Posted in:
August 11, 2008 1:16 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Warren Jeffs gets love letters in his prison cell, some of them written by the young girls he married-twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. It's pathetic and a little nauseating to think of a pretty young woman wiling her tender life away with dreamed-up concoctions of celestial bliss with a convicted felon. Yet the desires of fundamentalist girls aren't too different from the fantasies of other young women, who are notoriously dreamy in adolescence. Such has been the subject of novels and plays throughout literary history: Romeo and Juliet, Kathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Maria and Tony in West Side Story. As long as Warren Jeffs is beyond reach-whether in a prison cell or in a grave-fusty, fickle reality can't interfere with the pristine ideal.
Posted in:
August 8, 2008 12:41 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Psychologists point out that the opposite of love is not hate, it's
apathy. Indifference seems anathema to the bonds of caring that we
call love. In a big family, the potential for more affection can
result in a greater sense of security, a higher incidence of fond
expressions, and generally more love to go around. But when insecurity
prevails, the potential for apathy increases. Just as FLDS followers
can distance themselves from their neighbors and wholly discount the
"wicked world," they can also insulate themselves from each other.
Warren Jeffs has proven his willingness to hack away family bonds and
excommunicate lifelong FLDS members at his whim.
READ MORE 
Posted in:
August 8, 2008 12:00 AM by Unknown | COMMENTS
THE PLOT: A group of evangelicals have descended on sex-ed teacher Ruth Ramsey's Northeast town, and now the 41-year-old divorced mother of two is forced to teach a dubious abstinence curriculum; meanwhile, her daughters--one a star soccer player--want to join the church. Add to that her strange attraction to acolyte Tim Mason, and you have a perfect storm of suburban psychodrama.
LUCY(EXECUTIVE EDITOR): Perrotta kills two birds with one stone, writing a novel and the inevitable screenplay all in one.
YAEL(ASSOCIATE EDITOR): I had Tina Fey cast as Ruth from the first scene, when she walked down the hall of the high school with a latte.
LEA(FEATURES EDITOR): Yeah, I've never read a Tom Perrotta book before, and this was lighter than I anticipated. I didn't hate it, but the story felt a little dated to me, like, we had this conversation about prayer in schools maybe 15 years ago.
LUCY: But I think Perrotta is good at locating the tensions that threaten everything you thought was in place--in Little Children, it was a pedophile in Stepford suburbia, and in this book, it's sex-ed in the land of competitive girls' soccer. On the one hand, the subject matter for both books seems too obvious to be even remotely engaging, and yet in both cases Perrotta nails it. These are the things people fear, that overshadow their perfect life.
SHYEMA(ASSOCIATE RESEARCH EDITOR): My first thought when I started reading was, Perrotta is a liberal pushing an agenda. That it was going to be all these "normal" people against the "fanatics." But once he really gets into Tim's story, that he's this recovering druggie who turns to the church, you got an extra layer there.
LEA: I thought his take on religion was very heavy-handed. That scene where Ruth's kids go to church with one of the families in the community, and the parents are taking pictures of Ruth's kids all dressed up, was a bit over the top. I imagine going to church on a Sunday can be a mundane ritual for many people--just a commitment they have that they don't break, and it doesn't come with all the religious fervor.
LUCY: The thing Perrotta does quite well is get into the mind of a woman. When Ruth is watching one of her daughter's soccer games, he writes, "Watching them, Ruth felt a sharp pang of envy . . . wishing she'd grown up at a time when sports were a routine part of a girl's life. She would be a happier person now, she was pretty sure of it." That struck me as an incredibly genuine lament of a woman of a certain age.
YAEL: Or when he writes: "Later, after Tim left, she realized--though maybe it was less a matter of realizing than of being able to admit it to herself--that she'd secretly been hoping to find herself enmeshed in one of those corny 'opposites attract' narratives that were so appealing to writers of sitcoms and romantic comedies." What single woman doesn't think that?
SHYEMA: So who would play Tim?
LEA: That guy from Thirtysomething, with the long hair and the scruffy beard. Peter Horton. Did I just date myself?
NEXT MONTH: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Riverhead)
Posted in:
August 7, 2008 1:55 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
I've been reading Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, where a young woman falls in love with a vampire and has to deal with the prejudices of the general public about the undead. We humans are so intolerant! :) I think of Hamlet's warning to his friend, "There more things between Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Remember, this is "the dawning of the Age of Aquarius." We live in an era of secret worlds revealed, when even the primitive tribes of the Amazon, hidden for millennia, can be viewed on television screens everywhere. How predictable then, that the "peculiar people" who believe that God wants them to practice plural marriage would have their lives advertised on the tube and in print throughout the world. Whether we like it or not, we live in the prophesied time when our secret lives are "shouted from the rooftops:" the Information Age. As with the famous apple, and all knowledge, whether we use the information for good or ill is up to us.
Posted in:
August 6, 2008 1:47 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
What goes around comes around--even if you don't believe in karma. In the beautiful Creston Valley in British Columbia, Canada (where Teressa Wall Blackmore raised her children) a split occurred in the polygamous community some years ago. Longtime "Bishop of Bountiful" Winston Blackmore had gathered a loyal following that must have been threatening to Warren Jeffs. Jeffs replaced Winston with a more malleable bishop, one he could count on not to upstage him. But Bishop Winston wasn't willing to be undermined. Half the FLDS community insisted on upholding him as their leader. Those who remained loyal to Warren Jeffs continued going to the FLDS school, but would not allow the "Winstonites" to attend.
Now, years later, Warren Jeffs' self-serving decision has come back on him--like many other decisions he allegedly made (especially the decision to force underage girls into marriages of his choosing). The FLDS school board may soon be relieved of their responsibilities by court-appointed trustee Bruce Wisan. The reason? The Canadian government funds the FLDS school with hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Since half the community of Bountiful (the Winston Blackmore half) is barred from attending the FLDS school, the school board is violating basic rules of public education. So, Warren Jeffs' FLDS board of education special-cased itself right out of the picture. Karma does catch up--even if you don't believe in karma.
Posted in:
August 5, 2008 5:17 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Typically, fundamentalist polygamists have tried to keep themselves
exempt from the ways of "the wicked world." But the alleged crimes of
polygamous patriarchs have eroded their insular world, placing
polygamists under scrutiny. And patriarchs have retaliated. In the
past week, a series of controversies have proved that polygamists can
sling mud with the most seasoned politicians. When FLDS apostate Dan
Fischer testified against his former sect before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, sect attorneys filed fourteen affidavits from his children
and his former plural wives accusing Fischer of lies, non-support, and
abuse.
READ MORE
Posted in:
August 4, 2008 10:51 AM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
People keep asking me how plural wives live together without getting in
each other's way. "I'd beat up a woman who messed with my house," said
one woman. "No telling what I'd do if she went to bed with my husband!"
No
wonder the mainstream woman is puzzled by videos of FLDS sisterwives
embracing each other, comforting each other, and walking arm-in-arm.
No wonder she disbelieves a woman in her fifties who promises to
cherish her husband's teen bride-one she'll have to teach "the ropes"
of motherhood. Why don't too many cooks spoil the broth in polygamous
households?
READ MORE
Posted in:
August 1, 2008 3:30 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Some people ask if early marriage is mandated for FLDS teens? The obvious answer is "no," since only some of the girls aged 12 to 16 are married. Many are allowed to reach the ripe old age of 18 before being "assigned." So why do some marry young, while others don't?
We can look in a couple of directions. I tend to look to my own family for information, since my father took his wives under similar priesthood leadership, before the FLDS and AUB became separate entities. He married two fifteen year-olds. The first, Aunt "Rachel" worried her father with her inclination toward sensuality. Rachel's mother had died giving birth, and although his plural wives looked after her, her father may have worried that if she didn't get married, she'd get "in trouble." My father married her as requested, but didn't consummate the relationship until she was older.
The second woman had been the mothers' favored babysitter, and she made it clear to her father that she wanted to come into Dr. Allred's family. But she probably didn't expect to marry him until she was older. My father had been sentenced to prison for illegal cohabitation, so they married the night before he sentence began. She had no warning, was dressed in her nightgown, hair braided for bed, feet dusty from the coal bin where she'd propped her feet while doing her math homework at the kitchen table. Her father married them in my father's doctor's office, with no one else present-it was to be kept a secret even from her mother. My father forgot to kiss her after the ceremony, and she had to remind him. They didn't consummate the marriage until after he'd served his sentence and then some, since conditions of his parole precluded his being with his plural wives.
We can also look at the experience of Elissa Wall, whose nightmare marriage at the age of fourteen to her cousin Allen Steed is the focal point of her book, Stolen Innocence. Elissa gave her priesthood leaders big headaches. Like her brothers and her sister, Teressa, Elissa objected to religious leaders breaking up her parents' marriage. Elissa asked too many questions. She showed subtle signs of rebellion. And because she was so deeply bonded to her mother, she interfered in her mother's second marriage, to Colorado City Bishop, Fred Jessop. "Fred didn't like Elissa for some reason," Teressa told me. "He wanted to get her out of the house." He also wanted to reward Elissa's cousin, Allen Steed, for being a loyal follower. So he talked Warren Jeffs into assigning Elissa to Allen-against her initial pleas and her subsequent refusal. In the final analysis, Elissa was forced to marry Allen as the outcome of a power struggle between a teenaged girl and the head of the FLDS community.
I suspect that girls are assigned to marry young because they are precocious-intellectually or emotionally or sexually. But that doesn't mean it's justifiable. Gifted teens sometimes start college when they're fourteen or fifteen, but that doesn't mean they're ready to attend frat parties. Precocity doesn't equal readiness for adult life. Right?
Posted in:
July 31, 2008 3:40 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Recently a young woman interviewed me for a paper she was writing on polygamy. One of her first questions involved incestuous marriages. People tend to equate polygamy with incestuous marriage partly because of the widely publicized Kingston case, when a sixteen-year-old girl protested being forced to marry her uncle. But not all polygamous groups condone incestuous marriages. In my father's religious group (which later became the Apostolic United Brethren, or AUB) any sort of incest was taboo, as it is in most cultures. As a doctor, my father knew the hazards of genetic coupling and he wouldn't support the marriage of second cousins, let alone closer relatives. As the attending physician in many fundamentalist communities, he had witnessed horrific births when polygamous people ignored this taboo, where children came into the world with severe and heart-wrenching deformities. Despite his lectures and strong advice, many patriarchs stubbornly continued the practice.
Now that two of the men arrested in Texas are charged with marrying underage girls who were also relatives, the question rises again: Why do polygamists figure they are exempt from the ancient and scientifically-sustained taboo against marrying and bearing children with members of one's own family? The answer has to do with the same entitlement that accompanies polygamy in general: a belief in eugenic breeding. In these circumstances, eugenic breeding is rooted in the idea that people who are "called to live the Principle of Plural Marriage" are somehow superior to other members of the human race: more intelligent, better looking, physically superior, etc. If the idea seems familiar, look to Germany during the Holocaust. Eugenic breeding was used to justify the murder of millions among of mental patients, political activists, retarded people, and various ethnic groups, including gypsies and Jews so that the "Aryan race" could retain its "purity."
As for me, I think people who go to such lengths to justify their "superiority" are covering deep-seated fears of inferiority. What do you think?
Posted in:
July 31, 2008 1:27 PM by Jane Green | COMMENTS
The first time I met Josh, I thought he was a nice guy but a
transient friend. The first time I met Si I fell hopelessly in love and
prayed I'd somehow be able to convert him.
But the first time I met Portia I thought I'd found my soul mate.
She
was the sister I'd always longed for, the best friends I'd always
wished I had, and I truly and honestly thought that, no matter what
happened with our lives, we would stay friends forever.
Forever
feels like a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home
for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships
that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the
bitter end.
I met Josh right in the beginning, just a few
weeks after the Freshers' Ball. I'd seen him in the Students' Union,
propping up the bar after a rugby game, looking for all the world like
the archetypal upper-class rugger bugger twit, away from home with too
much money and too much arrogance.
He-naturally-started chatting up
Portia, alcohol giving him confidence he lacked when sober (although I
didn't know that at the time), and despite the rebuffs he kept going
until his friends dragged him away to find easier prey.
I'm
sure we would all have left it at that, but I bumped into him the next
day, in the library, and he recognized me instantly and apologized for
embarrassing us; and gradually we started to see him more and more,
until he'd firmly established himself as one of the gang.
I'd
already met Si by then, had already fallen in love with his cheeky
smile and extravagant gestures. I was helping out one of the girls on
my course who was auditioning for a production of Cabaret. It was my
job to collect names and send them into the rehearsal hall for the
audition.
Si was the only person who turned up in full
costume. As Sally Bowles. In fishnet stockings, bowler hat, and full
makeup, he didn't bat an eyelid as the others slouched down in their
hard, wooden chairs, staring, jealous as hell of his initiative. And
his legs.
We went in, bold as brass, and proceeded to give
the worst possible rendition of "Cabaret" that I've ever heard, but
with such brazen confidence you could almost forgive him for being
entirely tone-deaf.
Everybody went crazy when he'd finished.
They went crazy because he is so obviously loved, loved, being center
stage. None of us had ever seen such enthusiasm, but even though Si
knew every song, word for word, he had to be content with camping it up
as the narrator, as Helen, the director, said she never wanted to hear
him sing again.
Eddie was a friend of Josh's. A sweet gentle
boy from Leeds who should probably have been overwhelmed by our
combined personalities, but somehow wasn't. He was easy company, and
always willing to do anything for anybody he cared about, which was
mostly us, at the time.
And then of course there was Portia. So close that our names became intertwined: CatherineandPortia. Two for the price of one.
I
met Portia my very first day at university. We were sitting in the
halls of residence common room, waiting for a talk to begin, all sizing
each other up, all wondering whom to befriend, who seemed like our
type, when this stunningly elegant girl strode in on long, long legs,
crunching an apple and looking like she didn't have a care in the world.
READ MORE
Posted in:
July 31, 2008 1:20 PM by Jane Green | COMMENTS
I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London. I thought, given how my art had imitated my life, I would write about an engagement, the planning of a wedding, the trials and tribulations of suddenly inheriting a new family who weren't exactly what you expected.
I started Chapter One, and sat back, halfway through, running my fingers through my hair. Bored. I was bored and the words I was writing were boring. I didn't want to write the same old first person thinly-veiled account of my life. I wanted to do something bigger. Broader. Something that had some meat on its bones. I wanted to write about friendship, I decided. About a group of friends who had known one another since University, who were now in their thirties and still trying to pursue their dreams.
Cath was my first female protaganist who wasn't based on me. I loved her. I loved her realness, and her friendship with Si. Then Lucy, and Josh - all of them felt, very quickly, like real people and like friends, a sure sign you have got your characterisation right.
Towards the end of the book, Si has a crisis, and initially he was going to be fine, but when I reached that point, his character took over, the course of the story, and I knew it couldn't end the way I thought it was going to, even though that was so much quicker and easier. I put the writing on hold, and spent weeks doing research, and to this day I'm glad I did. The trajectory of Si's life is far more honest, even though it was frightening, at the time, to deal with such a big medical issue I knew nothing about.
For me Bookends marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit - single girl in the city trips around in manolos looking for Mr Right. From designer labels on every page in Mr Maybe, I consciously avoided them with this, wanting to write something less fluffy, less superficial. Of the earlier books, it remains one of my favourites.
Posted in:
July 31, 2008 12:39 PM by Jane Green | COMMENTS
Nick was never supposed to be The One, for God's sake. Even I knew
that. And yes, I know those that are happily married often say you
can't know, not immediately, but of course I knew. Not that he sounded
wrong-Nick spoke the Queen's English slightly better than myself, but
nothing else was right, nothing else fitted.
There was the money
thing, for a start. My job as a PR might not be the highest-paying job
in the universe, but it pays the bills, pays the mortgage and leaves me
just enough for the odd bit of retail therapy. Nick, on the other hand,
didn't earn a penny. Well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but
he wasn't like all the other boyfriends I'd had, wasn't rolling in it,
and , although that's not my main motivation, what I always say is II
don't mind if he can't pay for me, but I do bloody well mind if he
can't pay for himself.
And though Nick occasionally offered to
go dutch, it was such bad grace and I used to feel so guilty, I'd just
push his hand away, tell him not to be so silly and drag out my credit
card.
And then there was politics. Or lack thereof, in my case,
might be more appropriate. Nick was never happier than when he was with
his left-wing cronies, arguing the toss about the pros and cons of New
Labour, while I sat there bored out of my mind, not contributing just
in case anyone asked me what I voted and I had to grudgingly admit I
voted Conservative because, well, my parents had.
Speaking of
pros and cons, it might be easier if I showed you the list I drew up
soon after I met Nick. I mean, if I sit here telling you about all the
reasons why he wasn't right for me, it would take all day, and I've
still got the list, so you may as well read it. It might help you to
see why I was so adamant that he was just a fling.
Pros
- I fancy the pants off him.
- He's got the biggest, softest, bluest eyes I've ever seen.
- He's very affectionate.
- He's fantastically selfless in bed. (Make that just fantastic)
- He makes me laugh.
Cons
- He's got no money.
- He lives in a grotty bedsit in Highgate.
- He's left-wing/political.
- He likes pubs and pints of beer.
- I hate his friends.
- He's a complete womanizer.
- He's allergic to commitment.
- He says he's not ready for a relationship. (Although neither am I.)
So
there you have it-far more cons than pros, and, if I'm completely
honest, the cons are much more important, I mean, how could I have even
thought of getting involved with someone whose friends I hated? I have
always, always thought you could judge a person by their friends, and I
really should have known better.
READ MORE
Posted in:
July 31, 2008 12:37 PM by Jane Green | COMMENTS
The love affair that started in New York continued in England for a
couple of months. He was sweet, and young, and fresh, and even though I
was very much in it for the moment, I loved spending time with him. He,
on the other hand, would spend hours sighing and saying he wasn't ready
for commitment, and I would sit there with a smile on my face, assuring
him I didn't want commitment either, and wondering exactly why it was
that he refused to believe this was possible.
I liked his
sweetness and youth, given that my two relationships prior to him
were...not sure how to describe them...ghastly? Dreadful? Ridiculous.
Both were with men far older than I, and both with men who I not only
wasn't attracted to, but could go so far as to say I was physically
repulsed by. So why was I with them? Because they liked me! They adored
me, and pursued me, and treated me like a goddess, so different from
the men I had dated throughout my twenties who treated me like the
doormat I believed myself to be.
How could I resist? Surely, it
would have been rude to say no. So I got involved with, first one, who
I liked enormously for his intelligence, his warmth and his humour, but
physically I couldn't bear him near me, something about his smell, and
then the second, who was just plain peculiar. In fact, the nicest thing
I can think of to say about him was that I loved his house. Seriously.
I think that was the beginning of my addiction to house porn, and I
would lie in his enormous bathtub - rather different from my dripping
shower stall in my grungy flat in Kensal Rise - and think, I could live
like this! This could me mine, all mine (insert evil maniacal laugh and
rubbing hands together in glee if you wish...).
Superficial?
You think? Shameful I would say, but both were older, wiser, and they
saw something in me I wasn't able to see in myself at the time, my
self-esteem being, clearly, at an all-time low. But when I ended things
with the second, I flew to New York, and loved falling in lust with
someone my age, someone who, like me, didn't have a lavish lifestyle,
someone who made me laugh and who I could talk to.
READ MORE
Posted in:
July 30, 2008 1:45 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Merrill Jessop, a leader in the FLDS community and top dog at the YFZ
Ranch, may not be in prison, but two of his namesakes have been
arrested, along with three other patriarachs, with bail set at $100,000
each. Raymond Merrill Jessop allegedly assaulted a minor in 2004, and
Merrill Leroy Jessop took an ingénue to wife in 2006. After hearing
Merrill Jessop's fifth wife, Carolyn, talk about her husband in her
book, Escape, I'm amazed that the Jessops try to make marriage work
with anyone, let alone a plural marriage to girls who are effectively
children! Carolyn reports that sex between fundamentalists is awkward
and functional-that they must work around layers of unshed clothing and
that sensual pleasure doesn't enter the equation.
READ MORE
Posted in:
July 29, 2008 12:46 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | COMMENTS
Principle Voices, an organization advocating the right to live the religious "Principle of Plural Marriage," disagrees with Senator Harry Reid's Victims of Polygamy Assistance Act 2008. Principle Voices fundamentally objects to the proposal that funds be offered to help people leave polygamy.
READ MORE
Posted in:
July 28, 2008 1:30 PM by Jessica Henderson | COMMENTS
As the Radar editor, I read and watch a lot of celebrity news sites and
shows in the pursuit of breaking news. Apart from industry blogs and
cruising through the tabloid/Page Six clip package that gets
distributed each morning, I check in daily on People and Entertainment
Weekly, get a stiff dose of Perez Hilton and Pink is the New Blog,
occasionally pop by TMZ (and even sprinkle in a dash of star digs with
the The Real eStalker blog-ah, voyeurism). In front of the tube, I may
flip on everything from the pretty painful to watch Access
Hollywood/Entertainment Tonight/The Insider combo, catch E!'s The Daily
10 and set the DVR for Vh-1's hilarious Best Week Ever. I like to think
it's my job to know these things-casting news, show spoilers, the
breakups, hookups and births-but in truth it's probably just time I get
a hobby. Or, you know, a life of my own.
READ MORE
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