In My Father's House: A Memoir of Polygamy

ISBN-13: 9780896726468 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 328 str.

Dorothy Allred Solomon

Opis

Before Big Love, before Eldorado, a groundbreaking memoir explored polygamy, not with outrage but with honesty and grace. In 1984, when polygamous groups knew little but the fear and pain of secrecy and hiding, Dorothy Allred Solomon, the twenty-eighth of forty-eight children, went public with her family's story. Solomon left the family in 1967 to enter monogamy with a young veteran tormented by memories of Vietnam. Disoriented and homesick, she plumbed the complexities of love and lying, truth, and tyranny. As no one else had, she confronted the paradox of a faith that seals families for eternity, while casting them as outlaws, clinching a fate of poverty and persecution. Practicing the Principle of Plural Marriage was nothing new to the Allreds. Dorothy's grandfather, descended from three generations of Mormon polygamy, fled to Mexico and then Canada. His son Rulon, Dorothy's father, chose monogamy, but returned to the Principle. Rulon became a naturopathic doctor and spiritual leader, revered by his polygamous community but targeted by the World. His wives set up separate homes, which he visited in secrecy, yet fear of discovery uprooted and scattered the family throughout Dorothy's childhood and teens. Despite schoolyard taunts, wrenching inequities, and an abiding hunger for autonomy, Dorothy evokes the pull of family, the fervor that bound her siblings and parents, and the joy and awe of her father's too-rare presence. She vividly renders the tragedy that rocked Utah when Rulon Allred was gunned down in 1977 by members of a rival sect. A quarter century after the book's original publication, in a fresh edition with a new preface and epilogue, Solomon revisits her story from hercurrent vantage point and in light of recent events that continue to rivet attention and spotlight our national struggle for understanding and fairness.