Then came Mary, a middle-aged mother of two. Giggy invited her to move to the trailer park with her children, to take the job of park manager and live in the white double-wide provided. My sister and I both made friends with Mary’s daughter and the happiest summer of my youth was spent watching Clueless in their trailer while watching my friend’s little disabled brother.
But Giggy didn’t really want friends so much as followers. When former followers moved closer, they wanted to know Gig. As they came to know her, they wanted to be treated as her equal. That’s when things would fall apart. I can’t remember how many reconciliations we teenagers brokered between the women, but it was the only way to ensure we’d be allowed to hang out. Eventually Mary moved, and that was that.
Finally, there was Nancy Campbell, a Quiverfull promoter and the publisher behind Above Rubies magazine. Nancy was an American living in Australia, and she helped organize a two month book tour of Australia and New Zealand for my grandma to go on. I think that trip was probably the most fun of her elderly life, but she came home tired and walking with a cane (the first outward sign of her degenerative hip).
One of the women who attended this tour was an Australian mother of four, who was expecting another. She bought a copy of Born in Zion.
A few months later she died as a direct result of these teachings, refusing medical help as she bled to death in the days after birthing her fifth child. When the Australian press asked Nancy about her connection to the author of these deadly ideas, she exuberantly threw my grandmother under the bus, claiming not to know her.
These aren’t all the friendships my grandmother had and nuked, but they were the fiery explosions I saw up close. Giggy never acted as if friends were precious or irreplaceable. To her, they were.
Because she wrote, people thought they knew her, and they expected some level of reciprocity. They couldn’t see that she wrote because she thought she was interesting, or that she had no desire to know them. They couldn’t see her preference for one-sided adoration until it was too hard to adore her.
Misandry Angie 