Public Eye

Pasadena-born author David Ebershoff came back to town last week for a standing-room-only Vroman's reading and signing of his new "The 19th Wife," a fictional retelling of the life of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th bride of Mormon patriarch Brigham Young.

It's a rolicking good read, as readers of my recent review know.

Afterwards old friends of his, including former Polytechnic classmates, decamped to have some drinks and eats at his family home on Bradford Street. It's next door to the former home of the great Pasadena novelist Harriet Doerr. David's father Dave told me as we stood out in his backyard about the time Harriet called up to say that 500 starlings had flown down her chimney and wrecked her house. "I panicked!" she said. "I should have just thought to close the door and keep them in one room!"

David Ebershoff modeled Greta, a character in his first novel, "The Danish Girl," on a young Harriet on her Grand Tour of Europe early in the 20th century.

At Vroman's, Ebershoff told the crowd of how he researched "The 19th Wife" by taking a drive down to the polygamist community of Colorado City in southern Utah. He went into a supermarket hoping to find some "sister wives" -- polygamist mothers of many -- who would talk to him. It's against their fundamentalist religion to talk to outsiders, and they wouldn't. "Everything's sold in bulk," Ebershoff noted about the market. A local cop followed him everywhere he drove among the 15,000-square-foot compounds where the husbands keep their massive families. Most boys are dumped on the highway out of town when they become teens in order to keep them from competing with their dads and uncles for young girls' affections.