Photo by Lisa Jane Persky

I’ve known Judith for a couple of years, and we’ve sometimes talked about her growing up Mormon in Utah, a story that fascinates me.I want to know about how a writer as fierce and fearless as Judith got to here from there.  

Even before Willard Mitt Romney snagged the nomination for President, I suggested Judith write a piece about Mormonism for the L.A. Review of Books, a piece with as much autobiographical material as she saw fit. She kept ducking it, and I surmised, with Sherlock Holmes-like intuition, she was not ready to write that story. Then, one day, she started. Timing is always mysterious in the life of a writer. Imagine how delighted I was to get this desert-dry, historically rich, revealing, wonderfully one-of-a-kind piece, which turns out to be the start of an autobiography she will write for Pantheon. —Laurie Winer

Click here to read “The Mormon Chronicles” by Judith Freeman.

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