The mental junk food glut continues with Escape, by Carolyn Jessup, another runaway FLDS wife.
It's interesting to compare and contrast this memoir to that of Elissa Wall; the two accounts validate each other more than they contradict.
It's interesting, because although the FLDS community is large (it has about 10,000 adherents), FLDS "royalty" is small, consisting of only a few large extended families, a close-knit cadre centered around Warren Jeffs, and his late father, the former prophet Rulon Jeffs.
Both of the women who have written exposes were members of this cadre, insiders either born to or married to powerful men.
The same family surnames appear repeatedly in both accounts: Barlow, Steed, Jessup, Jeffs. A few others. Most of the FLDS members at the Texas compound also bear these names.
Although neither woman mentions the other in her account, it's obvious they must have known one another; both had sisters married to the prophet (first to Rulon, and then, after his death, to Warren). Both mention many of the same incidents, events, and people. Their timelines on the evolution of the FLDS from a fairly liberal offshoot of Mormonism (which believed, for example, that it was okay to drink hot and cold drinks, including coffee, tea, soda, and beer, unlike conventional Mormons) which just coincidentally happened to practice plural marriage, to the extremist version we see today correspond pretty well. Both women agree that the shift to extremism began with the Short Creek raid in the early 1950s, at which time FLDS members began to distrust and withdraw from the outside world, becoming increasingly isolated to the point that the past three generations of FLDS children have been raised having virtually no contact with or knowledge of the outside world.
The extremism accelerated under the rule of Warren Jeffs, who usurped his aging father's power by bullying him into submission, long before the senior Jeffs actually died.
Their situations differed significantly in that Walls was a 14-year-old when she was married off to an adolescent first cousin, while Jessup was 18 when she became one of four wives- and shortly thereafter, one of six- of an elderly man.
Reading the two books pretty much describes the two different destinies that a female raised in the FLDS could expect.
One of the most devastating accusations that both women make is that the FLDS callously turns out the majority of its male children in early to mid adolescence, so that they will not compete with the older males in charge for either power or the affections of the young female members.
Wall's book includes a photograph she took of her teenage brother, on the day her father ordered her sobbing mother to drive him to the highway and leave him there, with only a backpack full of personal belongings and a cardboard sign that read "DENVER". She did not see him again or know of his whereabouts for many years.
It's all very interesting, from a psychological perspective. I like to learn about isolated subcultures that exist within our larger mainstream culture.
