Karin Anderson introduces her new novel, Things I Didn’t Do (Torrey House Press).
First: sincere gratitude to the Association for Mormon Letters for acknowledging What Falls Away with the 2023 AML Novel award. Writing this book indulged my wish to conjure a meaningful (if imperfect) reunion of an estranged Latter-Day Saint community. I started writing Things I Didn’t Do immediately after; the two novels are a pair, even though they are each composed to stand on their own.
Many readers have asked if What Falls Away is my own life story. The answer is no, although I drew richly from my hometown’s geography, character, and culture. The protagonist, Cassandra Soelberg, is my just-older sister’s age. Neither of us became pregnant as teenagers, but I am haunted by the very real girls who did, who suffered life-crushing castigation and coercion. Their experiences seared (and implicated) all of us. Their stories deserve attention.
Unlike Cassandra, I wasn’t morally or intellectually isolated within my own family. My deeply religious parents were constrained but not paralyzed by the dictates of faith. We inherited dogma, inhibition, expectation and guilt—but my parents worked (not without grief, not without self-doubt) to re-structure their sense of Latter-Day Saint family as most of their children stepped beyond ancestral Truth.
I credit my parents for showing me how to stay—physically and temperamentally—in the beautiful, terrible, paradoxical geographies of Utah, Idaho, and the encircling arid West. Like Cassandra, the protagonist of What Falls Away, I live with the bittersweet impacts of leaving the religious fold—but I have remained among people I love, here in this confounding place, privileged to portray some of what I do and do not understand about “home.”
By the end of What Falls Away, Cassandra Soelberg is nearly sixty. She has tenuously reunited with family and community after four decades of exile. She stands with siblings, relatives, and congregation at her mother’s newly dug grave. She still knows nothing of the baby she surrendered to adoption the hour of his birth, but the novel closes with a moment of stunning revelation. Cassandra is flooded with hope and fear as she realizes that acquaintance with her lost son may be possible.
Things I Didn’t Do begins when Ryder Mikkelson is seven years old in Emery County, Utah. He’s the only child of hard-working parents, Alma and Evaleen. Ryder struggles a bit with language—he understands it clearly but words don’t roll easily off his tongue. Ryder is deeply attached to his cousins, Kent and Ferron. On a deer hunting trip in the Book Cliffs with his father, cousins, uncle and aunt, Ryder falls from his high perch on a loaded pack mule. His leg is broken so badly that the injury, in its way, defines him for the rest of his life—especially because he learns, in the emergency room in Grand Junction, that he’s not the blood child of his parents. He’s not “really” related to his beloved cousins. As he grows older, Ryder is frightened by his own natural gifts—especially his striking genetic height and his uncanny visual talents—as they further distinguish him from people he loves.
In the first book, I drew settings, scenes, events, and characterizations primarily from my own time and place. What Falls Away is distinctly feminine in its central consciousness. In Things I Didn’t Do, I drew more freely from my proximities to my sons, from shared experiences with my brothers, from the generous voices and intelligences of young men in the (many) college courses I taught over thirty years as an English professor. I shifted geographies, portraying regions of my home state that I have incorporated in secondary ways.
One reason I chose Emery and Carbon Counties, as well as the Tintic access to Utah’s West Desert, was to play the dazzling deceptions of stark desert beauty. Ryder’s home landscapes are shockingly barren to a tourist’s eye, but dappled with glory in Ryder’s hyper-visuality. The Green River’s passage through some of the most apparently featureless, colorless landforms of the American West; the confluence of Green and Colorado; the overlapping cultures and histories of indigenous and settler families; the shapes and colors and shifting light and hidden recesses of a massive east-west escarpment: all of this helped me bring a young boy toward the kind of manhood only he, with his peculiar talents, yearnings, and uncertainties, could accomplish.
How is this a “Mormon” story? On the surface, Ryder’s threaded Latter-Day Saint family histories are written as thwartations. Some readers will know already that Ryder was taken away from his first mother, his first genealogy, by an (at best) misguided institutional removal. His adoptive mother, Evaleen, was admonished to answer every dogma and rule of the “True Church” to protect her miraculous baby son from physical harm. Ryder’s father Alma is consumed by sorrow and guilt for drinking a beer with his brother and sister-in-law the night before Ryder fell from the mule. As he matures, Ryder strains toward a gentler understanding of how to live beyond the perceived threats of a religion he finds increasingly alien. A Latter-Day Saint bishop’s smug disapproval of Ryder’s intention to marry Sami Begay, the bishop’s rendition of the “Lamanite” curse, seems to cut the thread completely.
But I hope Latter-Day Saints, among other readers who have reason to ponder doctrinal legacies, will engage with my interest in the hybridity of spiritual selfness. Ryder’s father Alma eventually eases some of his painful self-reproach over sneaking cigarettes at work. Ryder’s mother softens her rigid fear of a decree-and-obey cosmos, trusting her instincts toward a maternal rather than patriarchal model of moral agency. Evaleen remains formally and earnestly “Mormon” from beginning to end; I see her evolution as an ingenuous (and admirable) Latter-Day Saint journey. Ryder may believe he has left religion behind, but his wife, Sami, knows better (and, of course, she knows her own Diné history):
Ryder asked, “You don’t have any white blood in you, do you think?”
Sami said, “In this country? Who doesn’t? I think I had a French trapper grandpa. At
least.”
Ryder: “My great-great-great-grandma is full-blooded Cherokee.”
Sami shook her shimmering mane. Set plates on the table. “Very funny. You better not find out your family has Ivies. I know I had a Paiute grandpa from out by Scipio.”
Ryder: “What if I do? Would you have still married me if you knew I did?”
Sami: “Sure. But you wouldn’t sleep quite so well at night, would you?”
Ryder: “Kit Carson?”
Sami: “Divorce.”
Ryder: “Really? What if you found out your very own kids were descendants of Kit
Carson? Would you run them off?”
Sami: “What if you did? How much do any of us really want to know who’s floating
around in us? In our children’s blood and bones?”
“I thought Diné revered their ancestry.”
“I thought Mormons were genealogy freaks.”
“I’m not Mormon. No more than you anymore. Quit that.”
“We’re always what we used to be. A little bit.”
Ryder opened the window over the sink, inviting the winter air. “Let’s not find out any
more than we need to.”
I write about questions like these because I don’t know the answers. I lean toward fiction in these fact-philic times because I’m better at portrayal than resolution. But I trust Sami on this point: “We’re always what we used to be. A little bit.”
And so, however I resist or embrace, my writing will always be “Mormon,” at least a little bit. And my writing will—like anyone’s—consist of threads, fragments, unexamined blobs and over-scrutinized swatches of everything else I am, and that “my” people are. Latter-Day Saints are some of my people, and I’m lucky and grateful to know them beyond the facile, sweeping, opportunistic portrayals that too often recur inside and outside of the institution.
Ryder Mikkelson—assembled by potent forces of genetics, history, place, time, and relationship, visible and invisible, becomes himself in the milieu. And, crucially, he comprehends better than most of us that he is many possible things beyond this hard-earned self. This knowledge finally gives him courage to negotiate old fears, new potentials, and haunting figures—finishing the narrative at nearly the same point as his unknown mother’s, pairing the novels. Will this mother and son ever meet? I think so. Will I write the reunion? No. That moment belongs to them.
A gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and heretic, Karin Anderson is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams, and Things I Didn’t Do, which won the 2023 AML Novel award, as well as the co-editor of the anthologies Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild and Utah Lake Stories: Reflection on a Living Landmark. Her work has appeared in Dialogue, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin.