The Latter Days: A Memoir

Novelist Freeman (Red Water) recounts her upbringing in a Utah Mormon family where she never quite belonged in this poignant, if at times meandering, memoir of a life lived chafing against restrictions. Freeman was one of eight children, and only one of two girls, in a family run by a pragmatic, resourceful mother and an unpredictable father prone to violence. She grew up in the predominantly Mormon city of Ogden with her early life governed by the church. Freeman soon found the strictures of Mormonism oppressive, preferring to be outside riding horses or exploring nature. At age 17 in 1964, well on her way to becoming the Mormon version of a “wild child”—she smoked, she drank, she fooled around with boys—Freeman married her older sister’s ex-boyfriend, John Thorn, a Brigham Young graduate six years her senior. This first foray into adulthood was soon made terrifying when Freeman’s newborn son, Todd, was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart defect, one that would require a series of risky surgeries. Moving with John and Todd to St. Paul, Minn., so Todd could see a top-ranked heart surgeon while John worked as a counselor at Macalester College proved an awakening for Freeman on myriad levels as she strayed from her husband and came into her own academically. While some of the minutiae on Mormon life slow down the book’s middle sections, Freeman writes with the clear voice of a person who’s (mostly) shed the trappings of the past. (June)