I can’t say for sure exactly why, but two days ago, I sat down at my computer, opened Google, and typed in my parents’ names. I was overcome with longing to find out what had ever happened to them. We haven’t spoken in nine years. I hadn’t felt the least bit curious before in allContinue reading “On Seeing My Father’s Face for the First Time in Nine Years”
Tag Archives: Mormonism
Why I Love Grad School, or Please Talk Career Options with Your Daughters
When I was 22, my undergraduate professors started to ask where I’d be going next. Everyone assumed it would be grad school. My art history professor, a supportive, wry-humored expert in Mexican art named Deborah Caplow, especially believed I would make a career for myself in art criticism and teaching. My future, cast in theirContinue reading “Why I Love Grad School, or Please Talk Career Options with Your Daughters”
My First Bar Tab at 32
“Really?” My friend, A., asked. We’ve known each other 20 years, but she’d been away for the last ten. “Really.” I assured her. “Why would I? Do I seem like the type to hang out in bars?” “Okay. Fine.” “So how do I do this?” She smirked. “I think you just walk up and say,Continue reading “My First Bar Tab at 32”
Mormon Feminista
One week in Laurels, the Sunday School class for 16 to 17-year-old Mormon girls, my teacher passed out pairs of knitted white baby booties and Xeroxed excerpts from a 1950s women’s magazine. While the boys down the hall talked football, college, and career goals, we read about what sort of wives we would become. After you marry, you willContinue reading “Mormon Feminista”
Losing Faith
For me, the loss of my faith was much like gaining it. Something outside my control, like a storm blowing in. And this frightened me when it happened. Growing up Mormon, I had been taught that faith is a virtue. And virtues, by definition, can be chosen. Cultivated. Integrity, loyalty, honesty, charity. But faith, it turnsContinue reading “Losing Faith”
Into the Gray
I have a problem. I love certainty. Labels. Categories. Classifications: fiction or nonfiction, ethical or unethical, subject or verb. As a child, I crammed a pine bookcase with glossy paperbacks of E.B White and Louisa May Alcott and Lloyd Alexander. I lined up the little volumes alphabetically and counted them when I needed reassurance that the world spun onContinue reading “Into the Gray”
An Ex-Mormon Meets the World
If you know any ex-Mormons, please be patient with us. A favorite Mormon creed is to be “in the world but not of it.” And to be “set apart” is to be formally blessed for a calling within the church. To be marked as different–as a Mormon–is synonymous with being chosen by god. At 20 I left all this behind.Continue reading “An Ex-Mormon Meets the World”
How I Ended It
Like many girls, my first great love was ballet. But the Royal Academy of Dance examinations terrorized us once a year. The first time I stepped into an examination room and faced an examiner shipped in from the Commonwealth, I was ten years old. The square windows in the doors were taped over with paper,Continue reading “How I Ended It”
Leaving the Fold
It wasn’t the scientific objections. The glaring fallacies and inconsistencies in the doctrine. For me it was the morality of the thing. The Mormon worldview refuses to face the human condition squarely. Buddha, at least, could admit that “lifeContinue reading “Leaving the Fold”
On Death and Defiance
A few years back I attended a reading by Carolyn Jessop who had escaped a fundamentalist Mormon community. Piled her children in a van in the middle of the night and made a run for it. She’d written her memoir, published as Escape (2008), and now was reading at Third Place Books. She had receivedContinue reading “On Death and Defiance”
The Trailer Park MFA 
You must be logged in to post a comment.