Best memoir of the year and then some

The Sound of Gravel
by Ruth Wariner

I picked this out of the Best Memoir and Autobiography awards on Goodreads, and wow! Did it ever deserve to be there! Her life in a small renegade Mormon community in Mexico is mind-bogglingly weird. As the oldest girl of sound mind in the family, she gives up any personal dreams she might have had to become her mother's mainstay, the person who takes care of all the kids that her mother continues bearing, long past any point of reason.

It kind of puts a finger on the kind of screwed-up logic a lot of religious people follow. In their case, they have a very strong belief that plural marriages are the direct route to heaven, and having lots of children is part of it. So the husband (I hesitate to call him a father), spawns child after child with little thought of how he's going to take care of them. The lord will provide. And, of course, the U.S. government--all of the three wives live off welfare and food stamps. They are American citizens even though they live in Mexico, and they are single mothers because their marriages are not considered valid.

Of all the important things in the Christian theology that a person might choose to believe, the men (the father, who is dead, and the mother's husband) seem to fixate on the whole multiple wives thing. In fact, that's why they've broken from the rest of the Mormon church. But it could just be that's the one issue that affected the author's life so much and all the other points of doctrinal difference don't come into the story.

But in the case of the mother's husband, best I can tell it's all about the sex. And a little about power, too. And in the case of her mother, there seems to be a sick sense of worthlessness that rules her life. Without her husband, she's nothing. She truly believes that the only path into heaven is through loving service to a worthless man.

As I read the story of the little girl slowly working herself into adulthood, I wanted to cry so much at so many lost opportunities.  The book isn't all sad and definitely not pitying, it's absorbing--and very hard to put down. Many stars to this.