Escape

Overview

Escape is Carolyn Jessop's account of growing up inside the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and of the marriage she entered at eighteen to a man decades older, already sharing his household with several other wives. The book traces the years that followed: a household governed by her husband's authority, a family structure that pitted wives against one another for standing, and a slow accumulation of restrictions on where she could live, what she could earn, and how her children would be raised.

The narrative turns on Jessop's decision, after years of deliberation and fear, to leave with her eight children in 2003, taking almost nothing with her. She frames the departure not as a single dramatic act but as the culmination of a long, closely guarded plan, made riskier by the knowledge that no woman before her had managed to leave the sect and keep her children with her.

The book closes on the aftermath of that decision: a custody battle whose outcome was unprecedented for a woman leaving the FLDS, and Jessop's subsequent role in providing information to state investigators that contributed to the broader legal reckoning with the group's leadership.

A Firsthand Record of Life Inside a Closed Sect

Much of the book's importance rests on its vantage point. Rather than reconstructing FLDS life from the outside, Jessop writes from decades of lived experience inside it, describing the mechanics of plural marriage, the schooling of children within the community, and the everyday negotiations of status and survival among co-wives. That inside perspective has made the memoir a frequently cited reference point in later journalism and legal proceedings concerning the group.

The book also sits within a broader body of writing by women who left high-control religious communities, a genre concerned less with theology than with the practical structures — economic dependence, isolation, surveillance — that make leaving difficult. Jessop's account is notable for pairing that structural analysis with the specific, practical achievement of retaining custody of her children, a legal outcome the book presents as historically significant for others in similar circumstances.

Why Escape Has Been Challenged

Depictions of coercive control and psychological abuse within marriage are the primary source of objection to this book, with critics contending that its portrayal of a young wife's subjugation is too disturbing or explicit for some readers, particularly younger ones. The memoir's candid treatment of an arranged marriage to a much older man, and its account of a household in which sexual access was dictated by the husband, has similarly drawn concern from those who consider such material inappropriate for school library collections. Its frank discussion of religious authority used to justify the isolation and control of women and children has also prompted objections from readers who view the portrayal as unsuitable for younger audiences, even where the intent is documentary rather than sensational. According to records in this catalog, the book has been the subject of formal challenges in 1 state and 1 school district.