“I am my mother’s fourth child and my father’s thirty-ninth.”

 

Over the past couple of decades, memoirs have gone in flashier, more attention-grabbing directions. But few have the quiet impact of this opening, from Ruth Wariner’s 2016 contemplative memoir The Sound of Gravel. While uneven, Wariner’s book is a worthy entry into an overcrowded field, and a deeply personal, sympathetic, warts-and-more-warts look at growing up in a polygamist cult where the individual is systematically devalued, in the service of the larger group, until little of the original self remains.

Wariner and her many siblings were raised in Colonia LeBaron, a fundamentalist Mormon settlement founded in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1924. The author’s father, Joel LeBaron, was anointed leader of the colony by his father, sect founder Alma Dayer LeBaron, upon the “prophet’s” death.

Wariner paints vivid, and not always unhappy, pictures of her childhood in LeBaron, from the tiny house with no electricity or running water and the perma-smell of mouse droppings, to village dances and baking birthday cakes for the seemingly constant family celebrations, and waking up every morning with a damp nightgown from sharing a mattress with her mentally challenged older sister—whose tendency toward violence forms one of the story’s major turning points. The author and her siblings simply accept their life for what it is, with little questioning. “They made me feel almost righteous for living without, as if being poor were the same thing as being humble and good,” Wariner writes.

As a youngster, Wariner is a generally happy-go-lucky, dutiful child who lives to please her mother. She possesses none of the judgement toward her mother, Kathy, that the reader does in observing Kathy’s repeated pregnancies, despite a genetic predisposition toward birthing children with severe disabilities, a continual lack of money to provide for her ever-expanding brood, and the incredible burden she places on her older children to serve as surrogate parents to their infant and toddler siblings even before they’ve had a chance to enroll in high school.

Only later, when Wariner’s sunny, trustful nature is tested in the face of sexual abuse and her mother’s refusal to stop it, does the family’s life begin to unravel. Wariner, though, is still a marvel of compassion, saying of her mother—who insisted on staying with an abusive husband simply because he turned on the waterworks while promising to never hurt her or her children again (you can guess how that turns out)—“She wasn’t some monster, she was just another human being who’d gone looking for her life and somehow ended up on the wrong path.”

Wariner’s inexperience as an author—and some sloppy oversights on the part of her editor—show through in the occasional awkward turn of phrase or sentence construction, and frequent repetition of words and ideas, but there are a handful of lovely passages, like this one: “My brothers and I fought for the chance to hold the tiny creature that stared up at us through a bundle of blankets. . . . His skin was so thin it was almost see-through, but it glowed, as if he were lit from within, the blue button eyes providing the only contrast. I thought he looked like the son of a snowman and half wondered if he might melt away when summer came.”

Overall, The Sound of Gravel—the title comes from the noise of a handful of dirt hitting the top of a casket during a stirring burial scene—is an absorbing memoir, and one that keeps the pages turning, if only to find out if Wariner and her siblings will finally escape their abusive, repressive, and chronically underprivileged life. But readers in search of climactic Hollywood endings and comeuppance should look elsewhere. This is not an easy read, and imagining a single person experiencing even a fraction of what Wariner and her siblings are put through is enough to make you reach for a glass of wine (or two . . . or, hell, a whole bottle). Read it for a fascinating look at the natural resiliency of the human spirit, and how readily it adapts to whatever is thrown its way—and how a moment of indecision or poor decision can profoundly alter the course of a life.