Inspired by true events, Torn by God is a riveting family drama that takes place in 1959 in a small Mormon town in Utah. It chronicles the devastation brought upon the Sterling family when the father has a vision which leads him to become involved with a local polygamist group run by a self-serving fundamentalist named Brother Reuben. Under the influence of this group, the father comes to believe that the Mormon Church never should have rescinded polygamy. He knows that the practice is against the law and grounds for excommunication, but he feels it is something God demands of him. Twelve-year-old Beth watches helplessly as her father becomes increasingly involved with the polygamists and her mother sinks into depression and illness. Even Beth is not safe from Brother Reuben with his piercing eyes and suggestive sexual remarks. When her father leaves home to build a church for the polygamists, the family is cast off by the Mormon community. It is up to Beth to take care of her sick mother and her little brother, Mikey. This story delves deep into the controversial association between mainstream Mormons and fundamentalist off-shoot groups such as those led by Warren Jeffs.
I've been writing most my life, sometimes with the left side of my brain, as when writing technical documentation in the 1980's, and sometimes with the right side, as when writing my novel, "Torn by God: A Family's Struggle with Polygamy." Either way, my focus has always been on the human mind. My most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways. Exploring the depths of another's mind, with all its intellectual and visceral layers of complexity, is as exciting and stimulating as exploring a foreign country.
Given my fascination with mind, I search for books which have a unique and idiosyncratic voice. It is not the writer's voice I am looking for, but the voice of the characters who live out their lives on the pages. For me, "voice" is more than just a tone or narrative style: it reflects the movement and subtle nuance of a character's mind, it maps the associative leaps between one experience and the next, it connects the character's sensory experience with a unique perception. Maybe the best way to say it is that everything in such stories is characterization, to one degree or another. Books such as Jane Hamilton's, Book of Ruth, McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Joyce Carol Oates', Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, all have this quality that I so admire.
In my own stories, I try to achieve a high level of psychological realism, moving into the mental space of my characters, and settling in for the duration. Maintaining this kind or realism can be difficult at times. For example, when I was writing from the mind of my 12-year-old narrator in Torn by God, there were things I wanted to say that I couldn't say and still maintain the child's perspective. Still, I felt the innocence of the child narrator was important because it was indicative of the innocence of all the characters in the story. They are all controlled by the voice of their parents, by the voice of their religious leaders, by the voice of their God. So I let the girl see what she could see and let the deeper meaning lie beneath the surface, in the subtext where it belongs. It is there for my readers to find, if they can.
See reviews and interviews of Torn by God at:www.hotpresspublishing.com/zoemurdock
