Christine Brown Reflects on Real Reason Why Her Family Moved to Flagstaff

Christine Brown is looking back at her family’s previous move to Flagstaff, Ariz. — and how she thinks there may have been more to it than her ex-husband Kody Brown was letting on. 

In her new memoir Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom (released on Sept. 2), the Sister Wives star, 53, gets candid about the reason why she believes Kody was pushing their family to relocate to Flagstaff from Las Vegas in 2017.  

Along with Christine, the other wives in the Brown family’s plural marriage at the time — Meri Brown, Janelle Brown and Robyn Brown — were expected to make the move as well, along with most of their 18 children that make up the entire family.

In her new book, Christine, 53, recalls: “One day, out of nowhere, Kody sat us all down and explained that we needed to leave Vegas, saying it would be safer and better for us financially. He presented a plan, but said we could pick where we ended up.”

“As it turned out, even the picking of the place had been preordained,” she claims.

Christine — who shares kids Aspyn, 30, Mykelti, 28, Paedon, 26, Gwendlyn, 23, Ysabel, 22, and Truely, 15, with Kody — notes that she “did not want to take the kids away from their friends and schools” at the time, but she ultimately wanted to be a “team player” and do what was best for the family. 

“I couldn’t split up the family,” she explains. “I believed this was my kids’ best chance to have a good relationship with their dad.”

However, after their family “uprooted” their lives and settled in Las Vegas, she learned Kody may have had an ulterior motive for pushing the big change. 

“About a month after we moved in 2018, we learned that Dayton, Robyn and Kody’s son, had been accepted to the university in Flagstaff,” she recalls. “I was furious. Was that why we moved? So Robyn could be closer to her son while I was pulled farther from my children?”

At the time, Christine was leaving behind her older children, Aspyn and Mykelti, who were staying back in Las Vegas.

On top of having moved to Flagstaff “under false pretenses,” Christine writes that another strain the family was dealing with was paying off the 14-acre property they purchased to build their family compound on, called Coyote Pass. 

The original plan was for each wife to build separate homes on the compound so the entire family could live close to one another. However, due to financial issues and multiple wives deciding to leave the plural marriage, that plan unraveled. Coyote Pass served as a major point of contention in the last few seasons of Sister Wives, and the property was eventually sold earlier this year.

Christine finally chose to leave Kody in November 2021 after 25 years of marriage, while Meri and Janelle both announced their separation from Kody within 14 months of Christine leaving. Kody is now only married to Robyn, 46.

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Earlier this month, Christine opened up to PEOPLE about how her new memoir offers an inside look at their family in a way that fans have never seen before. 

“I feel like there’s a rest of the story that wasn’t told before,” Christine told 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.”

“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 continued. “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 map 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,” she added.