Thursday, September 22, 7 p.m.
Joe, Alina, Vicki and Valerie Darger will read from and sign Love Times Three: Our True Story of A Polygamous Marriage, with Brooke Adams of The Salt Lake Tribune.
From a family that inspired "Big Love's" story of Bill Henrickson and his three wives, this first-ever memoir of a polygamous family captures the extraordinary workings of a unique family dynamic, and argues for the acceptance of plural marriage as an alternative lifestyle.
Joe, Alina, Vicki, and Valerie Darger live a normal suburban life in a large home in Salt Lake County with some 20 of their two dozen children. Joe, Alina, and Vicki were married on the same day 21 years ago. Valerie, Vicki's twin sister, joined the family in 2000. When the Dargers tuned in to the first episode of Big Love, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing - the specifics of their very private life played out on their television. The Dargers soon learned the producers of the show had used the cover article of a Mormon magazine about the Darger family as the basis of Bill Henrickson and his three wives, even down to the family meetings and triple “honey-do” lists.
While the public has watched with fascination four seasons of "Big Love", as well as the reality show “Sister Wives” of TLC, the Dargers are anxious to illuminate why contemporary men and women are choosing this lifestyle, and hoping to move the conversation about the plural lifestyle away from Warren Jeffs and the controversy of child brides to more mainstream polygamists, who do not follow a prophet, and willingly enter into plural marriage as adults.
Written in the voices of the four parents, Love Times Three is the story of one man, his three wives, and their twenty-four children as they live out their faith in a world of prejudice, misconception, and fear, including a chapter on the sister wife dynamic, one from Joe on how he juggles his three distinct romantic relationships, and a chapter from three of their children, called “My Three Moms.” Despite the risk of legal action, the Dargers know that it’s time to counteract Hollywood’s sensational interpretation and correct the general public’s misunderstanding of polygamy with the truth. Now, for the first time, Joe, Alina, Vicki, and Valerie Darger lift the veil on their so-called taboo way of life.
Brooke Adams covers polygamy for The Salt Lake Tribune
and has been a reporter for more than 25 years. She spent four months
in Texas in 2008 after authorities raided the FLDS ranch in Eldorado,
has covered many polygamists and polygamous groups including Winston
Blackmore in Canada, the Kingston and Allred groups in Utah, and has a
blog called “The Polygamy File” that is consistently The Tribune's top blog in readership. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.