THE LATTER DAYS

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. Judith Freeman is a novelist, essayist, critic, and short story writer, and the recipient of many literary awards and prizes. Her first book was a collection of short stories, FAMILY ATTRACTIONS (1988), which was praised in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books for its originality. Her novel RED WATER, named one of the 100 best books of 2002 by The Los Angeles Times, was widely reviewed. The New Yorker called it a novel “that makes astute points about the almost indistinguishable similarities between faith and love.” The story is set in 19th Century Utah and focuses on a bloody event known as The Mountain Meadows Massacre in which 120 emigrants from Arkansas, on a wagon train passing through Utah, were slaughtered by a group of Mormon settlers on Sept. 11, 1857. Only one Mormon was ever tried and convicted for the crimes, a polygamist named John D. Lee, and RED WATER is told through the voices of three of Lee’s wives.