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Daphne Bramham on The Secret Lives of Saints
Daphne Bramham of The Vancouver Sun was the lone British Columbian among three runners-up for the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in Canada that went to Russell Wangersky for his firefighting memoir, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself (Thomas Allen). Here Bramham reflects on the process of writing The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect (Random House), her investigation of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints community in Bountiful, B.C.
As a child, I dreamed of writing books-novels. I chose journalism as a career because I figured that working in newspapers was a great way to learn the skill of putting nouns and verbs together-although you don't get much chance to use adjectives or even adverbs.
And the discipline of daily deadlines helped me evolve from a reporter to a writer. I also rather quickly learned that my imagination is no match for real life. My ability to construct a make-believe world could never begin to compare to the stories in the real world.
In my wildest of dreams, I could never have conjured up Bountiful and the world of fundamentalist Mormonism.
In fact, in May of 2004, when I received an email from Jancis Andrews about polygamy and young girls being trafficked across the Canada-U.S. border to be concubines to older men -all in the guise of religion, I really didn't believe her.
But she convinced me that it was true. And with that, I began a journey into a dark story that had all of the things that my mother had told me were not topics for polite conversation-religion, politics, sex and money.
My mother, as usual, was right. These are not topics that can be dealt with politely so for the most part we shy away from them. In doing so, we tacitly agree that it's okay for old men to have dozens of wives and hundreds of children. We tacitly agree that it's okay for them to take 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old girls as plural wives; that it's okay to use young boys and men as slave labourers before cutting them adrift in order to satisfy the punishing arithmetic of polygamy.
Before I started writing the book, I'd written close to 100 newspaper stories about what was going on in Bountiful, B.C. within the group- which the lawyers warned me I should never call a cult. But it was only in researching and writing the book that I began to absorb the magnitude of the abuse, the long pattern of abuse and the sheer horror of life in Bountiful.
Because this is non-fiction, not make-believe, I could not have written it without a number of people who not only took the risk of talking to me, but invited me into their homes. Sometimes for days on end, I sat at kitchen tables sorting through boxes and boxes of religious tracts, personal letters, unpublished family histories and photo albums.
I drank gallons of coffee and poured out nearly equal amounts in tears. I met women so badly traumatized that they'd slipped into lives of prostitution, drug abuse and alcoholism. I met boys who were confused and adrift, convinced that they are damned for all eternity and have nothing left to lose.
The voices of the tyrannical god-men wormed their way into my head. But for every sleepless night I had, I knew from the pain-etched faces of the people I'd met that my bad nights were nothing compared to what they had suffered....
It has been my privilege to shine a light on a dark corner of Canada, to press for the rights of the women and children of Bountiful to be respected and protected and to finally see that justice may be done in that community. But that's the chapter that has yet to be written.
978-0-307-35588-1
-----------------------------------------
For an insider's view of abuse in Bountiful, see also Debbie Palmer's courageous memoir Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy (Dave's Press, 2005), winner of the Vancity Women's Book Prize.
0-9687943-3-5
[BCBW 2009]
As a child, I dreamed of writing books-novels. I chose journalism as a career because I figured that working in newspapers was a great way to learn the skill of putting nouns and verbs together-although you don't get much chance to use adjectives or even adverbs.
And the discipline of daily deadlines helped me evolve from a reporter to a writer. I also rather quickly learned that my imagination is no match for real life. My ability to construct a make-believe world could never begin to compare to the stories in the real world.
In my wildest of dreams, I could never have conjured up Bountiful and the world of fundamentalist Mormonism.
In fact, in May of 2004, when I received an email from Jancis Andrews about polygamy and young girls being trafficked across the Canada-U.S. border to be concubines to older men -all in the guise of religion, I really didn't believe her.
But she convinced me that it was true. And with that, I began a journey into a dark story that had all of the things that my mother had told me were not topics for polite conversation-religion, politics, sex and money.
My mother, as usual, was right. These are not topics that can be dealt with politely so for the most part we shy away from them. In doing so, we tacitly agree that it's okay for old men to have dozens of wives and hundreds of children. We tacitly agree that it's okay for them to take 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old girls as plural wives; that it's okay to use young boys and men as slave labourers before cutting them adrift in order to satisfy the punishing arithmetic of polygamy.
Before I started writing the book, I'd written close to 100 newspaper stories about what was going on in Bountiful, B.C. within the group- which the lawyers warned me I should never call a cult. But it was only in researching and writing the book that I began to absorb the magnitude of the abuse, the long pattern of abuse and the sheer horror of life in Bountiful.
Because this is non-fiction, not make-believe, I could not have written it without a number of people who not only took the risk of talking to me, but invited me into their homes. Sometimes for days on end, I sat at kitchen tables sorting through boxes and boxes of religious tracts, personal letters, unpublished family histories and photo albums.
I drank gallons of coffee and poured out nearly equal amounts in tears. I met women so badly traumatized that they'd slipped into lives of prostitution, drug abuse and alcoholism. I met boys who were confused and adrift, convinced that they are damned for all eternity and have nothing left to lose.
The voices of the tyrannical god-men wormed their way into my head. But for every sleepless night I had, I knew from the pain-etched faces of the people I'd met that my bad nights were nothing compared to what they had suffered....
It has been my privilege to shine a light on a dark corner of Canada, to press for the rights of the women and children of Bountiful to be respected and protected and to finally see that justice may be done in that community. But that's the chapter that has yet to be written.
978-0-307-35588-1
-----------------------------------------
For an insider's view of abuse in Bountiful, see also Debbie Palmer's courageous memoir Keep Sweet: Children of Polygamy (Dave's Press, 2005), winner of the Vancity Women's Book Prize.
0-9687943-3-5
[BCBW 2009]
Submitted on March 10, 2009 in By David.
