Member-only story
POST-MORMON STORIES
How the Past Set My Writing on Fire
After years of abortive drafts, finding compassion for my younger, misguided self was the key that finally unlocked my memoir.
I was arrested in 1987, when I was a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary. For terrorism. In Canada, of all places. But even before that happened, I had become obsessed with the big idea to write about what it’s really like to be a missionary.
Tension between image and reality
We probably all picture Mormon missionaries as an army of interchangeable young men in white shirts and ties, trudging endlessly from one porch to the next with a message and a holy book. Even growing up Mormon, this was pretty much how I envisioned mission life. It wasn’t until I turned nineteen and was pressed into service myself that I discovered a more colorful reality.
The missionaries I met were anything but homogeneous, and frequently anything but holy. Some were diligent and some were slackers. Some were pious, sure, but more were profane. There was gossip and brownnosing and backstabbing galore. A few of my colleagues seemed to be set on breaking every rule in our little white handbook, not mention a Commandment or two.
I was something of a sheltered kid up to this point, but I was also a budding science fiction writer. I’d attended the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University only a year earlier. My reaction to the absurd truth of mission life was, inevitably, an intense desire to write about it.
What’s more, I wanted to write about it not in some roundabout, science-fictional way but as a straight first-person memoir. The missionary world would be alien enough to most readers to be interesting all on its own. The tension between image and reality would, I hoped, fuel a compelling narrative. Taking mental notes for this tell-all book was one of the ways I kept myself sane.
Setting some ground rules
As I said, this was my big idea even before the ill-considered incident that landed me in jail (and which I will not spoil here). After I was free again, with a better story than I’d ever imagined, I was…
