On Writing Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown

Annie Dawid

PARADISE UNDONE: A NOVEL OF JONESTOWN:

a chronology 

Spring 2004, Portland, Oregon

In the “C” aisle of Powell’s Bookstore, the largest independent bookshop in my city, I finger the spines of various non-fiction books about communes, in preparation for my upcoming sabbatical, during which I plan to write my next novel.

In Southern Colorado, where I will spend the upcoming year in an off-grid cabin at 9,100 feet while my five-year-old son goes to preschool, I plan to read all morning and write all afternoon. In other words, Heaven. My book is titled HIPPIE RUINS, and is based on two communes, still extant, an hour south, where I can visit on research jaunts when need calls. Friends live in these communities, where I have spent previous summers, childless, taking lots of photographs.

The “communes” on the shelves give way to “cults” as I move down the aisle.  Cult Controversies; The Suicide Cult; Jesus and Jim Jones. Here, I find a cluster of tomes with Jonestown in the title and I immediately recall being at the  University of North Dakota Writers’ Conference, and giving a reading from a work- in-progress, in which some parents go to a cult deprogrammer in an attempt to rescue two daughters who’d fled to a community in New Mexico in the 1980s, changed their names and stopped communicating with their family. The girls are based on my friends in a suburb of New York city, where I grew up. I knew the parents had in fact gone to a deprogrammer, but I invented their encounter with that individual. In my story, the deprogrammer informs them that his daughter died in Jonestown.

After the reading, a friend called JM came up in tears, telling me about his colleague Becky, whose two sisters and nephew died in the Jonestown massacre. (Later I would learn the nephew was also the son of Jim Jones.)  That moment in my story was fleeting, as was my understanding of Peoples Temple at the time. But now, reading these titles and remembering JM’s grief for his friend, I thought: I must write about Jonestown. The hippie communes could wait. Here was a story that felt urgent – the story of the people who believed in the fight against racism, who died because they followed a dangerously charismatic and narcissistic leader. 

I thought of the 19 suicide bombers who engineered the deaths of 3000+ strangers in the 9/11 terrorist attack and knew I could not begin to understand them. But social change activists – like Becky’s sisters – I could attempt to learn what made them do what they did.

Spring 2008, Westcliffe, Colorado

In the four years since that moment in the bookstore, I’ve turned my life inside out, quit my full-time professor job, moved permanently to the mountains and written a very serious novel, PARADISE UNDONE, resulting from years of researching endless non-fiction about everything related to Jonestown. I’ve hiked the hills listening to Jim Jones rasping in my ears, having discovered the tape library at the Jonestown Institute in San Diego, run by Becky and her husband.

Ultimately, I chose the four protagonists for my novel, none of them based on Becky’s sisters. Two are real people: Marceline Baldwin Jones, who was with Jones from beginning to end, and about whom nearly nothing is written. The other is the Guyanese ambassador to the United States, who, in 1981, on the 3-year anniversary of the massacre, killed his wife (one of Jones’s former political aides) their child and himself.

The other two are composites based on real people: an African-American man – a former drug addict who escaped from the jungle on the day of the massacre, and a white woman who stayed back in San Francisco, staffing the Peoples Temple office on Nov. 18, 1978, who has had trouble letting go of Jim Jones as hero, despite all evidence to the contrary.

These four human beings have taken up my literary life. At the same time I’ve raised my son alone, gotten work as a barista, and found an agent to sell my book in time for the 30-year-anniversary of the massacre.

Except, I don’t have a publisher after all, despite some close calls – one liked my novel but was publishing a non-fiction book on the subject that November, and didn’t want more than one Jonestown title. Another said he loved my book but had just moved to a smaller publishing house and the sales staff hated it; he said he “didn’t want to shove my book down their throats” as the new boss – oblivious, it seems, to the Kool-Aid reference.

After 40 rejections from the big publishers, I’m disappointed, and my agent has returned the book to me, with apologies. But I’m not giving up, not after 4 years of full-time life with Marceline, Vergil, Watts and Truth. They deserve to have their stories told, so for the next 16 years I steadfastly send the book out into the world myself: small presses, contests, university press competitions. I get close 17 times, as a finalist. I write an epigraph for the 40-year-anniversary in 2018, bringing the story into the present moment at the Oakland cemetery.

Various factions of Jonestown survivors battle about including Jones’s name on a memorial in the California cemetery at the mass grave of unidentified survivors – mostly children. Those who want Jones’s name on the list of the 918 dead hold a separate ceremony at the graveside from those who say it’s like including Hitler in a Holocaust memorial. 

London, Nov. 18, 2023 

Hundreds and hundreds of rejections later, PARADISE UNDONE: A NOVEL OF JONESTOWN is published by a new British press, Inkspot Publishing. My 24-year-old son, now a graduate student in Paris, joins me in London for the book launch: Marceline, Vergil, Watts and Truth enter the world.

PARADISE UNDONE, A NOVEL OF JONESTOWN

Imagine a community full of rainbow families where everyone comes together in the spirit of equality and fraternal love.

Shy pastor’s daughter Marceline and her new husband Jim Jones found Peoples Temple in the face of rampant hostility and aggression in 1950s segregated AmeriKKKa.

They give hope to the poor, the miserable, the alienated and disenfranchised of all colors, and build a commune in the jungle of British Guyana.

But this Eden too has its serpent. One who is also jealous of God, and where he goes, everyone must follow, even to the grave.

BUY HERE

Annie Dawid has published five books, including fiction, non-fiction, po etry and essays. She teaches at the University of Denver, University Col lege master’s program in creative writing online from her home in very  rural Colorado. Her fifth book, Put Off My Sackcloth, was published last  year by The Humble Essayist Press. It was a runner up in the Los Angeles  Book Festival 2021 autobiography category and a finalist in the 2022  Memoir category from Book Excellence and in non-fiction, Rubery Interna tional Book Award 2022. Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown won the  2022 Screencraft Cinematic Book Contest.  

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Category: On Writing