American Girls follows the unbelievable lives of Lori and Sam Sally, sisters who married Moroccan-born brothers, and Lori’s fight to save Sam from the Islamic State.
The deeply complicated nature of sisterhood is a dynamic many people are familiar with: the ebb and flow of intimacy; the near-instinctual drive for comparison; the neverending mingling of contradictory emotions like jealousy, admiration, and devotion. (If you have a sister, you’re probably nodding along.) Even the strongest of sibling bonds can be challenged, but not often as powerfully as the force the Sally sisters faced.
Journalist Jessica Roy explores what happens when you push sisterhood into the most extreme scenario imaginable in her new book American Girls: One Woman’s Journey into the Islamic State and Her Sister’s Fight to Bring Her Home. She spent the last four years researching the unbelievable lives of Lori and Sam Sally, a pair of sisters raised in the Jehovah’s Witness faith who married a pair of Moroccan-born brothers, creating a momentary synchronicity in their lives that collapsed just as quickly as it came together. In 2015, while Lori was desperately working to distance herself from her abusive husband, Sam was following her (equally abusive) husband to Syria, where he became a voluntary fighter with the Islamic State.
What happened from that moment forward is so shocking, it reads as if it could be a scripted drama produced by the likes of Kerry Washington or Paramount Plus. From Lori’s dogged efforts to retrieve her estranged sister from Syria to Sam’s conspicuously meandering explanations for how she and her children ended up in an ISIS stronghold — it’s hard to recall a more compelling modern depiction of how sisterhood functions as a magnet, causing two lives to attract and then repel one another again and again and again.
Sam has since returned to the United States and is currently serving a prison sentence for providing financial support to a terror group. The sisters aren’t on speaking terms and haven’t been for years. But as anyone familiar with the mysteries of sisterhood knows, that relationship could — even now, after everything that has taken place between these two women — change in a heartbeat.
American Girls is a work of reported nonfiction, built on the heels of a hugely viral two-part feature Roy wrote about the Sally sisters for Elle magazine in 2019. Roy spoke with Katie Couric Media about her experience covering such a complicated, emotional tale.
Katie Couric Media: Why did you choose to write a book about the Sally sisters?
Jessica Roy: With Sam, it’s very hard to pin down what’s true. She’s told many different stories at many different times over the years. The most sensational version of Sam’s story is the version you might already know: A middle-class, beautiful, white American woman fell for a terrorist, and ended up chasing him to Syria.
But that’s a very oversimplified version of the story; it’s one you can read in a five-minute recap article. What I wanted to try to do with this book was to go even deeper than I did in my articles for Elle. I wanted to ask, what were the motives here? What’s the context? What was at stake? That’s the nice thing about writing a book: You have the opportunity to explore those questions at length.
What was it like writing a biographical book about a woman who was such an unreliable narrator for her own life?
That was the hardest part because this is a work of nonfiction. Everything needs to be true. All of it needs to be fact-checked. And in fact, there’s so much more to this story that didn’t make it into the book because I couldn’t verify it. So it was quite difficult: I wanted to give Sam the space to give her version of her own life story, but I also wanted to make sure the reader had the actual facts, too.
The other problem was that so much of this story took place in Syria, in a society that doesn’t exist anymore. As you can imagine, that did not make it an easy thing to report. And so I think that was one thing that I worked really closely on with my editor, Sally Howe at Scribner. She helped me figure out how to navigate Sam as an unreliable narrator, and how to present her case fairly while also making sure the reader didn’t feel misled.
Crucially, this process forced me to come to terms with one of the central takeaways of this story: there are some things in Sam’s life where we’ll just never know if they’re true or not.
Your reporting for this book revealed how sexually violent Sam and Lori’s childhoods were — and how this upbringing might have contributed to their decisions as adults. Can you elaborate on that?
Research has shown that trauma can completely rewire the brain. As a result, one can end up accepting certain situations or realities that they might not otherwise have accepted if they hadn’t gone through that original trauma. This is why I wanted to include Sam and Lori’s childhoods in this book; they both went through so much sexual abuse and trauma, and they also witnessed so much misogyny and hatred toward women and children in general.
These kinds of trauma exist at the core of most extremist ideologies, including the one espoused by the Islamic State. I wanted to explore the disturbing parallel there and try to understand how Sam’s earlier life experiences might have impacted the decisions she made as an adult.
Have Sam and Lori read the book?
Lori loves the book. I haven’t spoken to Sam. She recently transitioned from prison to a halfway program, and I haven’t had any contact with her since she transitioned there. So I don’t know how she received the book. I hope that she feels that it’s an honest accounting of what she told me in our interviews, but I also would understand if she hated it.
The central question of this book is about choice. What do you think: Did Sam and Lori make different choices, or was there something else at play that led to such a divergence in their two lives?
Because of economic factors, adverse childhood experiences, and the restrictive environment in which she was raised, I think Sam very much ended up in certain situations where it almost appeared like she was programmed to make the wrong choice. While Lori experienced similar trauma and ended up making different decisions, I do think that both women were sort of driven by the ghosts of their trauma. The question, of course, is exactly how impactful that trauma was, and why one sister went in one direction and one in the exact opposite direction — and unfortunately we’ll never get a perfect answer to that question.
It’s worth noting that this whole conversation is more common than we might immediately think. For example, think of the classic thing people will say about domestic abuse: If someone is being hurt by their partner, why don’t they leave the relationship? Of course, the truth is always much more complicated. Maybe they’re married, maybe they have kids, maybe they don’t think they deserve to be happy, maybe there are economic factors at play.
These unfair characterizations happen all the time — and they happened with Sam. A lot of the original news coverage depicted Sam as a completely reckless, thrill-seeking woman — or she was depicted as a poor, dumb woman who was tricked into following her Muslim husband to Syria. I wanted to complicate both of those stories, and to show instead that Sam made several bad decisions, yes, but they might have been bad decisions that she was primed to make.
American Girls is available now. You can order it online, or pick it up at your favorite local bookstore.
