I wanted to genuinely like The House of My Mother and I’m not sure I did. I devoured it within less than a day but it felt less like enjoying it and moreso returning to the site of a car crash to see if there’s any remaining shrapnel.
Sheri Franke’s memoir, tell-all, was released in January of 2025, about a year and a half after her mother’s (Ruby Franke) arrest and after almost fifteen years of publicized abuse. Utah-based Ruby Franke ran a family vlog called 8 Passengers and amassed a total of 2.5 million subscribers at the channel’s peak. Despite other notable instances of emotional abuse or neglect, the family channel began experiencing a downfall after it was revealed Franke’s brother, Chad, had been sleeping on a beanbag for seven months after his room privileges had been revoked. The downfall of the family, however, had happened months prior when Ruby invited disgraced therapist Jodi Hildebrandt into their lives to teach truth out of distortion. There are a million videos on YouTube breaking down the timeline and an apparent documentary coming in February, so a full recap seems unnecessary. I’ve been glued to this story since it broke, dreadfully intrigued by the logical missteps that had brought the family to such a strange reality.
I was interested in reading Franke’s book to continue my rubbernecking and it served that purpose well. It’s a warped ‘behind the scenes’ of the most wholesome family channel on the internet and it’s impossible to look away.
While I was reading, however, I felt guilty gaining delight from my morbid curiosity being met. I felt a twinge of shame when Franke writes, “Please just stop. Let them heal in peace. Let us all heal. But everyone was talking about it… dissecting every detail, feeding this true crime circus. Didn’t they understand? These are children, my siblings, real people, who have suffered unimaginable horrors. It’s not entertainment. It’s not a story to be picked apart and analyzed. I wanted to scream at them all to stop, to leave it all alone. Some things should remain unspoken, some horrors should be left in the dark where they belong. This was one of them.” or “… The drama was real, the consequences permanent. Our grief had been reduced to a mere commodity, packaged and sold, consumed and discarded.”
I had shared this sentiment throughout the book, hadn’t this family been through enough and who am I to gawk at their demise? In some capacity I had sought this content out, the first commentary video recommended to me on my YouTube feed years ago and I had watched with unblinking eyes ever since. On the other hand though, this content had been published by Ruby and I was sympathetic to Franke wanting to give her side of the story after fifteen years of being voiceless.
If memoirs had theses, this would be Franke’s, “This moment, this climax of my family’s descent into madness, needed to be documented, preserved, and shared on social media, just like every forced smile, every staged perfection had been too… This nightmare was born on social media, it should die there too.” Despite the desire to have grown up in an alternate timeline where the 8 Passenger channel was never created, the reality didn’t change. For nearly the entirety of Franke’s conscious life, she had been unwilling actress, a puppet for her mother’s play, this was the opportunity to finally insert her own lines, direct her own life.
I had two complaints about the book one practical and one perhaps too personal. Practically, the writing left something to be desired. The overuse of metaphor and simile often distracted from the material, pulling me from the facts of the matter while not necessarily providing more feeling or insight. Franke has several beautifully written passages throughout her book which made me respect her as a budding writer but served to her detriment when comparing other passages in the book that followed a similar cadence and vocabulary to her high school journal entries. Those insightful passages elevated the book from a behind-the-scenes tell all to a true memoir. One of the fantastic quotes that stuck with me was, “Jodi saw sex everywhere. In every interaction, every glance, ever fleeting thought… A part of me pitied her. A repressed, self-loathing, deeply damaged woman trapped in an environment in which she felt compelled to conceal her true nature. Surrounded by woman she couldn’t have, women who were married to men she resented. In her mind, there was only one path to justice- crush the sperm donors and liberate the females.”
The writing and tone and vocabulary all hit perfectly to describe the monster who had come to live in the family home while providing that extra hint of insight into her perceived psyche. These moments are what make Franke’s public family story her own and demonstrate her true voice coming through. She’s intelligent and wise beyond her years which is what makes the forgettable, A to B plot points that are intermixed disappointing.
The second complaint is personal and maybe why I find myself dissuaded by the memoir genre as a whole. I wanted it to end differently- very difficult when writing about true, documented events. I’m not talking about the tragic facts of the Frankes’ lives, although of course I wish they didn’t happen, I’m talking about the introspective aspect of the book. It seems now with several of the top memoirs that have come out in recent years is that the author hasn’t distanced themselves properly from the events, I often feel like I’m reading therapist mandated journal entries rather than fully fleshed out, processed ideas. The author has to capitalize on their fifteen minutes of fame, leaving much to be desired. But, specifically, I wanted Franke to unpack the Mormonism/Fundamentalism of it all. Something I find utterly fascinating is how pervasive Fundamentalism is in our American culture today, secretly lurking behind your favorite reality TV shows, family vlog channels, and cooking blogs. Franke does acknowledge this phenomenon when describing how her mother came to be a vlogger, the quote “in the world but not of the world” appearing several times. This quote comes to mean finding a way to influence the current culture toward Mormonism without falling into it. The way I see it, however, is a shockingly proud way to view oneself for the amount of humility preached through the church and through Hildebrandt's teachings.
I wanted to see Franke unpack her faith more, analyze how the entire 8 Passenger situation would not exist if it weren’t for their Mormon roots. Every time she does make the connection, it falls just short of pulling that final thread. For example, the parenting methods she describes are not practiced outside of the Mormon church, or at least not without Fundamentalist influence. When she describes Hildebrandt's thought of babies, ‘utterly selfish creatures,’ I’m brought back to the idea of “blanket training” with the Duggar family (19 Kids and Counting). The practice of putting a baby on a blanket and a toy just out of reach, smacking the child’s hands when they reach outside the blanket for it. This idea that children, babies, are somehow conscious enough to concoct manipulation tactics or have the ability to grow self-discipline from physical abuse, is inherently fundamentalist. When she describes the suffocating patriarchy that striped her of temple recommendation for adulatory while simultaneously believing the forty year old married man that no adulatory occurred, or the patriarchy that refused her mother any other role than perfect parent, that is fundamentalist. The religion that allows for living prophets, malleable words of god, that’s Mormonism. When the rhetorical question is posed how could Jodi Hildebrandt become a living god to Ruby Franke, the answer is Mormonism.
I hope Franke is able to unpack the religious ties of her trauma on her own time, away from cameras and false prophets but I don’t think you can write a memoir with only half the insights. Overall, the book was a way for Franke to reclaim her voice and her story, to further expose the abuse and trauma suffered at the hands of women who were victims in their own right but who found ways to turn their chains into puppet strings. It wandered the line between a flash in the pan tell-all and an insightful memoir while displaying shining moments for Franke as a strong, up-and-coming writer. I’m interested to see what she’ll do in the future, further distancing herself from her mother and becoming her own interesting and fulfilled person.
Note: Quotes were taken from Audiobook format, therefore punctuation may not be accurately reflected.
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