Escape
Carolyn Jessop (with Laura Palmer), 2007
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767927574
Summary
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1968
• Where—Hildale, Utah, USA
• Reared—Colorado City, Arizona
• Currently—West Jordan, Utah
Carolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a group splintered from and renounced by the Mormon Church, and spent most of her life in Colorado City, Arizona, the main base of the FLDS.
Since leaving the group in 2003, she has lived in West Jordon, Utah, with her eight children. Laura Palmer is the author of Shrapnel in the Heart and collaborated on five other books, the most recent being To Catch a Predator with NBC's Chris Hansen. She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
It must be said up front that her narrative is inconsistent at times and irritatingly vague. You never know, for instance, whether she thinks that her escape has ruined her chance for salvation, whether she even believes in God, or whether, indeed, she ever did. But the book is fascinating for all that, mainly because of its close attention to the details of her everyday life and how it seemed to her. She took each event as it came, until her existence became unbearable, untenable, and then she came up with the courage to radically change her life…it's hard to get a handle on other people's religions, or even that salvation we hear so much about. Where should tolerance be exercised and where should it stop? Escape doesn't presume to answer these questions. It just tells a fascinating story that would properly horrify us if it occurred in Arabia or Afghanistan, but right here in America, it's just baffling.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
(Audio version.) Seventeen years after being forced into a polygamous marriage, Jessop escaped from the cultlike Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints with her eight children. She recounts the horrid events that led her to break free from the oppressive world she knew and how she has managed to survive since escaping, despite threats and legal battles with her husband and the Church. Though sometimes her retelling overflows with colorful foreshadowing and commentary on how exceptional she is, the everyday details she reveals about this polygamous society are devastating and tragic. Frasier delivers Jessop's words in a soft voice that develops intriguingly from an innocent and naïve tone into a more assertive and self-confident one that mirrors Jessop's journey. She maintains the same rhythm, but through the inspired words of the text, she really embraces Jessop's persona.
Publishers Weekly
Born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the author describes her life before, during and after her marriage at 18 to a 50-year-old man with three other wives. This painful memoir certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to the polygamous fantasies of the HBO series Big Love. The author's large family lived in grinding poverty, and Jessop was constantly subjected to humiliations at the hands of her husband, Merril. But she had inner resources. In a decidedly patriarchal culture, she often spoke her mind, and she talked Merril into letting her go to college. Her occasional questioning of his views, however, earned his suspicion and the condescension and mistrust of her fellow wives. So what kept Jessop in the community? Fear. From her earliest childhood, when she played a game called "apocalypse," she had been taught that God punished those who disobeyed his rules. Furthermore, she knew that no woman had ever managed to get herself and her children safely away from the community. Still, one night in 2003, Jessop snuck her eight children out of the house and fled to Salt Lake City. There, she found little in the way of support networks for women escaping polygamy. She was told that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." The chapters about her struggles to adjust to this new life are more riveting than the occasionally tedious descriptions of her earlier hardships. Especially wrenching are scenes featuring the two of Jessop's children who felt torn between their parents and resented their mother for taking them away from the FLDS church. The book's final pages recount triumphs large and small, from getting her first stylish haircut to standing up to her husband in court. Though Jessop's circumstances were unusual-and particularly harrowing—her memoir will appeal to many women who have left abusive relationships.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Escape:
1. Discuss the authoritarian roles of men versus the submissive roles of women in the FLDS, particularly in light of the following comment Carolyn Jessop, made elsewhere:
Women in the polygamist culture are looked at as property, as a piece of meat. We are not looked upon as human beings with rights. The Women are basically baby-producers. It's a difficult thing to break away from. You don't contest it.
— Nick Madigan, New York Times 6/29/05).
2. Why it is so difficult for women to break away from the FLDS? Recall Jessop's statement in the book that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." What about Jessop's sister?
3. Talk about Carolyn's own mother and her erratic behavior.
4. Discuss Merril and the kind of man he is. Also talk about the competition between Merril's wives. Wouldn't you think—at least hope—that they would have been supportive of one another?
5. Can children raised in such an isolated and sequestered culture, with few outside influences or alternatives available to them, be considered to choose FLDS "freely" when they arrive at adulthood?
6. In a society that respects religious freedom, what is the government's role with respect to FLDS—especially with polygamy, physical abuse, and under-aged marriage? Do laws to protect women and children against abuse trump Constitutional rights for religious freedom? In other words, if the state intervenes, is it protection...or is it interference in private religious and family matters? (For FLDS, religious salvation depends on a man's fathering many children from different wives.) Tricky questions.
7. Talk about religious fundamentalism in general—Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. To what degree are fundamentalists in any religion alike? What are the root causes of such strict beliefs? Does fundamentalism undermine a society (not counting threats of terrorism) or can it be a source of strength?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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