NEED TO KNOW
Christine Brown Woolley is opening up in ways she’s never done before.
Fans have seen Christine, 53, and her polygamous family navigate the many highs and lows that come with their arrangement on Sister Wives. The TLC series debuted in September 2010 and will be embarking on its milestone 20th season this fall.
The show kicked off with the family patriarch Kody Brown navigating his marriages to Meri Brown, Janelle Brown and Christine (who was his third wife), as he entered into a fourth polygamous marriage with Robyn Brown. For a long time, the Brown family wanted to put on a happy front. But in the hit reality show’s most recent seasons, everything began to crumble.
Christine, for one, finally chose to leave Kody, 56, in November 2021 after 25 years of marriage. This eventually led to her finding love with her now-husband David Woolley, but it also sparked a domino effect that impacted the larger family as Kody’s growing estrangement from his kids worsened. Kody is now only married to Robyn, 46.
And while fans got to see a lot of what went down, the series only scratched the surface.
Christine’s new memoir, Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom, comes out on Sept. 2 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It details her upbringing in the Mormon faith and her journey as a sister wife while also providing glimpses into her present.
Gallery Books
“I feel like there’s a rest of the story that wasn’t told before,” Christine tells PEOPLE exclusively. “Even though I really feel like our show did our best to be authentic and everything — I really tried my best to be authentic.”
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“I still felt like there was a huge part that I kept hidden just to be a peacemaker, to make everything work, and everything,” she continues. “And then, through leaving, people asked all the time, “How did you do it? How’d you do it?’ I really feel like it’s kind of like a math of this is what was happening, this is what was happening that I didn’t agree with, this is what was happening that made me stronger, and this is what made me leave.”
The book offers “a progression of what happened … more of an insider kind of a thing,” the author adds.
Now, as she tells her story in her words and on her terms, a weight has been lifted off her shoulders.
“I felt like I finally got it out there, really what my heart had been holding onto for so much, and it really felt to be free. It was liberating,” she says.
Fortunately for Christine, when the writing got hard, she could lean on David. The pair wed in Utah in October 2023.
“Even those hard times, I would tell David after a specific chapter was difficult or a specific memory was difficult. I’d have to talk to David so much through things and be like, ‘Babe, I think I’m just sharing too much,'” she recalls. “And he’s like, ‘Well, why don’t you talk to me about it? Let’s see if it’s too much.’ And we’d talk about it.”
“I realized it was just cleansing and freeing,” she adds.
Encapsulating everything with the title she chose, Christine says, shows that “it’s just been a journey through all of those things.”
“Through finding faith, and faith is a crazy thing when you think you have your whole world handed to you and your beliefs because you’re born into a certain religion,” she concludes. “What you believe faith is, versus when you get older, what faith becomes. But I think all of it’s just been a journey.”
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Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom comes out Sept. 2 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
