Peggy Riley talks polygamy, faith, ‘Amity and Sorrow’

Popular shows like “Big Love” and “Sister Wives” have given us a small glimpse into the life of a woman within a polygamist family — her struggles, her relationship with the other wives and her expectations. In debut novel “Amity and Sorrow” (Little, Brown and Co., $26), Peggy Riley uses her thorough research on escapees and survivors of polygamist cults to tell the story of a mother, her two daughters and their lives after escaping a life of polygamy.

Amaranth, the first of 50 wives to a polygamist cult founder, and her daughters Amity and Sorrow, escape a community full of rape, incest and abuse, driving for four straight days for fear of being caught. After crashing their car in Oklahoma, the family is reluctantly taken in by a local farmer. Riley conveys each woman’s individual struggle outside the polygamist cult with which they were familiar: Amaranth’s inability to let go of old concerns, Amity’s excitement to begin a new life and Sorrow’s longing to return to the community she knows.

Riley, an American writer and playwright currently living in England, took the time to chat with us by email. She provided insight into a woman’s decision to join a cult, the difficulties that come with breaking free and whether or not it is possible to start a new life.

Riley will be offering more of her insights at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books where she appears on the panel “The Family You Choose” on Saturday at 4:30 p.m., as well as at an event on Monday at Book Soup at 7 p.m.

You’ve had a career as a playwright. What inspired you to shift gears and write a novel?

I moved from Los Angeles to London, where I’d lived and worked as a playwright for more than 10 years, but... a few years ago, we moved to Kent, following the Thames east to where it opens into the Estuary, toward the North Sea. Leaving London, my ideas started changing. New stories emerged and I couldn’t see how to fit them on a stage. Maybe it was the sea or the wide sky or the silence, but my writing shifted, became more interior, more personal. I wrote short fiction, but I wanted to try something that went deeper for longer. I wondered if I could write a novel and decided I had to try.

Your two title characters are sisters but are clearly different sides of the same coin. Do you feel you relate more closely to Amity or Sorrow?

They are like that, or like those skirted dolls that you turn over to find the wolf’s head where Red Riding Hood’s feet should be. I wanted to explore nature vs. nurture, so the girls are raised in the same environment, but they are treated very differently, with very different expectations. Amity is raised to watch others and to wait to be told what to do; it makes her compassionate, intensely aware of the people around her. Sorrow is raised to believe that she is special, that she is holy, and it makes her spoiled and hungry for autonomy, for more power than her faith allows. The best of me is in Amity, but I suspect there’s quite a lot of Sorrow in my hungers and wants.

How do you, as an author, write about a polygamous cult, its patriarch and its believers without passing judgment?

I feel nothing but compassion for anyone who joins faiths like these, for people who feel lost and alone, abandoned. I feel for their longing to connect, their desire for a passionate life that is faith-centered and all-consuming. I have compassion for our American impulse to build utopias and handmade faiths. I have compassion for the utopias we build and for all our handmade Edens that turn to rot, because we are so human. The loneliness that makes us seek community can also make us jealous. The desire we have to be close to God can lead some to crave too much closeness, to seek to possess God or to become him for their believers, out of greed and a lust for power.

The more we believe we are special or holy, the further we get from our own humanness, and then our humanness steps in with the worst of our faults and failings. It is there in any cult or fringe faith where the leader aligns himself with God. I don’t condone the patriarch’s behavior or the choices Sorrow makes while trying to get back to her faith, but I am interested in their longings. I am interested in the pride of faith that makes us believe that our Eden will succeed where all others – even the first Eden – failed.

Why did you choose to set the cult in northern Idaho?

Cults and fringe faiths thrive along borders. While it is possible for a cult to hide in a city – and Los Angeles has a rich history of cults in its – it is easier to hide in the wilderness, off the grid and in seclusion. Fundamentalist Mormons have survived for more than a hundred years along the borders of states and the borders between America, Canada and Mexico. Borders give you strong places to run. Northern Idaho has both polygamous and separatist communities in its towns and mountains, historically and as a consequence of a Millennial and post 9/11 world when so many fled cities out of fear. Having spent some time there with an old, dear friend, I found my head turning to it when I needed a safe place to hide my [novel’s] cult.

What type of research did you do in order to better understand cult life?

I read a lot of nonfiction by escapees and survivors, as well as histories on fringe faiths and cults that had collapsed. I had spent time with friends who had chosen to live off the grid and to live off the land, essential for any cult. But most things I imagined. I wanted to create an ecstatic faith, filled with rituals and practices I had never experienced. I wanted to build a crowded, noisy household, filled with wives and children, though my life is very quiet and fairly solitary. I tried to build the cult’s history out of my own curiosity of what it would feel like to live in a closed society that was made of faith, of what it would feel like to try to share everything, in denial of ego, and what it would feel like to really believe that the world was about to end. And then I tried to imagine that life for the children, who know no other world, and to follow the consequences in their lives from the choices their mothers had made.

Amaranth stands up for herself and for her daughters, protecting themselves from the antifeminist world of polygamy, as well as sexual, physical and emotional abuse. How do you view a woman’s decision, like Amaranth’s, to join a cult? And why is it often so difficult for women to break free once they are involved?

In Amaranth, I wanted to create a character who had run out of options and choices, so that when a charismatic man offers a way out, she takes it. Each wife is told that there is a family waiting for her, that she can live in safety and need never be alone again. There have certainly been times when I wanted to hear that. All lives take bad turns. Cities can be isolating, families split and fray.

We might join a group or a faith for any number of reasons, but cults are, by their very nature, hard to leave. They may believe, in leaving, that they are also leaving God. David Koresh trained his followers to believe that all doubts came from Satan. Doubting the faith made them evil. Our desire to be faithful can manipulate us, make us believe our gut instincts are wrong, are sinful. It is hard for a woman to leave if she is in love with the faith’s leader or if she has had children with him.....

Can you describe the relationship women within the cult have?

They are sister wives, old and young, living side by side. Sister wives are in the popular culture now in a way that they weren’t when I was growing up and I remember learning about the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was in high school. I was struck by learning about Joseph Smith’s “revelation” from God that men should have three wives to attain the highest level of heaven, and by his first wife’s reactions to it and refusal to accept it. “Good for you, Emma,” I thought. Shows like “Big Love” and “Sister Wives” show, to differing degrees, how the women struggle in sharing a husband, how much they must work on their relationships with each other and their own expectations. Women are drawn to want close relationships with other women; female friends are heart sisters, closer than kin. And, really, is there any woman who hasn’t thought life would be a whole lot better with a wife to share the work?

In my novel, the women have nothing in common except their shared husband and the desire to connect through communal living and ecstatic worship. They are all very different and all very damaged. I wanted to explore the comfort of the society, in all the things that would work for the women, but I also knew it would be disingenuous not to explore how hard it is to share, especially when children come. The women are taught to treat all children as if they are their own. But our flesh doesn’t listen to rules. Our flesh wants its own.

Why did you choose to open the novel at the moment Amaranth decides to escape, and show life within the cult through a series of detailed flashbacks?

Most “escape from a cult” books build toward the escape and the life afterward can feel like a bit of epilogue. I was most interested in what happened after the escape. I began writing the novel from a newspaper image I saw, of a burning church on fire. I knew my story would begin at that moment, at the church’s end, that the book would be about how they live in a new world. But I knew I also had to show the world they left. I decided to reveal the history of the cult as if it was being unzipped, or a seam ripped, so that the story forward from the running away as well as backward from the destruction of the church to its beginnings. I wanted to peel away how the church had formed, to show, at the end, what the beginning had been.

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