Staff Pick
This is, without a doubt, the best memoir I’ve read. Engaging, humble, fascinating, classy, thoughtful, inspiring, and so well written. I couldn’t put it down. Recommended By Britt A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
An arresting, lyrical memoir about the path the author took—sometimes unwittingly—out of her Mormon upbringing and through a thicket of profound difficulties to become a writer.
At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the Mormon church-owned department store in the Utah town where she'd grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she'd married at the age of seventeen, she was living in her parents' house with her four-year-old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she was born, and she was having an affair with her son's surgeon, a married man with three children of his own. It was at this fraught moment that she decided to become a writer. In this moving memoir, Freeman explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course, and those that allowed her to find a way forward. Writing with remarkable candor and insight, she gives us an illuminating, singular portrait of resilience and forgiveness, of memory and hindsight, and of the ways in which we come to identify our truest selves.
Review
"The Latter Days arrived at four P.M. and I read until midnight, unable to leave this memoir. Judith Freeman’s book is elegant and precise, as is always true of her prose. In this memoir of her childhood and coming of age in a landscape of rigid belief and constraint, the undertone of wonder and the heartbreaking moments of trust that faltered, as it had to, Freeman sends rays of light straight into the reader’s heart." Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here
Review
"This moving book came at me like a secret lost letter from a friend, offering—in Judith Freeman’s trademark frank and pellucid prose—a rich and revealing personal history in the world she knows as well as anyone: Utah, in this case the patriarchal cloister of Utah in the 50’s and 60’s. Her story is one of family succor and sorrow; and the flickering origins of shame. This is an affecting and tender memoir as Ms. Freeman displays the dark wonder of the forces that shape our life choices." Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine
Review
"The Latter Days, written with thoughtful, hard-won honesty, is the record of a girl growing up in a closed society rigidly governed by a male religious hierarchy – a profoundly undemocratic system that claims to embody American values. Painfully but with no rancour, Judith Freeman makes vivid the security of belonging and the rewards of obedience, the costs of security and obedience, the rewards and costs of seeking freedom. A brave and valuable book." Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness
Review
"A novelist’s account of her early life growing up Mormon in Utah and the family memories she kept hidden from herself....highly readable….A poignant, searching memoir of self discovery." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Judith Freeman is the author of four novels—The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and Red Water—and of Family Attractions, a collection of short stories. She lives in California.