Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom

As Part 2, “Sister,” delves into the details of Woolley’s marital life with Kody, Meri, and Janelle, the author frankly examines the Costs of Unequal Intimacy, and the course of her early life informs the complex dynamics of this theme. When Woolley first fell in love with Kody Brown and married him, she believed in the possibilities of a happy, healthy love life. She even “felt all the butterflies a young woman who had never been kissed should feel. I felt nervous and in love” (35). At the same time, Woolley’s retrospective authorial voice passes judgment on her younger self, asserting how naïve she was and how misguided she had been by her cloistered religious community. In the present, Woolley describes herself as a lively, romantic, and dreamy person who loves fairy tales and celebrations. However, when she was a young woman on the verge of marrying Kody, she was unable to realize her dreams or follow her heart. As she stresses the contrast between who she was and who she has become, her descriptions provide an indirect sense of the long, arduous evolution that she has undergone. As she says of her botched wedding experience, “I couldn’t do anything romantic because Kody’s wives would be at the wedding. I couldn’t be sexy. I couldn’t make eyes at my fiancé. I couldn’t hold Kody’s hand or whisper in his ear over cake” (34). Her use of anaphora in this passage affects a claustrophobic mood that mirrors the limitations of her younger self’s new life as the third bride in a plural marriage. Furthermore, the unromantic, tepid start of her relationship with Kody foreshadows the coming inequalities in her marital dynamics and portends her early willingness to sacrifice aspects of herself in order to adhere to her community’s religious expectations.

Throughout Part 2, Woolley inhabits her youthful point of view to convey the idea that her naïve hopefulness at the time kept her from seeing the inequalities in her relational dynamics. With this approach, she blends narrative and reflective passages to articulate the tension between the life she wanted and the reality of her marital situation. One example of this dynamic surrounds the evolution of Woolley’s regard for her polygamy pajamas, of which she says:

I loved them. I did! They were perfect for my ‘pious’ stage, and I loved that they connected me to our faith and that they were symbolic of my becoming a woman, at least in the eyes of our church. But as time went on, I associated them with pain. (42)

Just as Woolley initially believed that her marriage to Kody could be beautiful, equal, and romantic, she also believed that her so-called polygamy pajamas could hold a sacred, romantic meaning. Although her disappointment with her lukewarm wedding day proved to be an omen of the tumultuous, imbalanced marriage to come, she chose to remain hopeful. Likewise, the polygamy pajamas carried a dichotomous symbolic weight; on one hand, they granted Woolley a sense of piety and empowerment, but on the other, they came to represent entrapment and shame. The later images of her wearing the pajamas during a sexual interlude with Kody capture how dispassionate and invalidating Woolley’s relationship with her husband really was. Even when they were together in private, Kody clearly did nothing to affirm Woolley as a sexual partner, a woman, or an individual, and his ruinous lack of interest estranged her from herself.

Throughout these chapters, Woolley’s inclusion of raw details from her personal and sex life affect an intimate narrative mood. Woolley often breaks the fourth wall throughout Part 2, interrupting her account to address the reader directly, and such moments are designed to engender trust between the author and her audience. In Chapter 5, for example, Woolley admits, “In my original draft, I skipped from ‘The evening remained awkward’ to ‘the day after the wedding…’ without going into the in-between” (37). In this passage, she reveals that she had wanted to omit the specifics of her wedding night on the page and spare herself the embarrassment. By confessing the agony of her writing choices to her readers, she creates a more private, intimate space, and her willingness to draw attention to her narrative as a narrative also adds depth to the retelling, suggesting that the events to which she refers were difficult to live through and are therefore even more difficult to describe. In reflection, she admits that she included these intimate details in her account in order to paint a more complete picture of her imbalanced relationship with Kody. While Woolley would later be able to hear Kody “making love” with passion and heart to his other wives, Kody did not even give her the courtesy of a romantic wedding night, causing her so much pain that she could not bring herself to have sex a second time on her honeymoon.

Woolley’s discussion of her relationships with her sister wives also fuels the memoir’s broader explorations of unequal intimacy. Woolley entered her relationships with Meri and Janelle with the same hopeful naivety that she entered her marriage to Kody. As she says, “I believed Meri and Janelle would be settled in, so I would simply have two new women in my life and we would all support each other” (40). However, the young Woolley’s hopes for the future quickly proved impossible as she was forced to mitigate Meri and Janelle’s relationship and felt caught between Kody and Meri’s volatility. The less autonomy that Woolley had in her home and family life, the more estranged from herself she began to feel. Her narrative makes it clear that she was not treated as an equal, nor was she shown the love and respect that she deserved. As a result, Woolley found herself simply trying to endure her difficult circumstances. In short, the inequality in her home and marriage robbed her of her agency and her sense of self, distorting her understanding of romantic love.