Hypertext Magazine asks Sadie Hoagland, whose novel Strange Children releases today, “Why was the choice of telling this coming-of-age story about the youth within a polygamous commune important to tell through eight points of view?”
By Sadie Hoagland
Growing up in Utah, my experience of polygamists, and the media surrounding polygamy, was one where individuality was erased. Picture many images of women and children all dressed the same, with the same hair, as if they all moved and thought as one. So I felt like it was important to me from the get-go to distinguish my characters as having their own experience, and their own unique perspective in the community—to give them back their individuality. While many characters have overlapping beliefs, each also has something that makes them very much their own person. For the character of Emma, it’s her ability to bend her dogmatic faith to match her desires, for Levi it’s a series of secrets, for Cadence it’s that she values safety over belief, and for Annalue, it’s that she imagines being “somewhere else where work was not life but instead we had things like television, which I used to dream about in the dark” (Strange Children, p. 22).
The fact that the story is so polyvocal also allowed me to have several different entry points into the story. I could also create tension by playing with what each character knew about both a power struggle happening between a few men in the community and external authorities looking at the community, and how their “truth” differed from other characters’ “truths.” This tension seemed essential in a narrative partly about who has the power to bear religious testimony, to offer revelation, and to speak with the authority of god. These first-person narratives are in some way the youth of the community trying their hand at revelation; here they get a chance to embody the principle that “if I say it, it must be true,” and to formulate their own narrative about their identity, and how they fit into the community.
I also just love polyvocal narratives, and have ever since I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. There’s a thoroughness to getting multiple sides to the story—a wink to the detective genre as founded in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone—that allows the reader to piece all of these voices together, to make the story again for herself, to see the chasms small and large between in the internal experiences of each character. I find that deeply satisfying when I am reading, and while it was challenging to write so many points of view, it also allowed me to feel as if I had made the setting of Redfield a place with depth—a place that’s very real in mind. I’m grateful to what each character showed me about the place, not to mention the story and where they fit in it.
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Sadie Hoagland is the author of Strange Children (May 18, 2021; Red Hen Press) and American Grief in Four Stages (November 1, 2019; West Virginia University Press), which earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. She is the recipient of several fellowships and her work has earned extensive recognition, including four Pushcart Prize nominations from 2015-2018. You can visit her online at sadiehoagland.com
