Nonfiction Book Reviews

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer was an eye-opening book.  I had already read Escape by Carolyn Jessop, so I had something to compare this book to, and I thought it was interesting how different the two husbands in the story are.  Carolyn’s husband never attempted to be fair and love all of his wives equally, nor did he ever attempt to be a good husband to Carolyn.  Irene Spencer’s husband, Verlan, was very different, and in his own way, he truly loved Irene.  He wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was Irene.

In a nutshell, Irene was raised in a polygamist family, but her mother left her father when she was young, and eventually when Irene fell in love with a man who wasn’t Mormon or a fundamentalist, her mother encouraged her wholeheartedly to marry this guy instead of marrying a polygamist.  Scared to marry outside of the church and be damned for all eternity, Irene married her half-sister’s husband instead, and became Verlan’s second wife.   She regretted that choice for the rest of her life, as she suffered through abject poverty and third-world living conditions, on top of being subjected to being pregnant 13 times in 25 years.

The book could have been helped by editing - she spends a lot of time talking about how she never got enough sex with her husband, and how she had to share her husband and she was jealous because of it…When I say a lot, I mean the majority of the second half of the book was spent talking about this.  After a while, I started skimming, because there was just so much of that, that I could take, before I wanted to say, “Good, great, let’s get on with it then.  I understand you’re jealous - now what?”  She also seemed to spend most of the book crying her eyes out, which I am the world’s most sympathetic person (I cry when I watch a sad commercial on TV!) but even I wanted to say, “Aren’t you sick of sobbing yet?  Just do something about it already.”  She kept saying she would divorce him if he did blah-blah, and then he’d do it, and she’d stay with him.  Then she’d set a new criteria - she’d divorce him if he did this and this, and then he’d do it, and then she’d stay with him.  It was frustrating because for all of her ranting and raving and yelling and crying, she never followed through on any of her promises and always allowed him to come back into her life.

In the epilogue, I found out she became a born-again Christian.  That part seemed strange to me - Carolyn Jessop of Escape basically became an atheist of sorts, which is probably the same decision I would make if I had lived through what these ladies had lived through.  I would have figured God punished me enough - if he wanted any part of me, he would have made for a nicer beginning to my life. I also thought it was strange that Irene didn’t seem to try to separate out the current LDS Church from the fundamentalist sect she had belonged to.  For the most part, whatever the fundamentalists believed, she seemed to believe that’s what the current LDS Church believed in too.  I don’t know if that’s because of the conversion to born-again Christianity or not, but that left me baffled.

Now that I’ve read both Escape and Shattered Dreams, I’m going to read His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt because strangely enough, Irene and Susan were both married to the same man, Verlan - they were “sister wives,” to use the term in the polygamy world for it.  It’ll be very interesting to read about that relationship from Susan’s eyes, since Irene definitely had a lot to say about it. Escape and Shattered Dreams were so different from each other, I can’t wait to see how His Favorite Wife plays out.

I give Shattered Dreams 3.75 stars out of 5 - with better editing, it could have easily been a 4.5 or higher, but it was simply suffering from an overtelling of every single event that happened in 25+ years.  I would say that with what’s happening down in Texas right now, it’s worth the read, although I’d borrow it from the library instead of buying.

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