit is what makes the trap so elegant. Cyan isn’t selling nothing. She’s selling something real, something that genuinely helps, something that works. She’s just also taking far more than she’s giving, and the line between the two is deliberately blurred. It’s the same mechanism Murray identifies in the real wellness industry: “There’s not enough critical thought about wellness, particularly the way it’s been transformed into an industry.”

Murray also touches on something I find fascinating and slightly terrifying: the role of narrative. She was of the Harry Potter generation, she says, raised on stories where the strange kid turns out to be secretly destined for greatness, where a magical world hums just beneath the surface of the ordinary one. Not because stories caused the breakdown, but because, when psychosis overtook her, it seemed to light up those old story-shapes. In that state, she had a destiny. She could fly. She was going to save the world. The fictional frameworks she’d absorbed as a child became part of the architecture of her breakdown.

Jaimie carries something similar into Saoghal. She’s a woman whose sense of purpose has been systematically stripped away by illness, divorce, and grief. She arrives hollow. The cult doesn’t have to invent her hunger for meaning, it just has to find it and feed it.

What Murray’s account adds to the cultural conversation, and what I hope The Wellness Retreat adds in its own way, is an insistence on structural analysis rather than individual failing. The question isn’t how could she fall for it? The question is why is the structure so effective, and why do we keep building it? Murray is educated, middle-class, and self-aware. She had two psychoanalysts. And she still found herself in a hotel ballroom in London believing that a man in a yellow jacket controlled the weather.

The industry’s cruelty is that it often finds people at the exact moments they are most in need of care: the exhausted, the grieving, the chronically ill, and the creatively spent. People who have run out of conventional options and are genuinely, legitimately suffering. People like Jaimie in fiction. People like Murray in life. People, if we’re honest, like a lot of us at one point or another.

Murray’s memoir is called The Make-Believe. She’s talking about acting, about the cult, and about the blurry line between imagination and delusion. But she could also be talking about the wellness industry at large: the elaborate make-believe it asks us to sustain, and the stories it needs us to believe before we hand over our money, trust, and autonomy. That’s the conversation worth having. Murray has opened it. I hope The Wellness Retreat, in its own way, keeps it going.

My novel The Wellness Retreat, which circles many of these questions through gothic horror, is published by Hanover Square in September.