Escape by Carolyn Jessop

If, like me, you’ve been considering joining a fundamentalist polygamist cult, you might want to reconsider. Turns out that life in such a community is not all beer and skittles, by which I mean, actually, that beer and skittles will get you excommunicated, as will, no exaggeration, uttering aloud the word “fun.” At least, according to Escape by Carolyn Jessop. I picked up this book after being intrigued by the cover copy: “I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out.” The book starts out weirdly fascinating, becomes arduously grim, but then ends on an upbeat note. The author’s ex is a husband so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and life in his family is horrific in a way that I would not have thought possible in 21st-century America. Seriously, no matter how much you think your life sucks, you haven’t had to care for seven kids, one of them requiring round-the-clock care, while in the midst of your third life-endangering pregnancy, and while also being forced to have really, really bad sex with a husband whom you hate more than anyone on earth, in order to afford the barest measure of protection to your children from constant physical abuse. And the most terrifying thing of all is that everyone you know — your parents, your siblings, your neighbors, the police — believe that all of this is God’s will, and they will do anything they can to stop you from trying to leave. And that’s before an obvious psychopath who makes animal torture a part of his sermons ascends to the highest leadership position, “Prophet.” There’s something so backward and otherworldly about all of this that I always did a mental double-take whenever the author mentioned a specific year (Wait, this is 2003?). There’s too much outrageous stuff in this book to even summarize in a blog entry. If you’re curious about all the gory details, check out the book. The resilience of the author in the face of so much adversity is flabbergasting.