There’s a moment in The Nineteenth Wife where someone describes love as a pie. You only have so many slices to give out, and the more people you’re dividing it among, the thinner each piece gets.
In the context of the book, this is about polygamy. A man with five wives, ten wives, nineteen wives. Children numbering in the dozens. The math alone is enough to make your chest tight. How do you love fifty kids? How do you even know fifty kids? One wife watches her husband move into a new home with a new favorite, and she’s left calculating whether she’ll get a visit this week or next month. The jealousy is corrosive, but it isn’t petty. It’s survival-level. These women needed their husband’s attention to have food, shelter, and standing in the community. Love wasn’t just emotional. It was currency.
And the children? The book describes fathers who couldn’t name all of their kids. Who didn’t know their ages. Who showed up for the ones who were useful and forgot about the rest. That’s what happens when you slice a pie into fifty pieces. Nobody gets enough.
I kept thinking about this after I finished the book. Not about polygamy specifically, but about the metaphor itself.
Because I don’t have nineteen partners, but I do have a finite amount of love-energy. There are the obvious slices: my kids, my husband, my closest friends. But then there are the slices I don’t always think about. The slice that goes to my parents. The slice I save for myself, when I remember to. The slice that goes to work, because let’s be honest, work takes a slice whether you offer it or not. The slice that goes to the version of myself I’m trying to become.
Some weeks the pie is generous, big and warm with plenty to go around, the kind everyone who gets a slice lingers over. Other weeks it’s one of those sad little mini pies from the two-day-old bakery shelf, the kind nobody should really buy, but you talk yourself into it anyway and just feel let down a few bites in.
And it isn’t only the size of the pie that changes week to week. It’s who I cut it for. Some weeks my husband is easier to love than my kids, and it has nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s their schedule, maybe it’s mine, maybe work already took its cut before anyone at home got served, or maybe we finally got a rare date night and I handed him a bigger piece than usual. The part nobody warns you about is that the bigger piece has to come from somewhere, and that week it came out of the kids’ servings. Other weeks it flips, and the kids get the biggest slices while my husband just waits patiently for his turn to come back around. And then there are the weeks one of my parents ends up in the hospital, and I give a mom or a dad the entire pie and come home with nothing left to serve the hungry mouths at my own table.
What struck me about The Nineteenth Wife wasn’t just that these women had to share a husband. It’s that the book forced me to look at my own pie and ask some uncomfortable questions. Who’s getting a real slice? Who’s getting the smaller pieces, the ones I cut a little thinner and then cover with extra whipped cream so nobody notices? Who’s getting just crumbs? And who have I quietly stopped serving altogether?
I think we all walk around pretending the pie is infinite, that we can keep adding people, projects, obligations, and commitments without any of it getting thinner. But it does get thinner. And the people who feel it first are usually the ones who won’t say anything. The ones who’ll tell you your baking is just as good as it ever was. The ones who would never complain that their slices keep getting smaller and more misshapen, or that you used to serve them every night and somehow slid into handing them a piece only every few dinners.
The Nineteenth Wife is about a lot of things: Mormon history, murder, religious control, women’s autonomy. But the thing that stuck with me most was a line about pie, because it made me count my slices, and I didn’t love the number I came up with.
If you’ve read The Nineteenth Wife, I’d love to know what stuck with you. And if you haven’t, maybe start by asking yourself this: how many slices is your pie cut into right now?
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