The Polygamist's Daughter
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
Story featured in Hulu’s Daughters of the Cult documentary!
My father had thirteen wives and more than fifty children . . .
This is the haunting memoir of Anna LeBaron, daughter of the notorious polygamist and murderer Ervil LeBaron. Ervil’s criminal activity kept Anna and her siblings constantly on the run from the FBI. Often starving, the children lived in a perpetual state of fear—and despite their numbers, Anna always felt alone in her family. Would she ever find a place she truly belonged? Would she ever be anything other than the polygamist’s daughter?
In this riveting and deeply personal account, Anna shares:
• an honest, straightforward look into the horrors she experienced growing up in a Mormon fundamentalist cult
• her journey toward freedom and healing
• how she found the courage to escape—and forgive—those who had hurt her
Filled with murder, abuse, fear, and betrayal, The Polygamist’s Daughter is the harrowing, heart-wrenching true story of a fatherless girl and her unwavering search for love, faith, and a place to call home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this somewhat fractured memoir, LeBaron, daughter of Ervil LeBaron (the infamous, murderous leader of an offshoot group of Mormon polygamists), recounts her early life and eventual escape in the 1980s from the cultish culture of her birth. Born to one of Ervil wives, she rarely saw her father, as the family frequently and suddenly moved to avoid federal agents. After spending a year in Mexico with clan members away from her mother, she returned to Houston. The death of her father galvanized her resolve to flee the controlling, abusive group, which she managed with the help of a half-sister. The last third of the memoir recounts her life post-polygamy, including being born again and eventually raising her own children. She includes striking vignettes about her deprivation, such as subsisting on mayonnaise and refried bean sandwiches or working long hours scraping dead roaches from used appliances, and alarming anecdotes about how the family survived, including using smaller children to rummage through locked clothing donation dumpsters. Unfortunately, the book lacks a clear overarching structure and tends towards disconnected memories without much detail on the beliefs and practices of the group.
