Golden Richards, the husband of four wives and father of 28 children, is about as unlike the patriarch of Big Love, Bill Hendrickson, as you can get. Bill Hendrickson is charismatic, strong-willed, domineering (usually in a good way) and very capable. By contrast Golden Richards is passive, unsure, and incapable of leading is family in the right direction. As Udall lays out the story of Golden trying to survive the demands of his many children and particularly dominant first wife, I experienced passages that either made me laugh out loud or pulled me into the painful life of a man who suffered as a boy and continues to live through unbearable sorrows. It is both heartbreak and comedy.
What's interesting to me is how both this book and Big Love make polygamist families feel "normal". The first few chapters/episodes feel shocking but in no time I end up focusing on the human elements common to all families, the issues of need, love, and belonging. It's almost as if polygamy is just another ethnicity, another flavor that makes the family different from mine, but not so much that I can't relate.
Also interesting is that I almost didn't finish listening to the end. At first I couldn't really tell where Udall was going with this story. And then as he highlights certain characters, one, a 13 year old son named Rusty, is obsessed with things that are either offbeat or related to body functions; the humor of body functions is any thing but funny or interesting to me, but I soon realized that Udall was letting me inside Rusty's head and heart. I ended up falling in love with this weird kid and cried when (spoiler alert) when he died. I'm glad I stuck with The Lonely Polygamist and give it a thumbs up.
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