I recently read a book that I ended up really liking called Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife. As the name suggests, this is a memoir written by a woman who was the wife of a polygamist. She had grown up in a polygamist family although her mother had decided that this life was not for her and left it when the girl was young. Despite her mother’s warnings, she went into polygamy herself. She stayed in it for over two decades, having about a dozen children before her husband died. She was mostly miserable the whole time. Her second marriage was in a monogamous relationship. This book is her story.
The crux of the tale is the age old story of jealousy. Regardless of the fact that this woman chose polygamy … regardless of the fact that she’d grown up in it … regardless of the fact that she was the second wife and never had time in a monogamous relationship with her husband … she was jealous. She was jealous all the way through his marriage to more than seven wives. She never stopped being jealous about not having his undivided attention. She never stopped needing more physical love than she got. And I think it’s interesting and brave to hear this woman admit that this is what polygamy is like.
I have to confess that I’m a fan of the TV show Big Love and that I couldn’t help drawing comparisons between the show and the book as I read the latter. There are differences of course. Big Love is a modern family while this tale dates back fifty years. Big Love is dramatized while this story is just passionate. Big Love is set in the suburbs while this woman’s family was mostly in rural Latin America. But the parallels far outweigh the differences. In fact, I was surprised to see just how accurate Big Love is in many ways in terms of telling the story of what it’s like to live a polygamous life.
Definitely an interesting read!
