Marceline Baldwin is a shy and mild-mannered pastor’s daughter. Then she meets the charismatic Jim Jones. She falls madly in love.

They have a mutual desire to change the world and quickly become inseparable. In the midst of 1950s segregated America, Jim and Marceline Baldwin Jones made headlines for being the first white family in Indiana to adopt a black child. They adopt five other non- white children and called themselves ‘the rainbow family’.

Jones’ following begins to grow and becomes The People’s Temple, welcoming people from all walks of life and giving hope to the disenfranchised. They build a commune in the jungle of British Guyana on the ideals of equality and brotherly love, but the reality is very different. Jim Jones is a dangerous egotist and when things start to fall apart, he plans his mass-murder suicide mission. If he’s going to die, he will take his followers with him…

On November 18th 1978, nine hundred and nine people died in the jungle in British Guyana.

Published on the 45th anniversary, Paradise Undone explores the tragedy through the voices of four protagonists – Marceline Baldwin Jones and three other members of the Peoples’ Temple. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Annie Dawid blends fact and fiction, using real and composite characters to tell a story about the greatest single loss of US civilian lives in the 20th century.

Q & A

What made you decide to write about this particular event? Have you written about any other religious cults?
Two childhood friends of mine, sisters, went into a cult as young adults and didn’t emerge for decades. Their disappearance was the catalyst for my quest to understand how human beings can fall under the spell of a charismatic leader who is deleterious to their health. The older sister died of cancer while still in the cult, under suspicious circumstances. The younger sister finally managed to extricate herself, along with her son, after the death of her sister, and we have been in touch ever since.

Two other good friends of mine had friends/family fall into cult land. One emerged after 25 years, and the other died in the Heaven’s Gate suicides in California. I wrote a long story about the sisters and read part of it at the 2004 University of North Dakota writers’ conference, where I was a Master Teacher in Residence. Part of the story involves the parents going to a deprogrammer, and I invented him telling the parents that he had lost a daughter in Jonestown. (Story took place in 1982.) 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. A few months later, roaming the bookshelves doing research for my forthcoming sabbatical, where I planned to write a novel, HIPPIE RUINS, about communes in Southern Colorado, I roved down the aisle to Cults. Multiple books with with Jonestown in their titles called out to me. Remembering JM’s grief for his friend, I thought: I must write about Jonestown. HIPPIE RUINS can wait.

How much research did you have to do?
I started researching in 2004, continued through 2008, and then had to do still more to write the epilogue, which takes place in 2018. So, I’ll say a minimum of 5 years reading everything I could find, or order over the internet, as I was no longer at my university job with recourse to a library and librarians. I also spent many hours listening to the tapes from the Jonestown Institute, and this was some of the most difficult and most informative research. Note: Becky (mentioned above) is Dr. Rebecca Moore, who runs the Jonestown Institute with her husband, journalist Fielding McGehee

How many of the characters are fictional and how many are real people from the event? Did you interview any survivors? Were they willing to speak to you freely? Could they justify what happened?
Two of my four protagonists are real: Mrs. Jim Jones, who has barely been written about anywhere, despite her being part of Peoples Temple from the beginning until the horrible last day, and the Guyanese Ambassador to the United States, though I fictionalized his name. I wanted a Guyanese character; the real-life ambassador had killed himself, his wife and their son on the 3rd anniversary of the massacre. The other two are composites: an African- American man who escaped Jonestown on the last day and a white woman who stayed in San Francisco working at the Peoples Temple headquarters, remaining in thrall to Jones and the Utopian ideal of Jonestown for many years.

How important is setting in the book?
As a fiction writer, setting is key for me. Lots of the book takes place in San Francisco, where I lived for 7 years. I never made it to Jonestown, Guyana, but I read a great deal about the country and studied the many photographs available of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Compound in the jungle.

What is your typical day as a writer? Do you write at home in a special place?
When I was working on the book, I would take my son to the bus stop at 6:30 am, read all morning, write for a few hours, then take a hike with my dogs while listening to books on tape for research. My cabin was 780 square feet, and I worked at the dining room table.

Do you listen to music while you write? Or do you prefer total silence?
Either silence or classical music.

What sort of books did you read as a child and what is your favourite book ever (as an adult or child)?
Louise Fitzhugh’s HARRIET THE SPY made me a writer. I recommend it to everyone. Although it’s a book for young readers (my mother inscribed a copy for me on my 10th birthday), its sensibility is New York adult, and very funny.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Paradise Undone is my 6th and most important work. Getting it published was a 16-year process, and the fact that I can now hold the book in my hand still stuns me. It’s my most important work because I feel it speaks to the human condition in ways none of my earlier work does, most of which was semi-autobiographical. I wanted to illuminate some of the lives lost at Jonestown, almost all of whom remain, 45 years later, subsumed in the shadow of Jim Jones.

Thank you so much to the author for taking the time to answer my questions. The responses have been so interesting.

And many thanks to @Read_Media and Inkspot Publishing for inviting me to share this Q & A.

About the Author

Annie Dawid has published five books, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays. She teaches at the University of Denver, University College 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 International Book Award 2022. Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown won the 2022 Screencraft Cinematic Book Contest.