Educated

produce a piece of original academic research. In other words, having spent
five years reading history, I was now being asked to write it.
But to write what? While reading for my master’s thesis, I’d been surprised
to discover echoes of Mormon theology in the great philosophers of the
nineteenth century. I mentioned this to David Runciman, my supervisor.
“That’s your project,” he said. “You can do something no one has done: you
can examine Mormonism not just as a religious movement, but as an
intellectual one.”
I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a
child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with
different eyes, not the eyes of a critic, but also not the eyes of a disciple. I
examined polygamy, not as a doctrine but as a social policy. I measured it
against its own aims, as well as against other movements and theories from
the same period. It felt like a radical act.
My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of
belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on Buck’s Peak.
Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. No natural sister should love a
stranger more than a brother, I thought, and what sort of daughter prefers a
teacher to her own father?
But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I
preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I
became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling
that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. That feeling became a physical part of me,
something I could taste on my tongue or smell on my own breath.
I bought a ticket to Idaho for Christmas. The night before my flight, there
was a feast in my college. One of my friends had formed a chamber choir that
was to sing carols during dinner. The choir had been rehearsing for weeks,
but on the day of the feast the soprano fell ill with bronchitis. My phone rang
late that afternoon. It was my friend. “Please tell me you know someone who
can sing,” he said.
I had not sung for years, and never without my father to hear me, but a few
hours later I joined the chamber choir on a platform near the rafters, above
the massive Christmas tree that dominated the hall. I treasured the moment,
taking pleasure in the lightness I felt to have music once again floating up
from my chest, and wondering whether Dad, if he were here, would have
braved the university and all its socialism to hear me sing. I believed he
would.