Third Tuesday Author: Ruth Wariner

On Tuesday, April 17, 7pm join author Ruth Wariner, an internationally renowned speaker and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Sound of Gravel--a book unlike anything else you’ll read. At turns heartbreaking and affirming, Ruth’s strength, honesty, and enduring love for her family will stay with readers long after they’ve turned the last page.

Number thirty-nine of her father’s forty-two children, Ruth Wariner was born into a Mexico-based polygamist community.  When Ruth is only three-months old, her father, the prophet of the sect, is murdered by his own brother, the notorious “Mormon Manson” Ervil LeBaron, in a bid for church power.  Ruth’s mother remarries and becomes the second wife of another man in the community, adding new siblings (and fresh difficulties) to an already overstuffed family tree. But this is only part of Ruth’s life—at times she is a regular American girl, staying with her grandmother across the border, eating cereal and watching cartoons, until her mother uproots the family and takes them back to Colonia LeBaron. It’s this bifurcated childhood, one that alternates between the pleasures of childhood to the unusual and, at times, harrowing backdrop of a troubled community.